Mixedmedia — A Way To Increase Emotional Depth In Journalism

For six years, two colleagues and I have been researching a story about Chinese Prison Camps (you can read the whole story here for free — both in English and in German).

For the presentation, we were looking for the best possible way to increase the emotional engagement of the recipient. So I finally came up with an new way of storytelling.

I call it mixedmedia.

It is, in a way, an improvement of your traditional multimedia story.

Multimedia Stories, especially scrollytellings, have, in my opinion, three key problems:

1. Text dominates all other media genres. Videos, etc. are often rather adornments of the text.
2. Videos are often slowing down the story.
3. There was, so far, no satisfying way to seamlessly integrate different medialities.

Mixedmedia is trying to fix all of those problems.

There are two key elements for a mixedmedia story:

1. Freely programmable story sections.
2. The graduation of traditional media genres.

We are, firstly, breaking down our story in sections and design a unique slide for each section.

Secondly, we are breaking down media genres such as videos and use them in different graduations (for instance: slightly animated picture -> soundless mood video -> short loop -> complete video).

After doing this, we can define exactly, which graduation of which media genre best serves the purpose of increasing the emotional depth in our story.

With the help of those two techniques, we can truly start to mix and combine media genres in a precise and creative way.

I’m convinced that this technique of storytelling can unleash a more powerful, more engaging way of reporting.

Please, let me know what you think about my idea. And please let me know how you like our story.

Warm wishes

Stefan

P.S. If you are fluent in German: Here’s an in-depth version of my thoughts on mixedmedia.