Effective Multimedia Journalism

In the series “While We Sleep”, produced by Sam Saccone, Elissa Roberts from the VisCom School at the Ohio University, the things that happen while we sleep and the people that do after hour work are profiled.

The main link to the page the story series is described as : “The jobs of some take care of us in ways we don’t often stop to think about. Life doesn’t pause when we turn out our lights and go to sleep. There are about 3 percent of Americans who work night-shift jobs between 9 p.m. and 8 a.m., according to a 2007 report by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. Graveyard-shift employees drive police cars, stock grocery shelves, care for the sick and injured, repair roads, brew coffee – they labor at night so the rest of us can make it through our days.”

The stories, six in total, are of a variety of night happenings. They are entitled “While We Sleep- Clubs are Booming”, “While We Sleep- Taxis are Going”, “While We Sleep- Airplanes are Landing”, “While We Sleep- Traffic is Flowing”, “While We Sleep- Doughnuts are Frying”, and “While We Sleep- Rods are Reeling”

All of these stories draw on a fantastic use of imagry of the story they are profiling. There is also great B-Roll footage and use of background noise to help give the story relevance and help to make the viewer feel like they’re there, experiencing these things first hand.  The editing of the transitions are smooth, lighting of shots is good and interviews have great content.

The idea itself is also original and compelling. It seems like it is an angle on a story not often covered and the way it is done gives the story interest where there might have been little interest before.

That being said, I feel that these stories could have benefited greatly from text accompaniment to tie them all together into a larger picture and give them more depth. The visual pieces, although complete in themselves, lack the depth that text could have given them. They each have a short description of the story underneath, about 100-150 brief words that were a good start but could and should be expanded on to make this a more complete package. However, seeing as this was a college project from a visual communication department it can be assumed that that was not part of the project.

 

This story and others like it on a multitude of topics can be found on Interactive Narratives, a section of the Online News Association webpage.