Multimedia Packages
While I’ve rarely been one of the writers behind them, I’ve played a large part in ODYSSEY’s multimedia packages over the past year and a half, a responsibility that came with a steep learning curve but also a lot of opportunities to learn. A lot of my work here can be found in the coding behind the package as well as a lot of the multimedia. Both of these, combined with the writing, are meant to provide engagement to the reader that goes beyond that of other stories on our website, whether that be because of the depth of the story or the combination of multiple stories under one theme.
Presenting about packages
I and then-News Editor Liza Larson presented together at the Southern Interscholastic Press Association’s 2025 Spring Convention on feature storytelling for hybrid publications. While some of this was about the story itself and the writing behind it, we also talked a lot about the final product, which for me meant packaging. I was able to share the insight I had gained over the past year on the use of multimedia and web design to create cohesive and engaging packages from feature stories.
Looking back on Black History Month
This was a story I had to be extremely timely with. Within an hour of the press release being sent out, I had interview requests out to both winners and was able to quickly get quotes over email. From there, it was only a matter of writing the story, which was fairly straightforward once I had the quotes I needed. I also updated a timeline I had made the year before for the same story and included that.
After Apalachee
This package took a lot of collaboration. Editor-in-Chief Wyatt Meyer wrote the entire story and helped me compile information for the multimedia elements, but I was responsible for the design. I made this using Adobe Express rather than WordPress which was a bit of a learning curve since it was my first time using the platform. We had a lot of ideas about what to include as multimedia, but decided to go with a timeline, infographic and the variety of photos he had taken, with Meyer giving me three rounds of edits on design throughout the process.
Halloween Package
This package was a culmination of multiple stories, which I gathered throughout October from peoples’ choice assignments and beats. I did my best to encourage a variety of story types, particularly in including a video and podcast, areas we struggled with in last year’s package. I helped edit each story, both at the middle and final draft stages and was responsible for packaging everything together at the end.
Understanding Safety
The writing of this story was all done by then-News Editor Liza Larson but the design and multimedia of the web package were up to me. The story had already been separated into sections, which I decided to structure the package around, coding parallaxes and making soundcites for each. I also used links to some of the research Larson had done and a combination of Canva and flourish.studio to create multimedia, a bar graph and series of pie charts, for two of the sections. Overall, I feel the combination of these elements helped make the information more accessible rather than distract from the story itself.
New Teacher Package
I’ve been lucky enough to get to do this package twice. When I compiled it during my sophomore year, I took a lot of inspiration from previous iterations of the package, using Canva to create a slideshow with all of the photos and captions that viewers could click through. This year, with a bit more experience under my belt, I decided to experiment a bit more with multimedia and create a soundcite for each scene. Overall, I’m proud of the interactivity in both packages, but particularly in the improvement between the two.