Telling stories with pictures

‘A picture is worth 1000 words.’ At least that’s how the saying goes. So how many words does a video say; or stills plus voiceover; or interactive clickable maps containing video, pictures and audio? It all depends what you’re trying to say I guess. Journalists are in the business of telling stories and, more often than not, telling them efficiently. So anything that says 1000 words while keeping me in my word count sounds like a good idea to me.

It would seem that the best, and most obvious, application of multi-media is for human interest stories or to give a personal angle to universal issues. All this week BBC Breakfast's Richard Westcott has been running reports on how the credit crunch has hit real people. This has been done in a pretty traditional way. I can't help but think that they've missed a trick here. This is an ideal opportunity to get people involved in the reporting of their stories. Instead they remain the subject rather than the creator of their own news.

It seems there is a real lesson about the difference between timeliness and topicality here. Many of the times when users create their own stories with big media it's relegated to either stories that aren't time sensitive or soft stories which may not even fall into the category of news. While working with citizens to tell their own stories is unlikely to be able to cover breaking events, it could be used to deal with harder issues which are still relevant in the here and now.

There would be huge scope for a series of citizen generated stories to move into an online environment after its 1 week run. People will still undoubtedly have stories to tell and I suspect there will still be people willing to listen. The recession is not about to disappear tomorrow. It'd offer a new perspective on a series of events that has, so far, been focused very much on the elites of bankers, politicians and big businessmen.

Could we not have a patchwork of storytelling from everyone else affected by it? Would that not be an interesting angle and perhaps it would tell that story in a more effective way than traditional talking heads ever could.

Just because we are not in the business of writing history does not mean we cannot help people document it. Westcott's reports will most probably be consigned to the archives in future years. If the public had ownership is it not possible they would create a documentation that's timeless?