Thursday, March 1, 2007

Kristof on Maternal Mortality

I always think the New York Times has the best videos. Here's a good example of "backpack journalism." Kristof's page not only has a story with photographs, but those photos are videos in waiting, plus there's links to his blog with a chance to comment. I watched this video. It tells the story of one woman fighting maternal mortality. It narrowed in on the original broader story, which added to my interest and understanding of maternal mortality. What bothered me about this video is that it ran a little longer (over 3 minutes) and I felt like stopping the video. The video for the most part follows one shot of the subject, and the visual images were not very interesting. The most interesting part of the video happened in the last few seconds, making me wonder what happened next - but the video didn't tell me.


I did like the fact that the video was not just a TV report put on the web. Every time I see one of those, I wonder why I am watching TV on my computer. I think videos on the web should take a new angle on the news story and not just recycle the news in a different format, and this video did a good job of avoiding that format.

No comments: