Tag Archives: Next Media

#news2011: Bringing animation into news content: ‘provides fuller picture of events’

An interesting part of the visual journalism session at the Global Editors Network summit in Hong Kong today looked at where animation can work with news, by hearing about the work of Next Media.

The company, which is based in Taiwan, produces animation clips based on news events. One of their clips, which depicted a story relating to golfer Tiger Woods has so far received seven million views.

Content and business development manager Mike Logan told the conference the animations aim to offer a “fuller picture of events we believe happened at the time”.

That’s how we use animation at Next Media, animating the missing action. Doing news reporting you have an interview but it’s missing a crucial piece of video and that’s action not happening.

He also discussed News Media’s distribution platform News Direct, which offers –free of charge – “more traditional animation to help supplement video”.

This can simply be downloaded by news outlets and added to their own video work. Next Media’s own animations are also embeddable, such as this one Journalism.co.uk posted on its blog in February to illustrate the sale of the Huffington Post.

Find out more on Next Media here.