Flash

Elise Crawley

I, for one, really like flash.  With a couple of qualifiers.  I like experiencing things in flash.  And I like it when I have a lot of control over what I'm experiencing.  I think that flash is an amazing journalistic tool and I don't think that at this point it's being used often enough or to its fullest potential.  Granted, using flash can quickly send you down the path of creating more eye candy than you are journalism, but at the same time we live in a world where people are constantly fed information from a number of sources, so it's only natural that users want to be able to pick and chose more of their content.  I certainly don't want to sit through a five minute flash movie that I assumed would be adding more information to the story I just read and find out only one or two new things (even if I read that story in another newspaper!).  However, since technologically flash isn't easy enough for the common man to pick up and master in an afternoon, we certainly cannot expect journalists to be using it to embellish even a fourth of their journalistic content.  Yet.