Thanks to SoundSlides, audio slideshows are the poster child for multimedia. At their best they combine visceral photography with uniquely human audio — they force you to notice things you’ve never seen before, and to understand what they mean. The first time you see a good one, it floors you.
But they’re not the be-all, end-all of multimedia journalism – they’re the very beginning. Michael Bazeley captures what I’ve pondered about how audio slideshows can go wrong: They’re often cliche, and they often don’t really help tell the story. They’re threatening to become novelties.
It’s time to appreciate the limits of audio slideshows. They need a lot of pictures. They need compelling sound. They can only hold your attention for about 45 seconds to 2-3 minutes at a time. And perhaps the biggest problem is that they need a fairly conventional narrative, and one that doesn’t (yet) allow for reader involvement.
So what else can you do with photos online? A cool example of what I’ve taken to calling “photo-video” is this piece from The Baltimore Sun. It’s a pretty, interesting piece about the changing of the seasons… even if it is a piece completely devoid of news on a newspaper Web site. But it does show how you can use photographs in a different way to tell a story.