Always start with the question: What’s the best way to tell this story? Multi-media tools allow us to develop incredibly deep yet simple ways to navigate spaces and provide far more options for getting your story out during distribution. A creative presentation of the issues is a must if you want to draw people in after the news cycle has passed. And it may not always look like “news.”
Our best example of this is HOPE: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica, a reporting project that uses poetry, print, video, photography, radio, original music and even live performance to bring this challenging topic to as diverse an audience as possible. The interactive site LiveHopeLove.com weaves the elements together, using poetry as the point of departure.
On this project we knew we wanted cross-platform distribution but the poetry, music and performance were not planned. Once we saw the power of the work we understood that the pure “journalism” would have far more reach if combined with these other elements. The website has now won multiple awards and honors – and those in turn have drawn new audiences to this project.