The visual history of Vegas - Rob Curley did it again

Whenever people ask me how the digital future of local journalism and regional newspapers might look like I refer to Rob Curley. It is really impressive what Rob and his team have achieved on their way to prove the enormous potential of local story telling on the web.

Rob started his career at the Lawrence Journal in Kansas, where he managed to create new forms of cross media community services around local sports teams. He then moved to the Washington post, where he launched the Local Explorer, a unique map mashup displaying local crime news, real estate offers, and school and Point of interest information. He caused national debates among media experts when he started Loudonextra.com, a sublocal website for a Washington suburb.

Now Rob and his creative pack have moved to the Las Vegas Sun. And this time, I have to confess, Rob and his folks have topped themselves. The way they compiled the history of sin city is a milestone in local journalism and envisioning local story telling. Why so euphoric?

The Flash designed combination of historic pictures, videos, timeline, geocontext and personalisation is extremely cool and represents the best of newspaper core values. Check the section Construction deaths a complete multimedia monument for the forgotten victims of the Vegas construction boom. I guess there is no place on the web where you could learn more about the Vegas fascination. Could a regional newspaper achieve more?

What is missing? I'm still waiting for the integration of user content (amateur pictures and video) and the voices of authentic witnesses. It must be exciting to listen to the old croupier talking about the black jack nights with the rat pack.

Local history is a perfect web proposition for local newspapers since they have always been a crucial and reliable part of it. They can leverage their archive content, they can team up with users and local experts and they can perfectly play local history stories over all their crossmedia channels - from print to web, from radio to mobile. The Stuttgarter Zeitung recently launched "Von Zeit zu Zeit" (From time to time). It is not as visual and spectacular as the Vegas Sun but already adresses the full potential of local history.

If you want to keep track with Rob Curley and his experiences as a
self proclaimed internet punk in the local newspaper scene (including tops and flops) follow his blog.

A EURO '08 video magazine without video

With the football EURO 2008 entering it‘s final stage I’d like to share some experiences on a quite thrilling visual multimedia service we did for MSN in Germany. For the first time our Flash animation team used Microsoft Silverlight for an interactive infographic application.

The daily EURO video magazine combines 3-D-animations of all goals with picture slideshows, a full audio moderation and infographics envisioning match data and statistics. Besides the video magazine our Silverlight player allows MSN users to select the different content formats directly (e.g. only the goal animations or only the slideshow). The format illustrates the potential of innovative visual concepts on the web. The magazine is fascinating web video without any tv camera image involved.

The daily production is a real challenge. The partners involved are opta/Unlimited in Berlin (3 D goal animations), dpa-infocom (player, infographics, picture slideshow) and dpa audio&video services in Berlin (audio moderation and final video production). After the final whistle – in case of a penalty shootout close to midnight – the team starts to produce.

At 08.00 a.m. when MSN earlybird users start their office PCs the fresh magazine is already online. The audio anchorman and the unlimited folks had to accept three weeks of permanent night shifts. But the service and the overwhelming feedback made the lack of sleep worth it. We are really proud of the result and we have already started to discuss the next ideas for video without video.

Rising cost for energy and food - is media paying the bill?

Exciting discussion at the future congress “forward2business“ in the East German city of Halle. Stefan Liebing, coordinator for government relations at Shell oil company gave a forecast for the worlds energy consumption in the next ten years. According to Liebing a huge challenge.

The auditorium agreed on the fact that the gigantic demand for energy from emerging economies like China and India will force average western households to invest a bigger share of their budget for daily basics. Prices for energy and food – quite stable for decades – will keep rising and will remain on high levels. But who is paying the bill? I guess that not only leisure and travel expenses but also the media and entertainment budgets will suffer significantly. Another blow for newspaper subscriptions and Pay-TV?

For Germany „forward2business“ is quite an unsual event – may be thanks to its East German roots. 200 innovators and change managers from all industries share their ideas for the future trends in management and society, technology and science. I like the atmosphere, sitting in the garden of the medieval castle „Burg Giebichenstein“, enjoying the sun and the unconventional ideas of people who share their passion for the new. A touch of californian web camp feeling in the middle of Germany. We need more of that...

"Bild" is trailing "Spiegel" on the web thanks to visual content

Strong pleas for visual story telling at the second Hamburg media dialogue ("Internationaler Mediendialog Hamburg):

Kai Diekmann, chief editor of Europe's largest tabloid "Bild" made clear that commercially successful content on the web will be visual content. "Bild" is investing heavily in video and offers mobile download options for the pictures of it's pinup girls. Moreover they established a service enabling readers to act as reporters and provide Bild with images and information. According to Diekmann "Bild" is flooded with picture content from it's amateur paparazzi.

Especially via video and mobile "Bild" is closing the gap to "Spiegel online", Germany's leading news portal run by Spiegel magazine. Chief Editor Matthias Müller von Blumencron told the audience: "Video is a question of survival."

But how to get video monetised? Howard Geisler, Senior VP of Digitas Global, and Patrick Walker, Director of Video Partnerships for Google/Youtube in Europe, surprised the crowd with their favourite vision: Integrate the advertisor and his story into the video clip. Howard explained how Digitas is developing editorial video story boards with brands in order to compete with media clips or user content on YouTube. No option for "Spiegel". But Blumencron admitted, that it's getting harder and harder to get the PR spin doctors and the advertisers out of editorial web content.

A closer look at Spiegel Online's time machine

Some time ago, Spiegel Online, Germany's leading news website, launched its ambitious portal on contemporary history, einestages.de. The idea was welcomed everywhere, although the navigation was considered to be too complicated. The masses of photos are difficult to access (why isn't there a real slide show functionality?), and beside (sometimes too) sophisticated texts, I miss some short catchy statements.

The latest innovation on einestages.de is the „einestage.de-Zeitmaschine“. This time machine application shows how historic content can be accessed visually: Imagine you rush in a space shuttle through the universe: the years fly by, and masses of photos that stand for contemporary events pass your way. Technically, the flash solutions works quite well – in case you have a fast computer and the latest flash version. Of course you can set your starting time – either you start the flight nowadays or 100 years ago. The speed can be controlled by the track wheel.

So far so good. This time machine seems to be a smart idea to arrange historic content via expressive photos, giving inspiration to events you haven't known so far, satisfying a certain play instinct.

It really sounds perfect at first thought, but obviously it is not so easy to handle. To be improved: the link between the photos flying by and the real content: If you find a photo of interest, you can only click on it. A new site opens that shows the photo and provides some basic information such as location, date and relevant tags. But: neither title nor explanation what it's about. To access a short description, you have to click once more. But by getting into details, e.g. clicking through the slide show or reading the related article on einestages.de you leave the time machine. So if you want to continue your flight, you have to restart the application. You can't go on the point where you had left the time machine.

In brief: the time machine is a fascinating idea which picks up a human dream. The application is visually attractive, playful and full of inspiring content. But: Once more we get aware of a central challenge of visual journalism: to provide a close link from the attention-catching photo and the real content. One photo may not always suffice to immerse users into meaningful contemporary events.

For me, however, flying through the times with the einestages.de time machine would be even greater if some brief content snippets would be provided just one click away. Of course, everyone wants to maximize page impressions. But in this case, I fear the einestages.de time machine would be reduced to a playful gimmick and not to an inspiring way to discover contemporary history.

Volkswagen has two unpleasant messages for publishers

The second day of the FIPP/VDZ publisher conference in Berlin started with a shock. Ralf Maltzen, director of internet marketing at Volkswagen, had two unpleasant messages for his media partners:

1. Volkswagen will start to shift ad budgets at least on the web more and more to performance based models. Only if portals contribute to a sufficient number of measured test drive requirements or direct consumer feedbacks they get fully paid.

2. Volkswagen will increase direct publishing activities on the web."On the digital kiosk our volkswagen portal is just one click away from the auto magazines." Maltzen showed his highly praised and much awarded Schlemmer blog campaign with German comedia Hape Kerkeling (now offline unfortunately). He made clear, that Volkswagen might no longer be dependent on the media to tell it's stories on the web.

I tried to imagine what Maltzen would argue if the publishers would counter his shift to performance based ad deals by emphasizing the impact of editorial coverage to automobil sales. Who brought the pictures of yesterday's VW Scirocco debut at the Geneva auto fair to the world public? Who is providing test drive reports to advise consumers in order to enable purchasing decisions. And Volkswagen get's it all for free. What about making the editorial contribution part of the overall discussion about performances and fair ad deals?

The „v-word“ – German broadcasters and publishers in heated dispute

Whenever German media managers meet these days the „v-word“ is one of the hottest topics. The two day magazine publisher congress „Powering digital success“ that started today in Berlin is no exception.

Since Video has started to become a standard on average news sites the publishers of newspapers, print magazines and the tv broadcasters realise that the web is becoming the central battlefield for media competition in the coming years. Let’s assume that in five years from now young users browsing the web won’t be able to distinguish information portals operated by print brands, broadcasters or web only providers. They will basically all provide news in text, pictures and video. And I’m sure that the visual formats, mainly video, will be crucial for success in the mass market and for attracting ad revenues.

The consequences are quite irritating. Suddenly for instance German public tv, financed by monthly fees of German taxpayers, and the regional newspapers find themselves competing for the same audience on the same platform. Conflicts are inevitable.

The publishers accuse the broadcasters to pump up their portals with tons of premium content produced with public money. They fear that users won't click on privately financed news sites any more if they can find it all at the broadcasters' portals (and completely free of annoying ads).

The broadcasters and the regional broadcasting licensing authorities meanwhile try to prevent newspapers from publishing online video. The tv channels are afraid that every click on a web video clip will contribute to a decline of tv usage. Thus they argue, that every video clip on a newspaper site is a tiny piece of tv coverage and requires a broadcasting licence.

In the latest move public TV now offered the publishers to team up and use their branded news video. While German publisher legend Hubert Burda rejected the offer as some sort of poison pill, the WAZ newspaper group announced to co-operate with WDR television, the largest regional member of the public ARD group.

Be sure there is more news to come...

Short review on the latest german website relaunches

Maybe you remember the large blogosphere among media blogs about the latest website relaunches, such as Holtzbrincks' youngster news site Zoomer.de, News-TV N24.de or the yellow press website Bild.de.

Despite we note that there is much difference between these sites, one attribute is common: the shift to a visual presentation of news.

N24 focuses on video which seems very logic for a news tv channel (but which has been a novum anyway). Bild and Zoomer use appealing flash effects to present their slide shows and video news, or newsmaps to enhance the selection of regional news.

But both Bild and Zoomer not only use visual features. They establish also a 'visual layout': The top news section on the first screen is dominated by large photos, teaser texts are skipped. Scrolling down, we find a more conventional design, nevertheless focused on big images and photo slide shows.

Compared to this visual oriented website design, relauches such as netzeitung or FAZ.net seem rather conventional. We are looking forward to further relaunch projects to find out if there is a news site design concept which is different from the spiegel-sueddeutsche-focus-faz-netzeitung-scheme.

Best of Visual: visuwords

New media deserve new formats, even when the content itself does not change. Well understood by the makers of Visuwords, an online graphical dictionary. It is like a dictionary, but different. It shows in beautiful graphs in which ways words are related, which different meanings a word might have and so on (try “work” or “great”).

A small legend makes it easy to use, at least a lot, lot, lot more easy than with the traditional dictionaries, which are difficult to decipher.

Help: Collaborative Video

Personally Wikipedia never impressed me from a visual point of view. Not too many pictures; Video? It is there. But the collaborative aspect was missing and that might be about to change. A few weeks ago it announced a new initiative “Help: Collaborative Video”

By using the tools supplied, it will enable Wiki pages to include collaboratively created video, audio, animation, and slideshows as well as text and images. The experiment is carried out by WikiEducator .

What is collaborative video?

The wiki of Kultura, one of the partners in this project describes it as: "A collaborative video is a video created together by multiple users. Anyone with editing permissions can add photos, videos and sounds, edit them in a full-featured online video editor and then post it as a widget on any wiki page. Adding a collaborative video widget takes less than a minute. Once a video is created, any user can then go in and continue to add material and edit the video".

If you play the video you can immediately imagine how complex, how interesting, how hilarious collaborative video could become. (But still difficult to imagine why collaborative video should be preferred over individual video postings on a wikipage).

Is collaborative video new? It was to me, but a quick search revealed some other initiatives, for example http://wikivideo.blogspot.com.

Image vs. text - emotion vs. intellect?

Herlinde Koelbl is one of the most renowned contemporary news photographers in Europe. In a thoughtful dispute with German advertisement guru Sebastian Turner for the christian magazine "Chrismon" she reflects on the power of pictures. Asked what is more important text or picture she states (in my rough translation):

"Of course the picture is more important. It's the picture that adresses us directly. With it's emotions, it's meaningfulness. The word works via intellect. And there are so many events, where we only remember the picture and not the word. Nevertheless many of my works wouldn't be conceivable without text. Anyhow I prepare myself carefully for each new subject by reading. Reading is crucial to me in order to understand and later introduce this into my photos."

The mojo men - watch out for the visual reporters

The standards of visual journalism have to be defined yet. But the tools are already available. At the World economic summit in Davos Nokia provided a couple of VIPs with it's N82 mojo phone and - in co operation with Reuters - asked them to provide photos and videos - real time news coverage by high class citizen journalists.

One of the test candidates was Jeff Jarvis, who now via blog shares his remarkable experiences. The people he interviewed didn't take the Nokia serious as they would have taken a video camera plus a complete TV team. So they behaved less nervous and were more open in their statements. Neverteheless the quality of footage (including audio) was quite good. Jeff's conlusion: Tools like the N82 "may change the job of the journalist in ways more radical than I could have imagined until I started reporting with one".

Brockhaus survived war and revolution, but surrenders to the web

On October 1^st 1808, young book merchant Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus bought all rights to publish the „Conversations-Lexicon“. The Brockhaus encyclopedia became a backbone of German education and culture, a national symbol like Goethe’s „Faust“ or Beethoven’s 9th symphonie. For almost two centuries the fine leather spines of the Brockhaus editions with their golden characters were a must in the living room shelves of the German bourgeoisie.

This week Brockhaus CEO Ulrich Granseyer announced that after more than 200 years the 21^st printed edition was the last. Instead the complete Brockhaus (30 volumes, 24.500 pages, 300.000 entries, price of 2.670 Euro) will be available online and for free by April the 15th. „We had to accept that people are searching on the Internet“, Granseyer explained the dramatic step.

Brockhaus survived wars, revolutions and the iron curtain. In 1943 during the Secod World War allied bombs destroyed the headquartes in Leipzig. Ten years later East German communists seized Brockhaus. For 40 years East and West Germans had their own Brockhaus – the capitalst one published in Mannheim, the communist one published in Leipzig. Brockhaus survived it all. Now it had to surrender to the web and to wikipedia.

As a knowledge aggregator and provider the web is faster, more convenient, more interactive and – of course – more visual than print.The change of strategy comes late. The Encycloaedia Britannica was the first to accept the fact, that there is no future for this type of a printed knowledge base.

Bertelsmann, largest Brockhaus competitor in the German market, decided to go a different way. The day Brockhaus announced the end of the printed edition Bertelsmann‘s encyclopedia subdivision Wissen Media launched Spiegel.Wissen, a knowledge portal that combines the lexical data from Bertelsmann with articles from Spiegel archive and – yes – Wikipedia. Only one day later a beta version of Chroniknet went online, a picture portal, dedicated to collect the private picture stock of Germans and compile an archive of visual private history.

For it‘s portal Brockhaus will offer up to four million pictures they licensed from photo agencies. The portal will also contain permanentely updated info graphic content. The business model? Brockhaus hopes for sufficient ad revenue. But media planners are quite sceptical, whether Brockhaus can generate enough reach to become an attractive place for big brands.

Talking about the future of traditional media Brockhaus rises one alarming question:Who’s next?

Best of visual: www.tenbyten.org

A very inspiring way of re-representing existing material has been developed at www.tenbyten.org.

How it works? I quote the info-page of 10x10:
"Every hour, 10x10 scans the RSS feeds of several leading international news sources, and performs an elaborate process of weighted linguistic analysis on the text contained in their top news stories. After this process, conclusions are automatically drawn about the hour's most important words. The top 100 words are chosen, along with 100 corresponding images, culled from the source news stories. At the end of each day, month, and year, 10x10 looks back through its archives to conclude the top 100 words for the given time period. In this way, a constantly evolving record of our world is formed, based on prominent world events, without any human input."

Best of visual: cockeyed.com

Another 100% visual approach to information. Take a look at cockeyed.com.

Cockeyed.com attempts to build a height/weight chart, featuring photos of dozens of different body types. Photographs dropped into a matrix "building an online visual index of heights and weights".

When the image rules ...

In it’s February edition the German magazine „View“ (claim: „The news magazine in pictures“) speculates about „The new power of images“ (Die neue Macht der Bilder). Even if we can insinuate that the „View“ editors might have had some egoistic marketing intentions, the objective indications can hardly be ignored. „View“ quotes popular recent examples like ...

- the public love affair between French president Nicolas Sarkozy and singer Carla Bruni which dominated the European media for weeks and captivated the French public before the couple finally got married. The well orchestrated images covered discussions about Sarkozy’s political performance and agenda. “Bling-Bling-President” is the term the French media invented for the Sarkozy way to create visual politics.

- the tv pictures of Hillary Clinton almost in tears after being defeated by Barack Obama for the first time in the pre-electional race in the state of Iowa. The scenes of an emotional Hillary didn’t miss their impact on the American people. Only days later she celebrated her surprising comeback in New Hampshire.

- the visualized story of a new born ice bear baby in the zoo of Nuremberg, abandoned by it’s mother. Photos and videos moved the German public. Youngsters invested their pocket money to download the latest portraits of little „Flocke“. It even was a déjà-vu. One year earlier it was Knut, the ice bear baby from Berlin that made visual headlines around the globe.

- at the same time the security video of two teenagers beating an old man almost to death in Munich’s subway caused a controversial political debate about how to deal with young criminal immigrants. When the incident was taken up by the „Bild“ mass tabloid and the video was repeated in all tv channels the conservative governor (Ministerpräsident) in the state of Hessen changed his election campaign and demanded law and order measures against young criminal immigrants, trying to profit from xenophobic prejudices. Would it have been possible without the scaring pictures?

The new power of images is a fact. But it requires independent and unbiased journalim to protect the world from a dictatorship of images.

Best of visual: Silobreaker

By commenting on the takeover battle between Microsoft and Yahoo Christoph Dernbach („Mr. Gadget“) refers to another compelling approach to envision information. Silobreaker provides a couple of state of the art visual features all based on web search results.

I especially like the network maps, making transparent the links between certain people and subjects. Christoph used such a Silobreaker map to prove his claim that not Bill Gates but Steve Ballmer is the driving force behind Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo. Other elements are geographical hot spot maps and trend charts.

Have a look at Europe's best designed newspaper!

Just a short reference to one of the most innovative newspapers regarding visualization in Europe: “Eleftheros Tipos”. The Greek newspaper is the winner of the European Newspaper Award and the best designed national newspaper. Designed in 2007 by Javier Errea “Eleftheros Tipos” has already doubled the circulation on Sunday and increased by 30 per cent during the week.

Excerpt of the Jury-Statement: “Eleftheros Tipos caught the jury's idea in almost all categories. Front pages: They are often devoted to a single topic and display enormous typographic care. Inside pages: Cover stories are allowed to run over several pages. They are then structured by pictures, quotation blocks, and service boxes and offer the readers new stimuli. Infographics and illustrations are standard elements. Their use of typography and white space creates a special aesthetic appeal, which accounts for the paper's modern, but serious character.”

Javier Errea explains in an interview with the German “MediumMagazin” that the former ET was a “languished newspaper” which did not play any important role in the Greek media landscape. After the relaunch the newspaper would be very interesting for younger and female readers and intellectuals, Errea says. 156 journalists, 56 photographers and 24 layouters are working at the newspaper. Their new concept is to produce a newspaper like a daily magazine with an emphatic visual impact.

This success story shows how to improve newspapers considerably: high quality content presented in the appropriate professional design. We can recognize that the layout is not imposed on the text and dominating the content. Text and design interact in a convincing wise that attracts the reader. Unmentionable that this great newspaper has a tabloid size.

Map it! Geocoding opens new visual access to information

Google's Marissa Mayer this week at the DLD conference in Munich announced new features to come for Google maps and Google earth. The triumph march of Google's geo concept all over the web is incredible.

Many people in the traditional media, especially from the Offline Taliban faction (still convinced that the internet nightmare could be over one day), still renounce the relevance of map like mash ups as some sort of unserious triviality. Even web experts like Mattias Kretschmer express their scepticism.

I'm pretty sure that displaying information in a geo context will become indispensable. The geographical context uncovers hidden dimensions of facts and data.

One of the most impressive examples is the Local Explorer of the Washington Post . The team of Rob Curely developed a mash up concept which combines data for crime, home sales, schools and places to a unique tool of local orientation.

Last week EveryBlock was launched by Adrian Holovaty, a pioneer in geo mapping for information scenarios. It provides relevant local data and information for San Francisco, New York and Chicago. It's promise: "The easiest way to keep track of what’s happening on your block, in your neighborhood and all over your city."

In Germany various community sites and point of interest portals have started to use Google maps as an additional layer for providing context and orientation. In 2007 the first newspaper applications went online like Saarbrücker Zeitung or Der Westen/ Westdeutsche Allgemeine , the largest regional paper in Germany. The basic intention is to display local news from the editors in a geographical context. People can easily check what is going on in their local neighbourhood by access the news via maps as the quickest and most logical of all entries. With maps as a visual access they no longer need to waste their time by browsing through long lists of text stories.

The next step will be that private users and citizen journalists can upload their content including the geo reference. Publishers plan to add local classified ads or sponsored information by local shop owners, public services or cinemas, clubs, bars and restaurants. I guess it is one of the most convincing approaches to revitalise the real strength of regional newspapers - their local competence and credibility.

At dpa-infocom we just launched a gecoded version of our regional multimedia wire services (dpa-RegioLine). Bild.de has based the beta version of it's Berlin navigator on this feed. So far we add an official geo co ordinate for towns and cities. In the cases of Berlin and Hamburg, the largest German cities we provide the data for the city districts. Gerd Kamp, head of our application development and Mr. Geonews, gives some technical background.

In late spring we plan to attach the complete address to the regional dpa news wherever useful. Besides we intend to geocode our main world newswire dpa-InfoLine. Users should be allowed to follow news via news maps from the local to the world level - simply by zooming in and out.

By defining standards and workflows we hope to motivate more and more publishers and editors to go for the geo option and add geographic metadata to their content. Map it! Another task visual journalists and story tellers will have to embrace.

The eyeblogger manifesto: visual journalism and visual story telling

Eye bloggers believe in the „iconic turn“ as it describes the medial shift of paradigm from text towards image.

In the past the image followed and supported the text content. In the convergent media worlds text will follow more and more the visual content message (even print will continue to become more and more visual).

Related to the iconic turn is the term „visual literacy“ , defining the intellectual human capability to decode and interpret images.

The visual shift, the growing media dominance of picture, video, info graphic or other visual forms of content vs. text will accelerate in the upcoming years. The arguments are apparent:

1. Text is an inconvenient and highly demanding access to information. It will become more and more a tool of the information elite. Mass media on the other hand will attract users more and more via a more emotional and less complicated visual access.

2. Within the next five years TV and web will converge. IPTV and video streaming on internet portals will replace classic broadcast TV. Video will become a strong third visual format besides photo and info graphics.

3. The convergence of TV and web will resolve the divide in user experience between lean back (TV) and lean forward (web) scenarios. The hybrid combination of TV and web requires graphical interfaces to navigate from the couch.

4. Advertisement is shifting from the established media to the web. The new tools to measure reach and justify ad spendings are changing. Clicks and page impressions will be replaced by view time. A pre condition for this new criteria are visual and interactive contents with high stickiness, which attract people and keep them on the site as long as possible.

5. Technically VDSL broadband allows complex and data rich visualisations. User who can afford these high speed accesses, expect a new user experience. New combinations of visuality, interactivity and multimediality will in their potential beat all established media formats (e.g. world of warcraft).

6. All media platforms converge. Within a couple of years users will hardly be able to distinguish the web portals of print-, TV- or internet only providers since they will all offer the same elements of text, picture, info graphic, audio and of course video.

7. Visualisation still seems to be a theoretical subject for information scientists and digital artists. Now it is time to use the new opportunities for professional visual story telling and develop a visual journalism. This is especially true since images and visualisation can easily be manipulated or be misinterpreted. Linking the emotionality of images to the preciseness of the word is a highly journalistic duty and profession.

8. The convergence of digital platforms will lead to a convergence of journalistic job profiles. The basic competence of print and broadcast editors will get more and more similar. Focus and joint fundament will be visual web formats.

9. Visual journalism will pose new requirements to editorial training. A new profile of visual editors will unite classical journalistic abilities with the competence for visuality, interactivity and mulimediality.

10. Visual content can easily inform and entertain a global audience, regardless what language they speak. It thus ideally meets the requirements of the web as the only truly global medium.

11. Even in e-learning visual story telling provides new opportunities for handicapped people suffering from dyslexia and illiteracy.