It’s more than just a combination of text, photos, audio, video and graphics. Stories are fashioned through narrative structures, devices and techniques designed to draw the audience into the characters and events.

Inspired by the writing coach Jack Hart, who created “A Storyteller’s Lexicon” for The Oregonian newsroom, I decided to write out a multimedia storytelling vocabulary and some examples of how various news projects employ them.

Here are some of the common approaches and elements found in engaging multimedia news stories.

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Anecdote – A personal account of a series of actions.
Example: Julio Diaz shares his experience of being robbed in a surprising, two-minute anecdote. (StoryCorps.org audio)

Character – An individual who undergoes change or takes action.
Example: Photographer Luis Sinco goes beyond the iconic image of the “Marlboro Marine” and takes the viewer on an intimate journey into the soldier’s emotional and psychological struggles. (MediaStorm.com audio slide show)

Complication – An event or development that forces a character to respond or react.
Example: When the Gulf Oil spill hits the small town of Venice, Louisiana, the residents must decide whether to stay or leave. (News21.com video)

Contiguity – How all of the media elements on a page or website work together. The best multimedia pieces combine text and visuals in meaningful ways and avoid extraneous elements.
Example: The Highrise Project is a series of interactive documentaries about urban residential buildings that pays particular attention to the integration of text, images, video, sound, design and animation. (National Film Board of Canada interactive documentary)

Curate – Gathering, sourcing, verifying and redistributing information or social media elements to track an event.
Example: Andrew Carvin uses Twitter to cover major international events. (NPR social media)

Data Story – An application that allows users to search and access data a variety of ways.
Example: The Dollar for Docs news application lets readers search pharmaceutical company payments to doctors. (ProPublica database)

Detail – Distinct observations, facts or moments included for the purpose of conveying character or plot.
Example: This story of the world’s largest religious festival in India is told through intimate snapshots of the spiritual pilgrims. (Bombay Flying Club)

Dialogue – Conversation between two or more characters that allows the audience to see and hear characters interacting with one another.
Example: The back-and-forth between two adult daughters and their father who has Alzheimer’s disease helps provide insight into a family’s struggle to hang on to memories. (StoryCorps audio and photo)

Dramatic question – An overarching question posed at the beginning of a story; audience wonders how it will end.
Example: An award-winning 2007 article by columnist Gene Weingarten starts with a question, “If the world’s great violinist performed incognito in a Metro station, would anyone stop and listen?” (Washington Post article and video)

Establishing shot – An opening visual, often a wide-angle view that provides location and setting.
Example: The opening shots of an interactive documentary about Canon City, Colorado, a town built around 13 prisons, provide a sense of landscape and place. (Prison Valley interactive documentary)

Five W’s – Basics information or facts of story: who, what, where, when and why. The crux of the story often originates in the “why.”
Example: This story about same-sex marriage is told through the voice of a seven-year-old girl, who answers the “five W’s” simply and poignantly. (San Francisco Chronicle audio slide show)

In their own words – A story told by the characters without narration by the storyteller.
Example: In this profile of a ballpoint pen rapper, the reporters choose to stay in the background and allow the viewer to focus on the performer. (Newsworks.org video and article)

Interactivity – User engagement and participation.
Example: A virtual game of rock-paper-scissors illustrates how computers can be programmed to mimic human reasoning. (NYTimes.com interactive feature)

Linear story – A narrative with a distinct beginning, middle and end. The audience experiences the story in the format created by the storyteller.
Example: This web video chronicles how one Illinois farm became a suburban housing development. (Media Storm video)

Map story – A geographic display of information that responds to input from user.
Example: Mapping the battles and casualties of the Civil War provides a new way to understand the war’s regional impact. (WashingtonPost.com map)

Moment of reflection- A clear statement of what the story is about, often following an anecdote.
Example: The radio show This American Life sent nine reporters to a rest stop for two days to see what kinds of stories they could find. The episode is structured around anecdotes and reflections on travel. (This American Life audio)

Motivation – A reason or inspiration for the character’s action.
Example: What motivates someone to walk 10,000 miles a year? This profile of Dr. Marc Abrams, known as the Silver Lake Walker, seeks the answer. (LATimes.com audio slide show)

Multimedia – Combining multiple media elements (text, photographs, audio, video and/or graphics) to tell a story.
Example: This multimedia feature uses various media elements to revisit the 1960s Pirates baseball team. (Pittsburgh-Post Gazette multimedia package)

Multi-platform – Presenting a story across multiple news publishing platforms, including newspapers, magazines, social media, blogs, websites, apps for mobile devices or tablets, radio, television and documentary film.
Example: This series on the environmental issues of New Jersey’s Barnegat Bay was published in a series of newspaper articles, a website, and social media. (Asbury Park Press website)

Narration - The storyteller’s voice provides information and context.
Example: The reporter’s voice-over helps provide background to a story about New Jersey state budget cuts and educational resources for blind students. (Star Ledger video)

Non-linear story – Presentation that allows the audience to decide the order of information and story structure. Has no definitive beginning, middle or end point.
Example: This interactive documentary about the Great Lakes lets the user choose where to begin and end. (Waterlife.ca web documentary)

Opening – The beginning or start of a story that hooks the audience.
Example: The opening seconds of this multimedia feature about traumatic brain injury draws the audience into the lives of soldiers who suffer from it. (WashingtonPost.com multimedia feature)

Profile – A concise biographical sketch of an individual or group of people. Different from an event or issue-based story.
Example: Rosie Rios, a woman who runs a service for the homeless in Los Angeles, is profiled in this audio slide show. (LATimes.com audio slide show)

Resolution – An ending that provides closure to a story.
Example: In the final quote of this profile, an ironworker describes cycling as therapy. (NYTimes.com audio slide show)

Role-playing game – An interactive feature that puts the user in the position of a story’s character and enables decisions and choices.
Example: How would you balance California’s state budget? (LATimes.com budget game)

Sound bite – In audio or video, a short phrase or quote that captures an essential point in an interview.
Example: Three short sound bites in the first 30 seconds of video draw the viewer into the story of one family’s journey through the U.S. immigration system. (San Jose Mercury News multimedia package)

Soundtrack – Music synchronized to images or video. A powerful tool for setting the rhythm, tone and mood of a story.
Example: Music is the key element that ties together a web film called “Words.” (RadioLab video)

Story arc – The progression of a story from beginning to climax to resolution.
Example: Five Years Later: Hurricane Katrina follows a traditional story arc. The website’s navigation, which breaks down the story into a three main acts, guides the audience through the stages of the tragedy. (USA Today multimedia feature)

Timeline story – A chronological display of information that responds to input from the user.
Example: Tracking the 2011 Middle East protests and how events unfolded. (Guardian timeline)

User-generated – Story elements created by users, who provide multiple perspectives and experiences.
Example: Reader submitted photos of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. (NYTimes.com photo gallery)

I selected Orlean’s book Saturday Night, which was first published in 1990 and was reissued this year, as one of the primary texts. Saturday Night is a collection of magazine-style feature articles that start with the question, “What makes Saturday night so special?” In her attempt to answer that question, Orlean travels the county and cruises in muscle cars in Indiana, polka dances with seniors in Maryland, interviews homeless people on the Lower East Side, and spends the night in a missile silo in Wyoming.

So what does The New Yorker-style narrative nonfiction have to do with multimedia journalism?

I’m planning to use the book in several ways to help students explore aspects of digital storytelling.

Finding Stories
Most of the subjects in Saturday Night are pretty ordinary, but Orlean’s eye for detail and skillful prose creates wonderfully vivid portraits of everyday life. My students’ assignments will have a similar goal: to find surprising and compelling stories about people and events that rarely make the news.

Insight into the Reporting Process
Orlean is a rigorous reporter and researcher, even when she is writing about a waitress or a babysitter. Also Orlean’s use of the first person provides occasional glimpses into her own process and how she interacts with subjects. My students are always wanting to know how a reporter finds a particular story or conducts herself when she’s doing a story.

Narrative Structure and Techniques
When I think back on own journalism education experience – in a time before the term “multimedia reporting” was invented – I learned the most about the art of storytelling in my magazine writing classes. We studied writers like John Hersey, Gay Talese, Jimmy Breslin, Joan Dideon, Calvin Trillin and Lillian Ross. We learned how to structure a story, set a scene, select the most telling details, and incorporate quotes and dialogue. I’m hoping to bring a feature writing sensibility to the students’ practice of multimedia journalism.

Understanding Multimedia
My students’ assignments incorporate text, photos, audio and video. A key challenge is understanding when to use a particular medium to tell the story in the most engaging way. I have created several exercises in which students will brainstorm how they might translate one of Orlean’s profiles for the digital age. We will storyboard an article and discuss how it might be presented as an interactive feature on the web. Students will apply those concepts to their own work.

A Source of Inspiration (I hope)
This is an experiment. I know that many of the techniques of magazine writing do not translate to gathering audio or shooting video. Students will have three minutes to present a story, not 5,000 words. And many of the cultural references in Saturday Night are dated (i.e., in the future “people will eventually work from their homes via computer workstations and modem hookups.”) However, I’m hopeful that a book like Saturday Night is still capable of inspiring the next generation of journalists.

At the end of the semester, I’ll post an update of what I learn.

“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

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
• 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.

PICK Model for Online News

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.

Journalism in the Age of Data

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.

I teach journalism at a university that embraces the role of providing quality news and information to the public. Our students produce award-winning radio, television, documentary films, print publications, and web sites. And I’m always looking for new ways to provide our students with a newsroom experience that also serves the needs of the local community.

But I am also familiar with the challenges of creating and supervising student-run news publications.

I don’t consider these roadblocks that should stop innovation, but rather real-life issues to be considered. I post them here because they are often glossed over in discussions of how universities can be “hubs of journalistic activity.” (I’ve heard numerous presentations that go something like this: Newsrooms are cutting back. Journalism students already create news content. Set up a web site. Post the stories. Inform the public.)

Here are some of the challenges I have encountered. I welcome responses and advice.

Graduate vs. undergraduate journalism students
When people talk about journalism programs serving as regular sources of news for a local community, they are often talking about graduate schools with students who are older, more experienced, and more focused on their future careers. Undergraduate journalism programs, I believe, must also provide a broad liberal arts education to students who may — or may not — work as journalists.

Getting quality reporting from part-time reporters
Many of my students commute to school, take a full course load, are involved in existing student publications and clubs, do internships, freelance for Patch.com or the local newspaper, and work a part-time job to pay the bills. My students want to do quality work, but time and energy are in short supply.

A space for trial and error
I believe that student journalists should publish their work and be required to cultivate and interact with real audiences. At the same time, learning involves making mistakes. The public deserves quality, in-depth information. Students need spaces to fail without serious public consequences.

The news cycle vs. the school year
Each semester, our student blogs and web sites thrive and then are abandoned when students move on. To build a real audience, a news publication must be published continuously. The 9-month, two-semester school year means gaps in news coverage. As a result, I encourage “evergreen” stories that have a longer digital shelf life, but that is not the same as a regularly updated information.

Working with the best students vs. teaching the whole class
Many of the best student-run news operations (i.e. News21) select participants through a competitive process to ensure they get the most committed and qualified students. This works for special programs, but not in the traditional classroom.

Creating partnerships with news organizations is difficult
Our journalism program has explored various ways to partner with local news organizations. So far we haven’t found an arrangement that really works for both parties. There are issues of staffing, liability, licensing, and who has the final say on publishing a student piece. But we will keep trying.

Online Journalism I (Spring 2011)
-Download Online Journalism I syllabus (pdf)
-Link to Online Journalism I class blog with assignments, tutorials, schedule, student work, and lecture notes

Online Journalism 2 (Spring 2011)
-Download Online Journalism 2 syllabus (pdf)
-Link to the Online Journalism II class blog with assignments, tutorials, schedule, and lecture notes

The syllabus exchange works on a point system. For every resource submitted (i.e., syllabus, class exercise, assignment, handout, case study or rubric) a teacher can download two teaching materials. Everything is tagged and searchable by the professor’s name, school, type of course, and education level.

I signed up for a NewsU account and uploaded my syllabi for this semester. It took about 24 hours for NewsU to accept my submissions and award points to my account. Then I downloaded a few  interactive storytelling materials from professors at SMU, San Francisco State, and the Medill School of Journalism. Of course, many journalism professors have been informally sharing teaching materials online for years, but it is helpful to have a concentration of resources.

Here is a link to the syllabus exchange page -  https://www.newsu.org/tools/syllabus-exchange

But don’t use your points to download my materials. If you are interested, here is what I’m doing this fall semester at Rowan University.

Online Journalism I
-Online Journalism I syllabus (pdf)
-Link to Online Journalism I class blog with assignments, tutorials, schedule, student work and lecture notes

Online Journalism 2
-Online Journalism II syllabus (pdf)
-Link to the Online Journalism II class blog with assignments, tutorials, schedule and lecture notes

As I shift to my summer schedule, I wanted to take note of a few general lessons I’ve learned. Most of these are things I came to through trial-and-error, often with instruction from my students.

Lecturing is not the best way to teach that “news is a conversation”
Higher education and journalism are biased toward a “one-to-many” mode of communication; the web is not. In order to understand how journalism works in a digital age, a course on interactive news has to be participatory, conversational and collaborative. In my experience, this can also mean unpredictable and occasionally chaotic, but it is a lot more fun than lecturing everyday.

Follow smart people
My blog roll (see “Sites I Like and Use” on the sidebar) and my Twitter account are my key sources of information on what is happening in the profession and in teaching. If I don’t know something, I turn to those who do.

Don’t assume students are active web users
There is a difference between “passive” and “active” web users. Despite growing up with the Internet, some of my students navigate the web like they watch TV; they surf and consume. Or they only know how to participate within a defined structure like Facebook.

Don’t skimp on HTML and CSS
An assignment to build a simple web page can fill my email box with complaints. Then at the end of the semester, students say they want to learn more coding. So each semester, I give them more.

Raw audio interviews are gold
At the suggestion of veteran online journalism professor Mindy McAdams, I now require students turn in unedited audio recordings of interviews. They take a time to review, but they provide invaluable insight into a student’s interviewing and reporting techniques. I can hear the leading questions, the lack of a follow-up question, or the student reporter who does not allow the subject enough time to tell the real story. I can also tell if the student is interviewing a friend or relative.

Online tutorials are useful, but need follow-up
I use “how-to” online tutorials to free up class time and allow students to learn at their own pace. However, I’ve found that students will rush through them — or skip them entirely — unless they are followed up with some kind of review or assessment.

Experiment first, become an expert later
I used to spend a lot of time explaining a new piece of equipment or software before giving assignments. Now I cover a few basics and get students using it as soon as possible. I cover the more advanced techniques after they have some experience practicing.

The audience can be the best editor
I require that my students publish their work for an online audience (see a previous post It’s Not About the Blog). Despite the potential risks of this practice — like making mistakes in a public forum or having to endure spam and trolls — an online audience can provide a level of feedback that I cannot. Last semester, a student created an interactive map of all of the schools in his town. Eight minutes after it was published online, a reader contacted the student to say one school was missing.

Allow students to pursue a passion
I often ask students to report on subjects that they are passionate about. Some students respond, “I don’t have any passions.” I tell them to use my class as an excuse to find that new passion.  Then, over the course of the semester, I urge students to cover the topic as a “beat,” developing story ideas, cultivating sources, and digging deeper into the subject. It is satisfying to watch a student turn a hobby into an area of expertise. And reporters in the field routinely seek out students who have built up an online portfolio of work on a specific subject and quote them as sources.

Push beyond “write what you know”
While I allow students to write about things that interest them, I also require students to go places and cover subjects that do not interest them. I have found that it is essential to give very specific requirements (i.e. no quotes from anyone 17-25 years old) to get students to move out of their comfort zones.

Expect resistance to convergence
I have instituted convergence projects which require my online journalism students to work alongside broadcast journalism and photojournalism students. I underestimated how intensely students can identify with their particular specializations and can resent having to work with “those TV people.”

Storytelling is hard work
I can teach someone to edit an audio clip, crop a photo or compress a video. Or they can Google it and teach themselves. Teaching students to recognize, report and tell a compelling story is a real challenge, but that seems like a central goal of journalism education.

Students don’t remember PowerPoint presentations
I have now been teaching long enough to get an occasional “thank you” e-mail or note from a former student. While they often mention the content of my courses and how it helped in grad school or on the job, it is clear that interactions and conversations outside of the classroom are as meaningful — and often more significant — than the information I try to convey in the classroom.

Each student selects a topic or beat to cover for the semester and creates a blog dedicated to that subject. Then students report, write, photograph, gather audio, shoot and edit video for Web, and create interactive maps and timelines. All the student work is public, and the authors must cultivate an audience.

I like using the blog format for a number of reasons:

• It’s a free (or relatively inexpensive) way to create an online publication.
• Blogs can serve as an open-source reporter’s notebook – a place to try things, develop sources, and advance a story.
• It’s a hands-on way to learn about things like  HTML, CSS, feeds, linking, traffic, search engine optimization, and copyright and fair use.
• Students are required to generate ideas, write frequently, and learn to edit their own work.
• It allows for experimentation with multimedia and a chance to explore which elements can or should be used to tell a particular story.
• Students often have their work picked up by other publications or noticed by other reporters and editors.
• When students finish the semester, they have an online publication for internships and job applications. From my own experience, I know that an editor can tell a lot more about an applicant from 15 weeks of covering a single topic than from a stack of clips from the school newspaper.

When I began teaching several years ago, I was one of only a few instructors in my journalism department to use blogs for student work; today, many do.  Some students now complain that they have to maintain three or four blogs at the same time.

At the end of each semester, I ask myself: Is blogging outdated? Should I move on to another platform?

A recent report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which found that blogging has dropped among teens and young adults while simultaneously rising among older adults, raised these questions for me again.

I regularly remind my students that the class is not about blogging. It isn’t about the technology, software, or equipment. All of those things will be outdated in a few years.  I hope they take away lessons in reporting, writing, editing, fact checking, producing, informing, sharing, storytelling, and connecting with an audience.

I’d abandon blogs if I found another way to create that same experience in an introductory online journalism course. Much of the traffic on the Web has moved away from blogs to social networking sites. But I’ve yet to see a social networking experience that allows for all of the elements listed above.

I welcome suggestions.