A Recent J-School Grad’s Perspective on Tagwhat

Journalism students are trained to do it all. I recently graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder journalism school with an emphasis in photojournalism. But really this means I studied video and multimedia, Flash, HTML, 3D rendering, Photoshop, layout and design, advertising and social media. Oh. And photography, writing and editing.

Despite needing to know constantly changing media and platforms (I’m sure the technical knowledge I graduated with will be obsolete in a matter of years), one thing I still take pride in is knowing how to tell a story. Initially, our journalism education consisted of the basic, “who, what, when, where, why and how.” However, through a few amazing mentors, I learned that a story goes much deeper than the “W’s.”

A real story makes a reader connect to the every day experience and simplifies a complex subject into something we can all relate to. A journalist can document an unexpected pregnancy (http://mediastorm.com/publication/love-in-the-first-person) from a unique and personal perspective or give a criminal a sense of humanity (http://www.diaryofapredator.com).

At Tagwhat, we decided our stories needed to go deeper than a single virtual image overlaying reality. Instead of simply saying, “you are here,” we wanted to show people, “look at all the stories where you are.” Users are thrown into an interactive multimedia experience filled with stories.

Rather than taking a simple snapshot of a place and adding one-dimensional information, it is our goal to find stories about a location that haven’t been told before and can’t typically be found with a simple search.

While Tagwhat is a completely new and revolutionary digital platform, we strive to incorporate traditional storytelling, giving you a completely unique view of your surroundings.

by Stephanie