Multimedia

What a relevant week to be discussing multimedia in news. Journalists are being jailed, getting tear gas thrown at them, and this is all just in one city in America. What multimedia you should include in a post depends on the content and audience. Scientific journal articles often include graphs and charts with the data laid out in a more visual manner. This doesn't mean that more graphs are always better. Charts should never be accepted as true without careful inspection. 
Newspaper articles should almost always have a picture. I like that mashable has little headshots of the authors with every story. Stories about race written by white people should be read in a different light. Photojournalists have a difficult job, as was revealed in Ferguson this week. An Al Jazeera camera team was setting up video equipment when police in riot gear threw tear gas at them. They quickly fled their equipment and then a swat team came and turned off lights and pointed cameras down. Thankfully, another news station was more hidden from view and able to take a video of this happening. In our day and age of police violence and the he said, she said following police brutality cases, video provides solid proof. Otherwise we might be able to ignore news that shakes our sense of right and wrong. This is a photo of a local reporter who was one of the first to get to the Ferguson protests-

What kind of tone does that set for the story? 
And this is just for actual news articles. What about stories? One website that has great stories is medium. Apparently, some people thought that this article on helping self-recognized pedophiles was incredibly disturbing. But it reveals an opportunity for art to really change the direction of a story. The point was not to create shame or repeal people but to open our eyes to others reality. So, the art director has the job of setting the tone. They wrote a detailed article about how many steps they had to go through to get to the finished product. 
We live in a world that never stops moving. There are always distractions. How are people supposed to be able to concentrate on reading a long article. Scientists are always releasing new articles that say if we want to be able to remember more or this or that then we should be listening to certain music while reading. This weeks new finding was that music with a heavy bass line makes people feel and act more powerful.  But as a I am not a auditory learner, I find it problematic when other people choose the music. I would rather play my strange collection of music that I find helps me focus. I remember the days of myspace and geocities pages being all over burdened with multimedia. My page would automatically start playing a whole playlist when it loaded and the pause button wasn't easy to find. There were sparkly banners everywhere. I don't like NPR articles that are only audio, no transcriptions. 
Overall, multimedia is woven into every part of our online environment. It is generally a great benefit of our technological advancements but can be a burden. Editors and content creators should always be thoughtful when choosing what types of multimedia to include in their pages.