Page 117 - Convergent Journalism an Introduction Writing and Producing Across Media

Photographers’ Responsibilities for Different Media

spatial techniques to highlight key moments or information. Multi-
media picture editing is in its infancy, but producers can draw on the
past. From the 1960s through the 1980s, photographers produced a
variety of multiple-projector slide-tape shows. Creative individuals and
teams produced shows that created a mosaic of images, timed to music
and narration. It’s much easier to get the same effects today by using
computer software and digital images.
One aspect of multimedia production that eludes the other media
is the ability of the producers to add interactivity to the production.
The editor still retains the gatekeeper function but allows the viewer
to access it in more than one way. For example, in a series of stories
about political candidates, the stories could be organized so that each
candidate’s full story is presented from start to finish: education, expe-
rience, religious background, views, or any number of issues, and so on.
Click on candidate A and get the full story, then click on candidate B
and continue until you have covered all of the candidates. Another
way to access the information could be to look at all the educational
backgrounds of all candidates one by one and then move on to looking
at their religious backgrounds. Images, video clips, and other material 107
can also be viewed in this nonlinear fashion.

Photographers’ Responsibilities for
Different Media

The reason for discussing the editing before we discussed the photog-
raphy is that the photographer must approach the image acquisition
differently based on the intended outcome. To photograph for a print
product, the photographer must create a story in a limited number of
images. Space in print is always at a premium. Tight edits and a few
outstanding pictures carry the day in print media. The photographer
must make sure that each picture is top quality and that the four or
five pictures used on a page provide all of the information needed to
convey the full story.
If the pictures are to be used in a video production or in a multimedia
format, the constraint of numbers is lessened. A linear picture story
contains pictures that may be redundant in message, but because of
the way that the production progresses from picture to picture at a set
speed, producers use that repetition to build up the importance of that
piece of information.