Jenna’s Blog

According to gathering audio, photojournalism is moving with the times and is changing the digital revolution. The use of audio added to a set of photos is in all ways beneficial. I like the benefit of audio adding a voice to the subject. I think that it gives the project a much more emotional feel for the topic whether its focused on a tragedy or a a comedian. I feel that the audio gives a more in-depth feel to what the reporter is trying to get across. Sometimes still pictures give a false image and captions can only say so much, but if there is an explanation of details, maybe communication will come across more clear.

The first map off of 10,000 words is titled “Junta Holds Back.” I don’t think it’s actually interactive though. Yes you can click on it to take you to an article with maps about the topic, but there isn’t any activity for the viewer. It would have been cool for the map to be linked to maybe pictures or something that gave more detail. The second was a map about a camper attacked by a bear at High Point State Park. This can give people a sense of the area the attack happened. The third map about the mix up shows that a map can explain confusion of places that may be mixed up and cause a lot of questions. The best thing is to make sure the reader understands what is going on.

The Budget Balancer is an integrated part of Minnesota Public Radio website. MPR is one of the nations premier public radio organizations operating 38 stations that cover Minnesota, Wisconsin, the Dakotas, Michigan, Iowa and Idaho. It is also the country’s largest station-based producer of national public radio programs. This site has attached to it a budget balancing section. Mainly, this portion is to get a feel for what the nation has to say on what we should be spending our money on. Who doesn’t love to figure out new ways to save money? You can create as many different budgets as you like and match different expenditures and revenues together. This interactive site is a way for people to decide what they feel is really necessary and how they would minimize the deficit. I liked how the site has a link called “How to play.” For many people, like myself, budget balancing is a confusing topic. However, with this site, it makes balancing fun and easy to understand. I feel that this is a good way to get more people interested and concerned about the nations deficit. On a side note, I kind of enjoyed the little sounds they applied to their website when changing around the budget. Something really small made the site that much more appealing. Though I found this content in general pretty boring, the way they made it interactive and were able to put the power in your hands made the information more interesting. Lastly, I found it clever for them to ask users to leave comments about why they made the choices they did.

I chose the flipbook slideshow, “Cardstacker.” This one really caught my attention. At first I didn’t enjoy the flipbook method. I found it hard to look at and difficult to watch and listen at the same time. However, further into the slideshow I realized why they chose this flipbook method. If they had chose to do a video it would have either been days of video to watch, or would have missed a lot interesting information. The flipbook method worked well with what he was doing. It actually looked like he was building the card stacks and by using that method we got to see the process in a semi sped up kind of view. The narration went well with it to. I think this slideshow was thought out very well and done appropriately for the viewer to really get a sense of the “Cardstacker’s” artistic ability.