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The ABC news story, ‘From space, you can clearly see the human impact on the Amazon’ was written by Michael Slezak and Mark Doman, members of the digital story innovation team.
This news story incorporates a multimedia and interactive element in order to more clearly demonstrate the effect these fires have on particular areas of the Amazon rainforest. As you scroll through the story, you are zoomed into maps and NASA images of the rainforest as various colours and shapes appear to indicate different areas and the damage that has been caused.
Green shading is used to locate the rainforest and a yellow box illustrates where agricultural fires are being lit around the edges. Smoke and arrows are used to show where the unusual weather systems have carried the smoke and yellow and red dots indicate where fires have been recorded and where some of the rainforest has collapsed. A bar graphs are also used to illustrate fire and deforestation rates.
This interactive aspect differentiates this story from others regarding the Amazon fires as it allows the reader to become immersed with the information and stay engaged throughout it’s entirety. Using maps, graphs and images to present information is a more innovative way to tell a story and ensures the news corporation is staying relevant and suitable in today’s contemporary society.
The majority of the written aspect of the story is presented in the form of succinct, individual sentences that are used to compliment the images. This writing is not the main focus of the piece but does provide us with important information such as facts and statistics about the rainforest and the fires that are occurring. Using minimal writing is becoming increasingly common in contemporary journalism and this piece therefore proves that ABC news is considering what their readers prefer. However, after this factual section comes a more sophisticated and lengthy piece of writing. This section incorporates the opinion of professionals and a detailed explanation of the impact these fires have caused. Even if the readers do not read this part of the article, they would have still gained an understanding of the issue through the first interactive aspect.
The use of social media is hardly present in this particular story. The readers are given the option to share the story through the Twitter, Facebook and email links at both the beginning and the end of the piece. However, there is no direct promotion of the writer’s social media. If you wish to find links to their social media accounts, you need to go to his ‘about’ page.
By analysing what this particular story has illustrated, we are able to recognise that multimedia storytelling through images, videos and interaction is becoming the biggest news trend in journalism production
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