Newhouse School of Communications
MASTER STORYTELLERS SERIES
May 28, 2009
by Patricio Maya Solis
During his long career, including 11 years as The Washington Post's multimedia managing editor and 10 years as director of photography at National Geographic, Tom Kennedy gathered a great amount of knowledge about multimedia storytelling. On Apr. 13 he spoke to Newhouse students as part of the Master Storyteller Series.
"The fundamental problem with most journalists is that they focus too much on text and forget the visual and emotional side of storytelling," Kennedy said.
Kennedy sees multimedia storytelling as a fusion of two ancient languages: visual and musical performances. Yet much of the new media he works with borrows Hollywood techniques such as character development, a tight plot line and dialogues to help the narrative unfold.
French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard is known to have said that all fictional films inevitably end up having documentary elements, just as all documentary films inevitably end up having fictional elements. Thus, it comes as no surprise that successful new media presentations employ techniques originally geared at creating Hollywood films.
That said, Kennedy stressed the fact that video is just another aspect of multimedia journalism. "It is not synonymous with it," he said.
Each multimedia story presents a different set of challenges. Kennedy explained how video, photography, and interactive charts are used alone or with each other depending on the story. As a rule of thumb, an event told in chronological order is done in video, whereas a
complex story with many characters and situations is told with audio and still photography, he said. Charts and maps are used to convey hard facts.
To illustrate his points Kennedy showed a few multimedia stories from the Washington Post website. The most powerful stories were radically different from each other. The short video, "In Beichuan, China, the Agony of Surviving," showed the Sichuan province in China right after last year's 7.9-magnitude earthquake that killed 70,000 people. "Cleaning Floors, Brightening Minds," a photography slideshow tells the story of a school janitor in Washington D.C. who also happens to teach an art class.
Strong emotion was a common denominator in the work shown. Photography, audio and video allow subjects and journalists to tell stories from a personal perspective. In fact, sometimes the images speak for themselves. "If the weave of the story can be put together in a way that the narration is not necessary, then we don't do it," Kennedy said.
To watch excerpts from Tom Kennedy's session with students, click on the links below:
