The New Yorker's Multimedia: Photojournalists Eating on the Road

Compared to most newspapers, magazines have been slower to enhance their web product by adding multimedia, but now even The New Yorker has regular online multimedia features.

Check out this multimedia feature of photojournalists showing their images of and talking about some of the strangest meals they've eaten while on assignment around the world. It's very simple. But brilliant all the same.

What The New Yorker and other magazines (like The Atlantic with its podcasts and videos) have done is put a lot of thought into what stories would really lend themselves to multimedia. Too many newspapers have fallen into the rut of adding multimedia just for the cache, demanding their photographers or reporters produce web video more because it makes the newspaper look like it's on the cutting edge, rather than because it's the best way to tell that particular story.

The problem with this mentality, in my opinion, is that you end up with a lot of garbage.

Since the world online is already cluttered, doesn't it make more sense to increase the quality rather than the quantity? Or at least to really consider the questions: What kind of multimedia would enhance this particular story? What can we do with multimedia that we couldn't do with text and still images?

That's what I love about this week's audio slideshow from The New Yorker. It's not rocket science: A handful of photos thrown into a slideshow with audio of the photographers talking about the images in the style of sort of a photographer's notebook. (Here's a post on how to do it yourself.) But this piece was a perfect feature for The New Yorker's food issue. It makes sense and it's captivating.

Telling Stories With Audio Slideshows

Michael Werner and I are giving a workshop today at the Society of Professional Journalists' Building at Better Journalist Conference in Eugene, Oregon.

For those of you who can't be here or those who did attend but want some resources to refer back to later, I've uploaded a quicktime movie file of our powerpoint presentation.


As we explained in the workshop, Soundslides (downloadable from the link) is a handy tool for compiling photos and audio (but not for editing photos or audio). You must prepare your photos (save as jpgs) and audio (save as mp3s) in other programs. Uploading them to Soundslides is the easy part.

Here are links to more info helpful in producing slideshows.

Check out the Audio Journalist's Toolkit for info on audio gear, editing software and handy guides to using Audacity. Here are sites where you can download free music and sounds: Freeplaymusic.com, CreativeCommons.org, CCmixter.org and the Free Sound Project. Be aware, however, that just because they're free to download, doesn't necessarily mean they are copyright free. If you're making a sideshow for journalistic or commercial uses especially, read the fine print.

Check out the Photojournalist's Toolkit for info on basic photo composition rules and Photoshop basics.

Here's a workflow map of how to use the Soundslides software. If you click on this, you'll open a larger version to print. Let me know if there are problems. I can email you a pdf.

After you finish compiling your slideshow, you'll want to "export" it. This is one of the fussy aspects of Soundslides. It doesn't export a neat, compact file. It creates a folder called "publish_to_web" and that entire folder is what you need to publish. If you're working with a web team, just hand them over the folder, they'll know what to do. If you want to email it or publish it to your own personal website or blog, follow these instructions on the Soundslides online manual under "exporting and publishing."