Archive for the ‘ESPN’ tag
Ray of hope
Wayne Drehs certainly did some exceptional reporting for his multimedia package on ESPN.com’s Eticket story, “Ray of hope.” Drehs’ package tells the gripping story of Jason Ray, a former University of North Carolina student who also happened to be the school’s mascot for basketball games. Ray was killed shortly before UNC’s trip to the NCAA tournament in 2007, and although the story is tragic, Drehs digs deeper to find a silver lining.
Ray was killed in a car accident, and he was an organ donor. In an amazing turn of events, his organs ended up saving four people’s lives through transplants. Drehs does a great job of telling the story of each recipient of Ray’s organs, but the organization leaves something to be desired.
The first page of the package has a very long video that gives background to Ray’s basic story and two fairly unrelated anecdotes told through text. All of these elements add to the overall value of the story, but the project is lacking in smooth transitions between its contributing elements. There is an extensive amount of content, but it is kind of hard to filter through what is most important if one doesn’t want to spend hours looking at this one story.
The story is split into three parts, labeled “life,” “death,” and “rebirth.” It is a nice touch that the three are separated into three different pages and are simple to navigate between, but the three titles are quite vague and could be improved so that they better represent what is contained on each individual page.
There is a wealth of text, a ton of video, and just the right amount of pictures in this project. The pictures add to the story and bring each organ recipient’s situation into a more personal light, but the stories are a little hard to sort out in the massive amount of text. Drehs could have omitted much more as far as text goes, which would have helped to keep viewers’ attention. The videos could have been cut down considerably as well. I applaud the depth that Drehs goes into, but it is unrealistic to think that anyone will spend that much time to get the main point of a story. It’s really too bad, because I think the story is amazing and would be very compelling to a lot of people, if only it could have been tightened up.