This is the weekend edition of TheMarioBlog and will be updated as needed. The next blog post is Monday, February 16.
They are called cinemagraphs, a touch of a moving picture in a still photograph. You may have seen a cinemagraph already via Facebook or Instagram.
It is the latest creative format, currently applied to advertising but becoming popular in the digital landscape. It is half video, half photograph and 100% attention getting. Here you see the contents of a glass stir, or the fire in the fireplace flicker. If you have not seen one yet, you are likely to do so soon.
"You're going to start seeing a ton of these on Facebook," said one advertising executive quoted in a piece about cinemagraphs.
And how long will it be before cinemagraphs become part of the informational graphics palette for newsrooms?
That one moment or frame that is animated is what keeps our eyes glued to it. I imagine every bit helps nowadays, with the journalism of interruptions becoming more prevalent, and editors, designers and advertisers, trying harder to “glue” us to whatever they produce.
I can visualize these cinemagraphs having some real impact with such topics as sports, fashion and food stories.
More about cinemagraphs
http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/cinemagraphs/614862
http://www.tripwiremagazine.com/2011/07/cinemagraphs.html
US: A bad week for journalism
It has been a week of bad news for journalism. There is what Vox calls Brian Williams-gate (the price of embellishing the story), then Jon Stewart announces he is leaving The Daily Show (much to the chagrin of his many fans who insist this cannot be—resignation NOT accepted), Mic.com's Director of News Jared Keller has been fired for allegedly committing at least 20 instances of various levels of plagiarism ,and, finally, the profession loses one of its most erudite and courageous practitioners as Bob Simon, 73, of CBS’s 60 Minutes, dies in a horrific car crash in Manhattan's Upper West Side . No journalism class can escape a discussion of these events, and ours at Columbia Thursday was no exception. At the end, one of the students told me:
“It leads to the question of what is our plan B if we don’t wish to go into journalism. Furthermore, why use the word journalism, when right now there is so much more to the profession?”
My reply: We are storytellers first. We also need to remember that the majority of people in our wonderful profession are trained to tell stories, to inform the public, to guide and to respect the work of others. They do just that.
Good weekend reading
Don’t miss this piece from Popular Mechanics about how The New York Times gets produced each day.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a14030/how-the-new-york-times-works/