The story that I have chosen, A Sea Story, is about one of the worst maritime disasters in European history took place a decade ago. It remains very much in the public eye. On a stormy night on the Baltic Sea, more than 850 people lost their lives when a luxurious ferry sank below the waves. This long form story is publish by William Langewiesche.
The storytelling is not cinematic enough as there is no audio, video and interactive graphic in the whole article. Although the author described and gave a lot of actual figure about the story there is no hyperlink to let the audiences click in to know further. Besides there are no pictures or videos to support the things that the author described in the story. This makes the audiences cannot truly feel what is the author writing about. There is no interaction between audience and the story. Thus, audiences will feel bored when reading it.
To let the story be more attractive, I have made some suggestion base on my own opinion. Firstly, can put a picture about the model of the ship to introduce the structure of the ship, instead of using words. This will let the structure of the ship become more vivid to the audience. Besides, the author also can also make the photo of the ship interactive. For example, when the audience click on some particular place of the picture will have some pop window about the high of the deck, what facilities that the place have, how many people were at the place while the incident happened.
Apart from that, can add some hyperlink on some words in the story so that the audience can click on it to find out more and a way to let audiences understand more details about what is happening. For example, can add a hyperlink on the word “Estonia”, let the audience who know nothing about Estonia to find out more about the country, the culture or the language and the type of the ship, based on what the audience interested to know about.
Show the map about the depart place to the destination, in the map can include the time and the details such as the duration, 258 miles and also the direction.
Add some subheadings before each different topic, so that the audience can know what is in the paragraph and they can choose which part they wanted to read. Due to not every audience has the time to read the whole paragraph.
The author can attach some animation video about the whole story below the word form story. This is for the audience that more inclined or interested to video form.
Audio-book to tell the whole story. Let the audience that do not have time to read words by words can know the message through listen to the audio-book while they are doing their things. This can wider the range of target audience.
The story can be broke down by using timeline or things that happened in different deck of the ship. Throughout this, the audience interacts while they are reading the story. For example, to make it more interesting, a game-like feature could be add to the story. You can choose a footprint before you enter the ship. After that, you can use keyboard or mouse to control the footprint that you have choose to go to the place that you willing to find out and there will have some control button for the audience to go to different deck of the ship.
Hyperlink of the long-form story：
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/05/a-sea story/302940/?fbclid=IwAR12o_2FCZ-ouvzdCC3PX7DnbYHOJXBC9uk4o_7zqSu8DaXTDZ5UNp0XXZA
Storyboard of my suggestion:
Story Distribution Chart :
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