Show, don’t tell

Abstract

The influence of technology on the media is not a new phenomenon. Several innovations occurred in print production throughout the years and allowed newspapers to improve their design and visual storytelling, following the idea that sight is our dominant sense. This also applied to the digital world: broadband networks made it possible to upload and download large image files, enhancing the importance of visual content. The advent of user-generated content encouraged professional journalists to try harder to create and deliver material of the highest possible journalistic, aesthetic and technical standard. By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the use of photography, video, audio and data visualisation on the web had come together into something genuinely new - the form of digital storytelling known as “multimedia”. The increasing dominance of social media, and especially social video, has affected media organisations profoundly. Publishers and broadcasters have become reliant on social traffic, and many find that their visual content is increasingly being accessed outside their own domain. We should also be aware of the forces pulling in a different direction — also towards visuals, but in the truncated, shallow and trivialised form that succeeds on social media. The future of serious journalism is facing numerous challenges.