I must admit that I have become pretty much a slacker when it comes to reading the news online. The last time I actually went to a news site was probably more than three months ago because I wanted to see a video of something that happened back home. I get my news from Google Reader instead, which I admit is probably a bad thing because rarely do I ever read more than the short summary that shows up in the expanded view.
For this first blog assignment, I had no idea where to start so I started browsing the Interactive Narratives site (www.interactivenarratives.org). A multimedia project from the New York Times captivated me with the headline “The Debt Trap,” which can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/07/20/business/20debt-trap.html. It is a series that consists of articles, videos, photographs and interactive tools that take the simple topic of debt in as many angles as you could imagine.
What makes this multimedia series so effective is that you can be as interactive as you want to be while still getting the gist of the story. There are seven slides that you flip through that have sentences, like “Many Americans, drowning in debt, now face a lifetime of repayment.” If you hover your mouse over drowning in debt, it leads you to a link of an article about how one woman lost control, if you hover your mouse over lifetime, it leads you to an interactive tool that lets you explore debt graphically from the past 100 years. Other slides let you choose your age, determine how heavy your debt load is, how debt is affecting the rest of the world, what has attributed to the current state and finally how college students are being affected.
This is one of the best media packages I have ever come across and there are many things that the New York Times has done right.
- The slides themselves aren’t cluttered with links, they are simplistic and the images that accompany the slides are ghosted so as not to detract from the message that they are trying to put out.
- Once you click on an article there are striking images that accompany it, graphs and interactive tools, and there are a ton of hyperlinks within the story that lead to other stories so that the reader can get more information if they choose to.
- It gives you options. If you want to read more about a specific part of the series, it gives you those options. Whether you understand better through words, images, interactive tools, seeing how it applies to you or watching a video all of those options are just one click away.
- The interactive tools are amazing. One shows you what the average savings and average debt were graphically from 1920 to 2008, and it is rather shocking how drastic the differences are.
- Utilizing video. There are multiple videos that are scattered throughout, most focus on giving a face to the problem and are a mix of still photos and interviews.
- Conveying Impact. By the time you finish this series you know where you stand with debt and where the rest of the world stands with debt, how we got here and where we are headed. There are no questions left unanswered.
Things that they could do better
- Include more links directly in the multimedia package. There are a lot of links within this, but most of the links are available on the link from the original page. There is a bit too much clicking to get all of the information.
- Allow for more reader feedback. All that readers seem to be able to do is log in to recommend this to someone else, but they don’t have the ability to comment or interact.
Overall, I think that they did a great job with this and they accomplished something here that they never could have done with just the newspaper. There is a level of interactivity that makes the readers feel that this was done for their benefit, not Joe down the street or the entire country/world, but it includes the impact and speaks to all of those categories.
Check it out to see where your debt level compares to everyone else, or see how debt in America has changed in the past 100 years.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/07/20/business/20debt-trap.html
