Storytelling Critique

Slideshows
I found the slideshow, Shattered, to be extremely powerful based off of the pictures. Unfortunately, the pictures made up the entirety of the content. There was absolutely no news to accompany them. According to the article, “the [slideshow] form can be used to tell stories all by itself, by combining descriptive photos and using the caption field to convey additional information”. With this photo essay there were no captions or any other type of information provided. If I hadn’t had prior knowledge of the 9/11 tragedy I would have no idea what was going on in the pictures. It is obvious that some sort of disaster had taken place but with no other knowledge that’s about as much meaning as a reader would be able to take away. I think that the power of the pictures would have been greatly enhanced by utilizing the option of captions. It would have allowed the creator to tell the story of his pictures with equally powerful information.

Audio Stories
The story by ‘Audio Man on the Street’, seemed very poorly done to me. Again, this didn’t seem like a news story to me. It seemed like a reporter was in the process of getting clips together for a news story but didn’t finish. The content consisted solely of three eyewitnesses describing what they saw. While there was some context provided with a simple caption explaining that they were commenting on the crash of an airplane, I expected to have some other information as well. To make the audio clips more effective I would have either had the author narrate an entire story with those clips worked into the story as they would have been in a traditional television newscast, or to leave the clips as is and include a print story below them. I think that the eyewitness testimony is a powerful tool, but I don’t think that it is very effective on its own. To get the most out of the material some sort of news story rooted in the facts of the crash would be beneficial.

Print Plus
On cnn.com I looked at the article, Amputee, Doctor of poor: ‘What happens to me?’. I found the story that was written to be extremely powerful and I liked that there was a picture accompanying the story to help the reader connect to the material. It was also helpful to have links embedded in the text that would take the reader to a site that would explain things they may not have understood otherwise, like the proposed stimulus plan. Despite everything I did like, I felt like the author could have done more to improve the story and take it one step further. Within the story there is a lot of talk of how emotional Luis Caplan, the man the story was based on, was. Given the various media available to online journalists, I think that either a sound clip or video clip would have allowed readers to connect more with his emotions. If either of those had been offered as an option, readers would have had the choice to simply read the text if that’s all they wanted, but they also would have had the option to engage themselves in the story more than they would have if the story was printed as is.