FLYP media

When you browse the site at Flypmedia there is a plethora of stories, images, sounds, and angles through which the viewer can approach each topic. The user has choices, and the experience is polished.

Of the 10 laws of storytelling, Flypmedia easily tackles quite a few.

To start, it has the interactive aspect down to a science. Each page has either various thumbnails to browse, more in depth coverage of the topic, or extra footage to peruse.

There is a definite front page promise with the teasers each story has accompanying its content. These teasers not only give a glimpse of the story, but truly draw the reader in with beautiful pictures, engaging sounds, and detailed graphics.

For the most part, I did not find Flypmedia to produce much raw footage for its viewers. Rather, it crafted a very edited and finished product. It seemed to want to create an interactive magazine, not a collection of raw footage.

This is much different than many sites who seem to take user content or even blogger content and post them up as stories. Many of the aggregate sites will use raw footage to capture the emotion, this site does not seem to take that angle.

Flypmedia does take the time to really utilize all the digital benefits of putting together a magazine online. They do not seem to limit themselves to a certain number of interactive tools or pages. Their technique is beautiful, and seems expensive.

Flypmedia uses the same type of user feedback content. There is space to comment on a blog, and to share the site through social media.

Although most of the topics on Flypmedia appeal to a more national audience; a few stories did have a local feel to them.

For the most part, the topics that had their own sites with interactive features were feature stories that did not remain living stories. The topics did not appear to be grow over time, but rather were presented beautifully as a one time piece.

The numerous blogs that involved less use of digital assets were more friendly to user feedback. There is such a sharp contrast between the project, feature pieces and the blogs. I can understand why the feature pieces are not being posted so readily, they are clearly very difficult to make without immense resources. I think adding some more interactivity to the standard blogs would generate a larger audience and more buzz about the site. Hopefully they will be able to produce more of the interactive pieces over time.

This blogger had an interesting take on the future of interactive journalism and the way stories are being told to the public. He finds that the public’s short attention span to stories is a problem for interactive storytelling, while I think it could be a major factor in how we choose to present stories to the public.