Interactive Multimedia Journalism Project

25 points

Students will come up with a quality journalism piece idea that is ideal for visualization and interactive multimedia, and build a full-fledged, Dreamweaver based web-site for publishing the story to a worldwide audience. This must be a piece of journalism, not public relations or self-promotion. Here is an example of what your project should look like. Here is a template for you to work off of.

There are 7 components to this project:

A STORY: Relying on your writing and reporting skills learned in prior classes, you will write an 800-1000 word feature story that is based on solid research, primary sources, interviews. This story is the basis of your multimedia project, with all other components serving to build further understanding to your topic. Your blog will detail the search you will have to find an ideal topic. Your story needs to contain links to outside online references.

A BLOG: 10 posts throughout the semester that allows you to unveil the process of creating your piece of journalism. This part of the assigment plays into our discussions about new moves towards greater transparency in journalism practices. See more details about the Blog component here.

AN INTERACTIVE AUDIO SLIDESHOW: You will take photographs and audio clips edit them (using Soundslides and Garageband) into a fully interactive audio slideshow, that you will upload onto your webpage.

A VIDEO: You will shoot, edit and upload a video to compliment (but not duplicate) your story.

A DATA VISUALIZATION: You will created some sort of data visualization in Many Eyes or Swivel.

AN INTERACTIVE MAP: You will design either a button map or an invisible button map--whatever works best for your story, using Zeemaps or Flash, and integrate it in your story on your webpage.

A WEBPAGE: designed in Dreamweaver and posted on the UNI server. You will apply lessons learned in aesthetics and design. Templates are OK, but can also be restrictive.

You will be graded on the quality of your overall multimedia presentation; the design of your page, the soundness of your reporting, the quality of your journalistic storytelling, the quality of the individual multimedia components, and the way each individual project component complements one another.