Record the Digital Marketplace!
Annette Wagner’s Plea for Cross-Media Journalism
Is it ‘permissible’ to create an online game about dementia therapy? Can children and their grandparents chat online about whether or not Allah and God would ever share a flat? Web 3.0 boasts a number of emotionally moving, interactive sites with explosive socio-political content. Based on solid journalistic research, they cleverly combine traditional media and modern online formats to maximize their topic’s media impact.
Tackle the digital market! Try out new forms! While the Internet is often justifiably criticized for its superficiality and nonsense, it also has the potential to breathe new life into public service journalism. My cross-media project “Squeeze Me!” (co-produced with ZDF/arte) deals with the vital socio-political topic of dementia through numerous interlaced formats. “Squeeze Me!” links a traditional documentary film with social media websites, an online game launched on YouTube and other media formats in order to draw the attention of young and old alike to the emotional needs of those suffering from dementia as well as the hardships of their families and caregivers.
Well-designed online sites can turn difficult to place topics such as Alzheimer’s therapy, faith, and long-term unemployment into ‘click hits’ over night. Cross-media journalism fetches modern media users where they hang out – in the Internet – through playful and sensual storytelling, i.e. intuitive combinations of video clips, emotional blends of sounds and images, innovative web design, opulent sound design, occasional digital iconoclasms, and last but not least, interest-based navigation for broad audiences.
Annette Wagner
Following her studies and journalistic training in the daily newspaper business, Annette Wagner spent fifteen years making films and doing editorial work for German public broadcasters, including SWR, ARD, arte, ZDF. In 2008, she began branching out into cross-media storytelling: interactive website design, online game dramaturgy, blogging, and diverse social media techniques and formats. Annette Wagner successfully completed the EU media courses “European Social Documentary” (www.esodoc.eu) and “Multimedia Storytelling” at the “Akademie für Publizistik” (Journalism Academy) in Hamburg.
Annette Wagner links cross-media products with traditional formats (documentaries, TV portraits, reportages, background stories in print media).
DEMENTIA-Project INFO page www.squeezeme.de
CONTACT awa_crossmedia@me.com / +49 170 861 7977
Imprint
awa crossmedia produktionen
Owner: Annette Wagner
Humboldtstraße 3
28203 Bremen
Germany
Fax + 49 170 861 7977
Email awa_crossmedia@me.com
St.Nr. 72/458/06919
St-ID 72/449/580/312
