For this first multimedia critique, we were supposed to find a project on a news organization’s web site. I went to the Denver Post’s site, and found their “Motel Life” piece, which is done in Flash. I was initially impressed with the Post’s treatment of multimedia; it was a section very easy to find from the main page, and was also accessible from the ‘Photos’ section. I also liked that pieces such as “Motel Life” were listed as “Special Projects”; it made the in-depth pieces stand out from the more weekly features.

Problems arose when I actually started navigating through the project. It’s clear that a significant amount of time was invested in this, and that it wasn’t just thrown together, which made it frustrating to have to sort through the problems that arose. The biggest flaw is that, although there is intra-navigation on the main html page for “Motel Life”, shown below, there’s no way to get back to the menu from the individual stories. You have to either refresh the entire webpage, or start all over again from the Multimedia page. I would have liked to have seen a menu button on each of the stories. This would essentially serve the same function as hitting refresh in the browser, but makes the show seem more integrated.

I liked the simple layout of the menu and of the individual stories (I also appreciated that the accompanying text story opened in a separate window when that link was clicked),  but felt that certain features should have been incorporated. With regard to what we have discussed in class, the shows all started playing immediately once the links were clicked (a problem for the unsuspecting viewer), and no time bar was included, making me appreciate the importance of always including these in my own work.

One other aspect of this project that stood out to me was its use of music. I wish there had been more B-roll audio and less music used in these stories; I wanted to hear what the motels sounded like–did the air conditioners wheeze, did the walls creak, etc. Finally, if you listen to the third story, it uses the exact same background music as that which appears in Jenn Ackerman’s “Trapped” piece (something we’ve seen many times in the Photo sequence), which threw me off as soon as I started watching. I never really got over the strangeness. The dangers of community copyright licenses…

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/photos/

On the websites of many newspapers, photographs are treated as supplementary visual information to the meat of the article they accompany. While photography is allowed more of a stay in the spotlight due to the increased space allowed by online publications, there appears to be a tendency to underutilize the platform when it comes to running images.

The Boston Globe, however, is one of those outlets that does recognize and work with the potential offered by the web. The site is by no means perfect—when images run with news stories, the old patterns often still apply—but the “Photography” section of bostonglobe.com offers something entirely different. Special efforts are made to showcase the efforts of the Globe’s staff photographers, but other photo collections, composed of wire images, make up a considerable portion of the page. The site itself could be a little more streamlined—there are so many choices for photo viewing on one page that it’s a little overwhelming—but at the same time, the variety of collections available on one page for browsing minimizes the time viewers spend clicking around to find a slideshow.

The best part of the site, however, is the size at which the images in the collections are run. The default minimum width for the photos is 959 pixels, and viewers can also choose to employ the “full screen” option.
Links to the main Globe photo blogs are prominent and easy to find, but it was somewhat frustrating to visit the “Big Shot” sports photoblog only to discover that its host page was the Sports section, and that I had to click the back button in order to get back to the Photo area. This was not an issue with the other blogs, however.

Overall, the Boston Globe’s photo section does an excellent job of showcasing its visual information. While there are some navigation tweaks to be worked out, the site itself stands out as a good model of how online news outlets can work with the web.