Narrative Aspects Of Multimodal Articles In The Digital Age

In this digital age, all aspects of life have become more high-tech, especially the journalism industry. Multimodal articles, text articles heavily incorporated with various modes of communication such as pictures, videos, audio clips, and graphs, have greatly increased in popularity in recent years. Multimodal articles enhance the reading experience for a variety of topics, however crime stories are an area where multimodal articles can truly improve the reader’s experience while reading the article. They are able clarify the information presented and evoke an emotional response from the reader. Multimodal articles enrich the reader’s experience by making the characters and crime story more emotionally engaging and the crime more tangible. Traditional articles lack the visuals that bring the reader closer to the event, making the story seem distant, more difficult to envision, and the characters less relatable. Police …show more content…
Visual media, such as videos and pictures, turn names on a page into animated characters. Multimedia humanizes the victim, demanding sympathy from the reader. It creates a more palpable villain, which elicits anger and frustration from the audience. A traditional article faces the struggle of creating a character through words exclusively, without turning the article into only character development. Moreover, the multimedia aspects of “Two Gunshots on a Summer Night” engage the reader, allowing them to create their own questions and answers. This article calls for the reader to become a sleuth, using the information presented to them to draw their conclusions. The Atlantic article does not engage the reader in this way; instead it presents facts and opinions without giving the reader a chance to come to his own conclusions. Traditional articles fail to immerse the reader in the story, but multimodal articles bring the story to life, making reading them more informative and