What's beyond audio slideshows?
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    Screenshot of The Baltimore Sun piece, "Fall, for the moment."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.

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