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Marc Cooper

Woodland Hills, California

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Choose Your Multimedia Tools Strategically: Story is Still King

August 17, 2010
Marc Cooper co-coordinates USC Annenberg News21 with Prof. Patricia Dean. Marc is an Associate Professor of Professional Practice and Director of Annenberg Digital News, publisher of the online site Neon Tommy.

If everyone who has a hammer sees a world made only of nails, do reporters who know Illustrator think the world is one big infographic?

Choosing the right tool to tell the right story is one of the greatest challenges we faced during this summer's round of Carnegie-Knight News21 fellowships at USC Annenberg. Our mandate, like that of any cutting-edge news crew, was to at once tell the most in-depth stories while being as innovative as possible. But sometimes these two principles can pull against each other.

New multimedia tools, now reproducing themselves exponentially, provide reporters and editors with sometimes awe-inspiring ways to tell our stories. Learning to master these tools and when to choose them, however, can be as important as which tool a surgeon requests for a certain procedure in the compressed atmosphere of an OR.

Selecting the wrong application for your need, or innovating for the sake of innovation itself, can be as big a mistake as ignoring these tools to better tell your story.

We made these decisions as best we could as our Annenberg News21 fellows spent 10 weeks this summer developing their reporting packages on California in Crisis. More...

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