Changing the focus in multimedia story production: Experiences from high budget and low budget production settings

Abstract

Complex multimedia stories have initially emerged as prestige projects from high budget newsrooms such as The New York Times or the Washington Post; over time, both the practical experiences with the format as well as the developed technological affordances made it possible for smaller, more inexperienced newsrooms to produce complex multimedia stories, too. Within two different studies, we analyzed the production processes in both high budget and low budget settings. In this paper, we contrast the findings of both studies with the goal of abstracting indicators of change and implications for future productions. Based on the abstraction, we suggest changing the focus in multimedia storytelling productions from a product-oriented process toward a more process-oriented production; from a focus on hard production factors such as numbers and personnel to more soft factors such as distributed responsibilities and internal workflows; and from a focus of rather incidental communication toward a more managed communication within the production team. We conclude by deriving further implications for future research as well as journalistic practice and education.

Keywords

• multimedia journalism
• multimedia story
• digital journalism
• production
• budget
• longform