Writing for Multimedia Projects

When I read about how it might be helpful to know what the story is about in one sentence, I thought back to the advice I’ve learned from professors, editors and writers who have said the same thing about writing a story for print. This is something I wouldn’t have instinctively thought to do using video but I tried to do this for our most recent project and it worked extremely well. It’s easier to go into a situation taking video when you are clear about what you want to know from your subject and what you ultimately want to get across to the viewers. Knowing that question makes interviews run smoothly and it makes the subject or subject respond to that question with a more concise answer than they would otherwise. From that concise answer, we can as journalists, branch off and ask our subjects other questions that we can include in our story.