Flashy Journalism

First I must point out my use of the word flash. Because my computer/internet/programming vocabulary is limited, I refer to everything that moves on the internet as "flash." I am such an amateur that I can't identify eye-candy created with this program from pretty stuff that was created in another program. So for the remainder of this blog everything from traditional animation to interactive websites that seem beyond my comprehension of construction will fall under the category of flash.

When I read an online newspaper, in addition to the two local papers, I choose the New York Times. I like the layout. I am familiar with the navigation. I love the photography. Best of all, lots of slideshows. Following the destruction of hurricane Katrina, the print articles could not provide that same emotion that the pictures of the gulf coast could. A great thing about NYTimes.com, they tend to put their pictures together with audio in a flash slide show. The combination of images and audio gave a denesion to the Katrina devastation that could never be achieved through print. It may be laziness on my part, but I really like the option to just sit and observe the information versus reading multiple page articles.

I know that this blog was supposed to be about the impact on the future and I focused on current application of flash but I think this current application, or some derivative of it, will have a huge impact on the future of journalism. I would like to see a news organization that supplements their flash slide shows and short streaming video with text rather than the current norm of newspaper websites with a pinch of interactive media. --Alex