MAJOR RESEARCH/CREATIVE ACTIVITY SAMPLE #2
Where's the Multimedia in Online Journalism? The Journal of Electronic Publishing, September 1998. Reprinted in Design, the magazine of the Society of News Design, the international organization for professional news designers, Winter 1998.
The editor of the online academic journal Journal of Electronic Publishing invited me to write an opinion piece on the current state of journalism publishing on the World Wide Web. The audience of JEP is the growing number of professionals involved in the development, production, and publishing of information on the World Wide Web.
In this piece, I echo the call I have made in other venues for more effective use of the multimedia capabilities of the World Wide Web by journalists. I believe that the development of cutting-edge journalism content for the Web has not paralleled the development of cutting-edge content for other types of online information, such as advertising, technical support, and entertainment. My premise is simple: the World Wide Web is not a new medium, it is merely a delivery system. The receiving equipment will soon be very much like the television sets we consider commonplace today. The successful news media web sites will be those that provide active content.
In this piece, I describe the differences between the capabilities of past media and this new "media". I remind the reader that "multimedia" is not new, that Television is multimedia and that even a printed newspaper is "interactive". I forecast that the Web market for journalists will soon be dominated by the traditional broadcast media, because they are better prepared to produce the active multimedia content that will be necessary to capture the audience and the advertising dollar. I created a new term, "uni-media," to describe professionals who have experience in only one medium. I advise newspaper publishers to carefully consider their publication's place in this new medium, so that they might avoid unnecessary expense investing in something they can't realistically hope to achieve.
After publication online in the JEP, the piece was selected for reprinting in Design, the official journal of the Society of News Design, the foremost professional organization for journalism content designers. SND has 2,600 members in 49 countries and is accredited by the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications (ACEJMC).