Telling the Story of Sea Turtle Rehabilitation

What makes a good MPJ Project you ask? Multi-platform journalism is able to relay a story of information across different medias, yet ties them all back together.

 

Searching for a good example to analyze of multi-platform journalism, MPJ, I stumbled upon the Sea Turtle Hospital. This has all of the telltale signs of a multi-platform journalism site with rehabilitation stories, pictures, videos, and links to social media. This collaboration of different medias styles draws your attention and gives you basic information inciting the viewer to learn more.

 

Comparing the Sea Turtle Hospital site to others provided as examples for our class, it was easy to see similarities between the two. Though this site is a lesser known organization, they still have an active social media presence as well as a website that is constantly updated.

 

What makes the Sea Turtle Hospital a good multi-platform journalism example is their dedication to spreading awareness of their turtle patients. They create video stories on each of their turtles, tweet health updates, and post release dates when a turtle is ready to head back to the ocean. This creates a story of each turtle from their entry to the hospital, through their recovery, and release. There is also educational information given in their blog, linked to the site, on the different sea turtle species and how to help protect these creatures.

 

What really drew me to this example was the simplicity of the homepage. There is an easy layout of pictures at the top, blog posts below, and additional information under that. There is no need to overload viewers with all their information and turtle rehab stories. “Redundancy will detract from the experience—that is, if aspects of the story are told in video and also in the text, users might lose interest quickly,” says Mindy McAdams reporting on (Re)defining multimedia journalism. Everything has a purpose and a place.