What does digital storytelling mean for journalism?

I won’t lie: when we were told Daniel Meadows would be lecturing on digital storytelling, I thought, ‘Great, another airy fairy concept that’s all fad and no flesh.’ Five minutes later I was welling up – in a lecture! – and feeling rather silly.

Until then I had lived in the land of the old school where a journalist’s primary resource is words, pictures merely forming the auxiliary component... How naïve I was.

Meadows began by showing a sequence of polyfotos of his parents – moments in time captured in an age when every photo was a miracle, when people didn’t quite know how to act around cameras (although whether we’ve moved on is questionable).

This led me to wonder whether the digital revolution is rendering photos less meaningful now that we can take hundreds of pictures in one sitting, view them immediately and handpick those in which we look less like Pete Burns and more like Eva Mendes.

But before I could delve deeper into my reverie, Meadows was introducing Exhibit B. Dana Atchely’s video footage planted seeds in the mind; his words were the water but the most extraordinary element of the film was that it was left to blossom in the viewer’s own imagination: what wasn’t said made it brilliant.

The journalistic repercussions of this are huge. Today’s audience want their stories right now, the less effort the better – no reading? Perfect. And if anyone can tell a story through photography, then what does the future hold for us writers?