The Nieman Journalism Lab has a post on Zeega, a storytelling web app that it describes as “like Storify for multimedia”. The people behind Zeega, which is not yet public, describe it as a whole different medium rather than simply new software.
Nieman describes the concept:
The still-in-alpha software feels like Storify for multimedia: As you travel across the web, use a simple bookmarklet to collect media fragments — a Flickr image, a YouTube video, a track from the Free Music Archive — and dump it into a project bin. You can share your project bin and invite others to collaborate on the story. The editor interface is simple: Select a few seconds from a video, cut it with a few seconds of another video, drop in a music track, and suddenly you have a little story. You can even prompt the user to call a number or send a text message, delivering a surprising bit of audio in return. The output is pure HTML5, no Flash.
The post also has details on the team behind Zeega and how this summer there were awarded a $420,000 Knight News Challenge grant.
Co-founder Jesse Shapins tells Nieman how he feels hacks should seek to collaborate with hackers and how journalists should develop a better understanding of the possibilities and limitations of specific technologies.
“I do think you should have a culture within journalism of creativity around interaction, around the ways in which code works, and what the code makes possible. That doesn’t mean making a journalist learn to write every single programming language that exists. If they’re able to have a rich understanding of the creative possibilities, they can creatively approach the projects that they create.”
There is more on how Zeega makes interactive storytelling simple here.
