Eric: August 2008 Archives
Seidman is currently covering this year's political campaigns on a variety of platforms. In June of this year, he was featured on National Public Radio's Bryant Park Project, including a discussion about Barack Obama's campaign imagery. (You can read about it here, discuss it here, and listen to the podcast here, though I haven't had any luck getting it to play.) He extends the conversations through a blog on the Ithaca College site, as well as a Facebook group.How effective are election campaign posters? Providing a unique political history, this book traces the impact that these posters--as well as broadsides, banners, and billboards--have had around the world over the last two centuries. It focuses on the use of this campaign material in the United States, as well as in France, Great Britain, Germany, South Africa, Japan, Mexico, and many other countries.
The book examines how posters evolved and discusses their changing role in the twentieth century and thereafter; how technology, education, legislation, artistic movements, advertising, and political systems effected changes in election posters and other campaign media, and how they were employed around the world.
This comprehensive and original overview of this campaign material includes the first extensive review of the research literature on the topic.
As an Ithaca College undergraduate and graduate alum, and current member of the strategic communication departments advisory council, I've unfortunately only had a handful of encounters with Steve. But his ideas about and knowledge of just this kind of strategic communication are deep and very exciting. For anyone interested in graphic design / visual communication and politics (especially this year), I implore you to follow this conversation (and pick up a copy of his book).
What's interesting about the New York Times is ever since their redesign a couple years back, they've been putting up more and more interactive content. It started with basic videos of news pieces and rich media slideshows. Last week on their site, accompanying a basic article in the published paper about last stops on NYC subway lines, the Times put out a rich media, (somewhat) interactive complement for the article, with content you can only get online, like videos and high-quality color photography. Some of the Times' interactive efforts are a little behind the curve, like their penchant for 3D panoramas; though they do provide a level of immersion flat photographs - online or in print - just don't match.
My favorite feature is video speeches with accompanying transcripts that allow you to click to any block of the speech text and jump to that segment of the video. However you prefer to absorb the content - watching the video from beginning to end, reading the transcript from top to bottom, or jumping back and forth, queuing up only the segments you want to see & hear, and skimming through the rest - is there for you to use. There's even a clickable outline to the overall speech (presumably for lengthier ones), so you can jump to full portions of the speech, creating a kind of 'powers of 10' feel.
A lot of these features may have been around with the Times for a while, and there may be even more in-depth efforts with other publications, like the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal. I wouldn't really know because a) I don't dwell on the Times' site as long as I might read a print edition (another of the newspapers' woes), and b) other than occasional guilty (and necessary) dabbling with the aggregation of the Drudge Report, my primary news source / brand preference is almost exclusively with the Times.
It's tough to see the newspaper industry struggle without clear solutions to adapting and monetizing to the digital world, but exclusive online features like these certainly help. Here's hoping the Times is around long enough to see a turned tide.