News 21’s media scroller: a new way of presenting multimedia?
I’ve spent some time playing with Arizona University’s Carnegie-Knight funded multimedia project News 21.
It’s headline is one I fully subscribe to: “A New Generation Produces a New Form of Journalism“.
Amen to that. It’s good to see a project dedicated to finding new ways of doing old things, and they’re coming up with some good stuff. For example: how about this- a multimedia scroller to view photos and video associated with a text story.
News 21: Carnegie-Knight
You read through the text as you would any other online piece. But rather than having photographs & videos embedded within the text, it appears above the words as and when.
As you scroll down to a new paragraph, a photo illustrating the point appears. Scroll down a bit further, and it is replaced with some video which you can play instantly.
News 21’s current version isn’t much to look at, but it is certainly easy to use and gives a much more integrated way of experiencing multimedia. More please!
Adam Westbrook // ideas on digital storytelling and publishing 
I actually spent time with this site and was underwhelmed with the media scroller. My first inclination was to scroll quickly to see what happened and low and behold it broke. It doesn’t update quickly enough to seamlessly work alongside the scrolling text. Furthermore, there is no indication why a certain media relates to the text (especially since there aren’t any captions). I am never a fan of a second scroll bar on a static page, and I felt that the text was downplayed by limiting it to that small space. While I like the idea, I don’t think the execution worked in this example.
Thanks for the write-up, Adam. I understand if you don’t find it much to look at, but I’m excited to throw the idea of supplementing text stories with other media without having to deal with new windows popping up or having to navigate to new pages. I’m hoping to see someone with a little more time and a stronger eye for webpage aesthetics to build off of this piece.
Tracy, same response. 🙂 I’d actually written captions for the extra multi-media – but deadline hit us like a bus. I’ll try and get them up ASAP.