Bob Sacha: I watched 78 ‘multimedia’ stories from visual journalists and what I learned will shock you

Posted February 15, 2016

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In a post for medium.com, Bob Sacha shares what he learned from watching 78 pieces of video journalism.  In a sentance his takeaway is: "Of all the stories I watched, not a single one sucked."

Now we here at TheVJ.com know how powerful good visual storytelling can be, but it is great to see such admiration from outside our community.  With the proliferation of digital visual storytelling from outlets like Vice, more and more people are turning to video for information.

From Sacha:

I’ve been creating, watching and more recently judging “multimedia” produced by journalists for about 10 years and there were many times I have had to hide my head or look away in embarrassment. The reasons were many: Bad sound or no sound, shaky video, lack of scenes and sequences, no story arc, no characters, no pacing (“crazy aunt syndrome”), stories that might have worked best in video presented as audio slide shows, no story or, worse, a bad story. I’ll stop there.

So it was thrilling to see the quality of everyone’s work come up.

Still, while all the stories were decent and some were quite strong, not a single one met the threshold that Brian Storm taught me: “Do you want to forward this to 10 of your friends right away?”

Sacha continues to share some essential aspects of visual storytelling, and you can read the full post here.