Friday, January 27, 2012

Radio feature on top

"It's nice to be part of the future", Kari Hesthamar and Berit Hedemann (Norway's NRK, radio feature department) say. The future is this: Three years ago NRK started publishing their radio features on top of the NRK front page, the second biggest website of the country. A win-win situation: The radio documentaries are being featured on top, and the NRK front page gets the most precious of all contents: well researched and carefully told stories.

These stories are packaged, so that the front page articles (including the radio piece) can be updated on a daily basis, by side stories, extra material, photo galleries, interactive maps, even by news on the topic. Take the topic first, then expand it by additional stories and news: This makes it kind of news journalism in reverse. "It's great for us to be useful for the NRK website", Hesthamar and Hedemann say. (And above all it's great for a national media website to be useful for the radio documentary.)

NRK's radio doc editors made experiments trying to combine photos with the audio, "but they didn't really work together", Hesthamar and Hedemann admit. Which does not mean it cannot work: Radio features combined with stills will not make any video nor a film. At the core it will remain radio documentary, but in a new, innovative form requiring new talents and skills.

No comments:

Post a Comment