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Case Studies Provide Best Practices for Developing Multimedia Projects
By
Shellie Branco
Screenshot from Ashley Well's presentation: The MSNBC Projects Survival Guide |
Successful multimedia news projects include interactive stories about locals serving in Iraq, audio feeds from sporting
events, and even interactive games, such as the airport baggage screening simulation created by Ashley
Wells for MSNBC.
Those were just a few of the Web projects showcased in a Western Knight Center session about planning and organizing multimedia
editorial projects.
Terry Moore, features and online deputy editor for the Orange County Register, shared the newspaper’s “Decision
2004” Web site on the primaries. The site included a page of primary results, plus a voters guide and profiles of the candidates.
Moore discussed some of the lessons learned from the problems the Register encountered in its election coverage.
“We didn’t make sure the reporters kept filing,” she said. “We had Web editors rushing to get election
results. We didn’t get everyone around the table to get everyone on the same goal.”
She said the project would have benefited from having well-planned templates, better linking within the site and more promotion.
And she said storyboards would have been a big help.
Not everyone, however, agrees that storyboards are the best way to organize a presentation. MSNBC.com senior producer Ashley
Wells told session participants that he thinks storyboards are a waste of time.
“How do you know what to plan when you don’t know what you have?” he said.
Wells presented an amusing PowerPoint slide show on what he’s learned about planning Web projects, including his popular
airport baggage screening game, “Can You Spot the Threats?” (A link to his Powerpoint accompanies this story)
“My idea [of the game] was rejected in a seven-person meeting,” Wells said, adding that he thinks creative ideas
rarely come out of teams of more than five participants. It’s usually an individual who comes up with winning projects,
he said.
Other advice offered by Wells:
- Don’t commit to a deadline if you don’t know what the project is
- Find allies for your idea in order to convince editors to take it up
- Get more bang for your buck by thinking of how to reuse the format of one special project in the future designs.
- Make it worthwhile and keep the project up for weeks, months, even years
- Consider getting a company to sponsor it
He added that he thinks it’s better to first decide the approach to the project, and create your time frame later.
And remember, he said, production always takes longer than you think. “Be honest about the deadline. However long you
think the project will take, add 50 percent more time or cut 50 percent of the content.”
Wells said projects should appeal to three types of users: reactive users, known to open and close content quickly; active
users, known to skip around while knowing what they are looking for; and passive users, who sit back and let the multimedia play
for up to 20 minutes at a time.
When it comes to measuring the success of a project, it’s better to look at quantitative rather than qualitative results,
Wells said. Tracking the time users spent with the project is often a better measure of success than counting page views.
To promote the project, “stand on the freeway, not the street corner,” he said. Take advantage of any partnerships
you have with other companies.
“We use MSN,” he said. “That’s our freeway. Our street corner is the politics page [on MSNBC.com].”
Another approach to promotion was offered by The Minneapolis Star Tribune’s Regina
McCombs, who suggested that a slide
show with stunning photos could be sponsored by a local photography shop. She said people often watch two to three slide shows
in a row, so there is potential for revenue in such projects.
McCombs, a multimedia reporter for startribune.com, also demonstrated how her company created a project on troops serving
in Iraq. Thanks to audio interviews with troops posted on their site, a local family heard from a relative serving in Iraq for
the first time in months. The chance meeting also grew into a story for an area radio station.
The use of audio has been especially popular in the sports section, she added, noting the rabid Minnesota Vikings fans listen
to entire 20-minute press conferences with teams when they are posted on the Star Tribune site.
“It’s a simple way to do stories that are very popular,” she said. |
