Multimedia Journalism

   Whitney Houston's passing this Saturday at the age of 48 was a perfect storm of multimedia mourning. The ambiguous nature of her death, and her turbulent past of success, beauty, and public addiction. have surprisingly generated coverage that has been more flashy than substantive.

   In the wake of Houston's death, as is often the case with early-deceased celebrities, the media have saturated the market with images of her tragic beauty. Coverage at the broadcast and video level has emphasized public and celebrity reactions, and social media have blown up with celebrities posting about the late songstress. Text and radio coverage has done a good job of holding to the fact that although prescription pill vials were found in Houston's room, her cause of death as of the time of the media storm was still undetermined.

   Perhaps the most disappointing example of coverage was the Wall Street Journal's slideshow of Houston. The journal selected only powerful images of the singer on stage, in the light which we all already knew her, rather than encouraging the reader-subject intimacy we've often seen as the strong point of the slide show format.

   The ABC video was more telling of the element of Houston's success anyway, in that it humanized the Hollywood reaction with red-carpet interviews, and twitter posts by celebrities.

   The LA Times' treatment of Houston's obituary was a great deal more informative as to the personal context of  her death, going so far as to mention her addiction in the lead. 

Convergence

   I chose to stay close to home in searching for my example of convergence to see how it might affect me in looking for a job. I found some evidence of convergence on the website for Long Beach's own Press Telegram.

   These pictures are of the homepage, and selected areas that I thought were examples of convergence. Not only is there a “Target” tab, demonstrating convergence of advertising and content, but very subtly in the upper right hand corner of the page there is link to “LA.com," a guide to Los Angeles diversions run by Los Angeles News Group .

    The Long Beach Press Telegram partnering with diversion guide out of Los Angeles is mutually benefitial. The outlet's can share content, making it easier for the Press Telegram to report on LA area events, and informing the larger newsgroup of developing stories in Long Beach. 

   The fact that the site also offers a web search powered by yahoo! is another example of convergence. YAHOO! search allows readers connect the stories published by the Press Telegram, to the bigger picture of the entire web.

 photos captured directly from

Media Convergence

Media convergence is the dissemination of content across various platforms of media. According to Jenkins, it is an “ongoing process, occurring at various intersections of media technologies, industries, content and audiences.

A great example of media convergence is the online news site, The Huffington Post. More specifically, at the top of the news story is Newt Gingrich’s battle in the Republican primaries that is transmitted across various media platforms. The news story contains a lengthy article, a video on the same story, opportunities to share the story across all of the available social media platforms, a twitter feed of thousands of users commenting on Gingrich (#Gingrich/ @Gingrich), and section that allows readers to read similar stories on Gingrich across other news channels like the LA Times, NY Times, and CNN.

This Gingrich story is also a great example of social convergence. “Media convergence fosters a new participatory folk culture by giving average people the tools to archive, annotate, appropriate and recirculate content,” according to Jenkins. Below the story is a section where readers can contribute to the news content itself by uploading their own photos, videos, comments and even add corrections to the article itself. A decade ago, news was solely a linear conversation between journalists and readers. Today, journalists and readers are partaking in constant communication. The public today not only reads the news but also contributes to the news content that allows the public to see the whole story and not just a single view of the story.

Social convergence allows readers to share news across various platforms with their own personal community while disseminating the story across various channels. Today, with the onslaught of media convergence, people don’t depend on just one channel to gain their news. They depend on a number of reporters, a number of news channels and on their friends to disseminate the news and get to the bottom of a story.

Multimedia Journalism

Sometimes the best way to getting the story across and impacting the public is through emotion. The LA Times Photography section is a prime example of this. This multimedia section contains a breadth of community stories told through the eyes of the victims with photography, video, sound bytes, and news articles.

Photography, video and sound bytes contain the heart of the story while accompanied articles give more background and details that may be missing from the story. Multimedia journalism allows for readers to disseminate a story through the point of view of the writer and the point of view of the subject.

A particularly powerful piece is the story on Prison Hospice: Life and Death. This is a story narrated by an inmate who is suffering from cancer. He tells the story of his own illness, the story of others and how he continues to have faith in his situation. So much emotion and compassion is evoked through the multimedia slide with powerful pictures and narration. A story from the perspective of an inmate hardly has a voice in regular news, but through multimedia journalism, it becomes a voice to be heard.

By Cristina Szewczyk