Another beautiful piece of interactive journalism and multimedia storytelling from The Journal-World. This one was designed by Nathan Borror with assistance from Christian Metts and direction from David Ryan.
This is an early attempt at something we’ve been talking about for a while, but are just starting to really do. That is, to take a story and tell it the way it wants to be told. Wether that’s video, audio, text, photos, infographics, or anything else — the important thing is the story. This is in contrast to most newspaper companies, who still hold text-based pieces as the cornerstone.
Take a look around. You’ll find that many sites are doing videos and photos and such — but rarely are they first-class citizens. Usually it’s a basic text-based story layout with a few additional bits of multimedia in a sidebar somewhere. We don’t want to do that (at least not exclusively). If the best way to tell a story is through a video with some supporting text, then we want to use video with some supporting text. We don’t want the fact that we’re (historically) a newspaper company to keep us from telling stories the way they’re best told.
Besides the “mediums besides text can be first-class” approach, this is also an example of taking a big, multi-part (even multi-day, in print) piece and giving it an art-directed design all it’s own online. You’re going to see a lot more of this from us in the future.
And besides that, it’s yet another sneak preview of the design direction for the new LJWorld.com, which should launch this month. Check out the tight 16-column grid!
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