The standard conventions of print news writing are tried and tested. The narrative structures of digital and multimedia journalism are less so.
“That’s why innovation in a newsroom isn’t just learning how to shoot and embed video or using Twitter to cover a live event,” Ronald Yaros wrote in American Journalism Review. “Innovation must also include developing, testing, and using new story techniques that keep audiences engaged.”
To better understand and teach multimedia storytelling, I’ve been hunting for narrative metaphors and structures for online news.
Here are three resources on the subject that I have found useful:
Alternate story forms break down information by theme and organize stories into chunks that can be scanned and understood easily by readers. Suitable for the web and often for newspapers and magazines, alternate story forms include:
- Q&As
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- f.a.q.s
- glossaries
- checklists
- timelines
- quizzes
- games
A Poynter News University online course on alternate story forms, developed by Andy Bechtel of the University of North Carolina, is a great resource for exploring the topic and learning which stories work best for which formats.
The online course itself is a nice example of the use of alternate story forms. It employs tightly written text boxes, interactive exercises, and animation. And it that allows the user to explore the information in a non-linear manner.
Multimedia is often defined as the use of various elements: text, audio, photos, video, graphics, and animation. But a group of researchers at University of 
Maryland define multimedia journalism as a cohesive experience.
They analyze how a webpage or website combines media to create a narrative environment for the user.
To explain their findings, researchers developed the P.I.C.K. model. It focuses on:
- Personalization – How content in a multimedia story relates to the user’s needs and interests.
- Involvement – The degree to which technology enables users to participate with choices, responses or content.
- Contiguity – How text, words, graphics, and animation are presented together.
- Kick-outs – Minimizing anything that competes with the users’ attention and compels them to go elsewhere.
The goal is to move beyond simply throwing together text and video and understanding how everything works together. One finding is that text is still key in explaining how all of the story elements relate to one another.
Data visualization is the display of complex information through graphics and animation. It has become a standard way to display election results, geographic locations, and complex statistical or financial data.
A great resource for exploring the subject is Journalism in the Age of Data, a video report and website created by Geoff McGhee. It includes interviews with journalists at the New York Times, MSNBC, and BBC, examples of how newsrooms are collaborating on projects, and websites for beginners like ManyEyes and Flare.
It also presents an overview of the research of Edward Segel and Jeffrey Heer from Stanford University, who study the narrative structures of online news data visualizations. Their research analyzes dozens of examples currently employed by online news organizations and looks for common narrative devices and story elements.
They identify seven basic narrative genres in data visualization:
- magazine style
- annotated chart
- partitioned poster
- flow chart
- comic strip
- slide show
- film/video/animation
They also describe how newsrooms are adopting the storytelling techniques of film, graphic design, animation, and video games to cover the news.