4.12.2008

Surprise endings

Web readers who choose to watch a news video are clicking on good faith that the video will be worth their time. Every now and then, it's nice to reward these readers with an ending that surprises them and makes them glad they took the time to watch. My colleague Richard Michael Pruitt pulls this off masterfully in today's video about Dallas area residents enduring their second day without electricity after a ferocious storm. I tried to take the same surprise ending approach in my accompanying story, but if you compare both examples, you'll see how video trumps the written word in taking readers to the scene to experience the moment themselves.

3 comments:

MLO said...

I see what your seeing. Interesting to see both of stories. Do the editors at the Dallas Morning News what the videos to be completely different than print articles? Is it safe to say they are two different audiences?

Mark

Jake Batsell said...

Mark: Thanks for your comment. Our aim is to make stories and videos complementary, so that each can stand on its own. But if somebody reads the story AND watches the video, we hope they can gain a different perspective from each. We have print refers to each accompanying video in the paper, but I suspect that there's not a lot of overlap between print readers and video viewers on any particular story. Most video hits, I think, come from people who browse dallasnews.com and click on a video because it looks interesting. That's why as visual journalists, we can never assume that the video viewer has read the story already.

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