Multimedia and online journalism seminar

There is much talk now about multimedia, and any news website which doesn't incorporate multimedia, and lots of it, is seen as backward and resistant to change. It seems that in the rush to be seen as new and current and up-to-date and in a desperate attempt to make newspaper websites profitable, some sites are using multimedia for the sake of using multimedia.

The Guardian website has a lot of audio and video and picture slideshows, but I wonder how much is actually worth uploading.

Many of the videos have shots that wouldn't make it on the broadcast news, or the camera is shaky or there are zooms in or out. Other videos are very brief, a few seconds of landscape shots with some titles added in. Some don't even have those captions, and seem to be completely pointless, other than to prove to the world that the Guardian knows how to upload videos.

I'm sure there are other newspapers guilty of this, but the Guardian happened to spring to mind. I find it very off-putting, not knowing when I click on a video whether it's worth the effort, or whether it'll be worthless.

Too many newspapers are focusing on quantity over quality when it comes to incorporating multimedia into their sites.