Media Convergence and Multimedia Journalism

             MULTIMEDIA JOURNALISM: 

The chapter titled "Introduction to Convergent Journalism" defines multimedia journalism as "the practice of gathering news and reporting it across multiple media cross ownership." Thus, multimedia journalism is seen as a dimension of convergence and it requires reporting gathered news across different platforms. A journalist uses a combination of different skills (from traditional to new) to gather information and report that information to the public. An example of multimedia journalism would be the E! Online website because it incorporates different kinds of multimedia to report a story.

The section of the website labeled "news" features online print stories that explain the event and what occurred. The strength of this would be the character development of celebrities as the reader can take any amount of time to learn and understand the story as well as relate or not relate to the characters within. The website also features a video section which is basically the print stories in a video format. The journalist uses videos to report the event and this results in a different connection with the audience, usually a more emotional one. Last but not least, E! Online uses photos and slideshows as well on its web page. The slideshows are under the heading "photos" and display things such as best and worst dressed celebrities, star sightings and fashion police as well as many others. The audience has the ability to click on any slideshow that they are interested in. This slideshow and photo combination of reporting ultimately gives the reader interactivity as well as choice.

MEDIA CONVERGENCE:

In a short article on convergence Henry Jenkins says, "Media convergence is an ongoing process, occurring at various intersections of media technologies, industries, content and audiences; it's not an end state." An example of media convergence would be the Los Angeles Times website which produces and reports the news across two different types of media at the same time. The website is one way of reporting on current issues and the Los Angeles Times newspaper is another way of reporting on those same issues. A strength of print media is it's ability to provide context and conduct thorough explanations on different topics, and this is what the Los Angeles Times newspaper does. The online version of the newspaper has the strengths of multimedia and the ability to interact with the audience as well as allow a reader to search for either current stories or ones still available in the website's archives.  

The newspaper uses print journalism and mostly traditional skills to gather news and report on it whereas the online website uses new skills to do the same thing. The Internet is incorporated as a different form of media and uses mass amounts of technology to share the gathered information. If the Los Angeles Times had a broadcast station that would introduce another form of media in the process as well. Currently, the newspaper and the online website do a good job in showing the trend of media convergence as they are both reporting the news across two forms of media simultaneously.