How audio slideshows struggle in the mainstream

A quick Google search of the words ‘audio slideshow’ returned nearly 40 million results when I checked earlier. The same search of ‘podcast’ returned 90 million results. (blog = 3.7 billion!)

And only 3 mainstream media organisations featured in the first page of results – the FT, the Guardian and the BBC.

Delving deeper, let’s take a look at The Daily Mail website, which in November hit 50 million monthly browsers (compared to the Guardian’s 37.5 million) and occupies the top spot in the UK online newspaper rankings. The Daily Mail has not a single audio slideshow on its site.

So how about Sky News’ online offering? Likewise audio slideshows are nowhere to be seen.

So does that suggest audio slideshows are struggling to catch on in the online media marketplace, compared to blogs, podcasts, conventional slideshows or galleries? I admit my approach above is hardly scientific, and I can’t claim to be an internet historian who understands the chronology of developments – when podcasts arrived, and when audio slideshows edged out onto the 1990’s information superhighway.

Nor do people thirsty for information and news tend to start by typing ‘article’ or ‘video’ or ‘slideshow’ into Google.

More likely they go to their favourite news provider or Google Reader (yes, I am getting paid each time I mention Google) and browse around for their favourite sections or writers.

But it does seem audio slideshows have not really broken out and become ubiquitous as an added-extra in news media. As fellow VisVoxers have noted, they tend to be more successful as a tool to contemplative, retrospective and considered media consumption, than as an extra way to break news or explore ongoing stories in more detail.

In this and future posts, my plan is to explore some of the practical pitfalls to audio slideshows, and also look at the possibilities – exploring how and why news organisations like the Guardian, FT and BBC have made audio-slideshows a recognisable component of their offering.

But first pitfalls, and key amongst has to be TIME.

Cutting some audio for a podcast, or even re-versioning / tidying up some raw audio is not too time consuming.

Nor is creating a standard slideshow (i.e. without audio) – get the right pics, put them in the right order, stick on some transitions and Bob’s your uncle.

Compare that to audio-slideshows, where you’ll probably need to find the right pics, order them in some way, find audio that relates to the images, or locate the relevant commentator or commentators (photojournalist, correspondent, expert, the subject of the images/issue etc) and record their thoughts or conversation.

You’ve then got to edit the pics and audio together, making a myriad of technical and stylistic decisions along the way. By the time you’ve done all that, you might as well have shot and edited a video report instead.

All in all, it sounds like a lot of time, quite a bit of money, and quite a lot of editorial decision making.

None of those things are in abundant supply in the hyper-competitive, ultra slimmed-down world of news, where budgets are on the slide, and where conventional circulation and viewing figures are mostly in slow, inexorable decline.

If that all sounds a bit down on poor old audio-slideshows, don’t worry – future VisVox posts will also explore just how effective, successful and efficiently produced they can be.