Throughout the semester, I have learnt may different aspects of multimedia journalism. I think this has benefited me by visually enhancing my stories so they are not just words on a page but rather a piece of work that my reader can interact with. I struggled to get my head around using the shorthand format, but I think it can be something I pick up on when writing longer feature stories. Using the City Journal was a first-time thing for me this semester and I’m thrilled to have learnt how to use it because it instantly made my stories look more professional. This is because in the past I would submit word documents that didn’t have the range of tools that The City Journal provided me with. Some of these tools included the ability to add audio into my story, social media posts, video, images with captions and Flourish charts.
I will mainly be focusing on the multimedia aspect, Flourish. It’s a website that allows you to create data visualisations such as charts and graphs to present statistics. I wrapped my head around Flourish quickly this semester and it really helped me make my data and statistics look more appealing to my reader. Not only that, but it also is easier to understand when you see a graph that explains data and statistics rather than seeing many different numbers put in with words.
In my data story about lives lost on Victorian roads I used Flourish to make pie charts, bar graphs, line graphs and more to really show how many tragedies we had on our roads. It would have been easy to just write these numbers, but the visualisations really helped the reader to understand what I was saying, and they could interact with it.
For my explainer story I also briefly used flourish but not for data this time. I decided to make a visualisation with different bubbles that noted the symptoms of Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). When the reader would hover over the bubbles it would give examples of what some of the symptoms were in my detail. I thought this was a different way of using Flourish, but it had the same principle of making my work more visually appealing to the reader and easier to read.
Overall, I think I’m much better equipped to write stories in the future now that I’ve learnt different aspects of multimedia journalism.
