The Life and Death of Sitara Achakzai
Posted on September 15, 2009. Filed under: Critiques | Tags: Afghanistan, journalism, multimedia, Paula Lerner, PRI's The World, Sitara Achakzai |
Providing compelling content on the internet requires the careful selection of appropriate tools from the immense number of available options – everything from plain text to flash graphics and tag clouds – and then translating all of those into a simple, efficient presentation that manages to grab the audience and keep them occupied for the duration of the piece.
Just because its easier for creators to use audio, pictures and video – which do tend to be more attractive to the eye than just text – doesn’t mean viewers will suddenly pay attention; the journalist still has to tell an engaging story if the audience is expected to remain beyond the first multimedia moment.
In April 2009, Paula Lerner, a journalist working for Public Radio International’s The World, in conjunction with the BBC and WGBH, put together a multimedia package titled “The Life and Death of Sitara Achakazai.” The project, a simple, nearly four-minute-long slideshow accompanied by narration from Lisa Mullins, host of The World, and interspersed with audio clips, briefly chronicled the life of Sitara Achakazai, an Afghani women’s rights activist and member of a regional parliament who was assassinated by the Taliban earlier this year.
As a subject, Achakzai is undoubtedly important and serves as a valuable anchor for the audience who might not understand the complex history of war-torn Afghanistan. Through a single person’s life, Lerner is able to briefly trace some of that convoluted past, beginning with Achakzai’s childhood and taking the audience all the way forward to the Taliban occupation, followed by the American invasion and subsequent rebuilding efforts which Achakzai herself took part in.
The narrated parts of the piece follow basic radio package rules, which are then matched to Lerner’s photos, such that if the host is talking about Kandahar, or Afghani women, the photo displayed will correspond to the phrase being spoken.
As a result, even though the technique is a basic trope of broadcast journalism, viewers are able to put audio and visuals together so they have a more complete idea of what the story is. While this occasionally upsets the rhythm of the photos – viewers might not have as much time to take in a wideshot, which has more for the mind to process, and might linger for too long on a closeup – it still succeeds in that the combining of audio and visual elements manages to push the story forward.
The package then gets more interesting when the host’s narration is followed by an audio clip of Achakzai herself speaking, translated from the original Pashto. We’re treated to a first-hand account of how, as a child, Achakzai’s family was among the first to allow women to ride bicycles, and the multimedia nature of the piece means we’re also looking at old black-and-white photographs of her family with bike et al.
Achakazai goes on to describe her decision to leave Afghanistan for Germany, and later return to the country to help in its reconstruction and her experience with being politically involved in a country where women are unlikely to take part in anything that puts them in the public’s eye.
This ends up being the most compelling part of the package; We are told at the very beginning that Achakzai had been shot and killed by the Taliban, so we are keenly aware that the voice we hear is almost coming from beyond the grave. This raw, direct connection to the subject matter, coupled with rich, well-composed visuals, form the bulk of the piece and is also the reason it happens to succeed in telling its story.
The piece originally aired as a standalone radio package on PRI’s The World, using the information and interviews that Lerner had put together. In that sense, “The Life and Death of Sitara Achakzai,” also serves as a useful example of how to turn old-school journalism pieces into engaging multimedia presentations that add significant value to the product.
All the producer had to do was pick the best and most appropriate photographs that would go well with the original radio package, and then put it all together using a basic flash application that offers y0u the usual tools that slideshows provide, and suddenly you have content that goes beyond what a traditional outlet might have had to offer.
On the flip side, because the piece essentially takes a radio broadcast and updates it to fit into a new media framework, it doesn’t take advantage of all the possibilities that an internet package would allow. Achakzai’s story is a perfect jumping-off point for a quick rehash of recent Afghani history, told through the lens of a tragic, personal story. Unfortunately, the way the package is produced doesn’t allow it to serve as a launch pad to anything else, because it doesn’t link to anything else.
If the piece did pique a viewer’s interest in what the situation in the country is now, or what has happened since Achakzai’s death or even a further more in-depth pieces about the situation in the country, that sort of content would ideally be highlighted and linked to at the end of Lerner’s piece, but instead only lets you re-watch the same package again.
On the whole, Lerner and The World have found a simple, efficient way of taking a staid, traditional piece of journalism and making it into a compelling multimedia package, without major computer know-how or flashy presentation.
The piece ends with a quick note about Achakazai’s death, reminding the viewer one last time how much more of a connection a personal story can bring to a broader, regional issue, while appropriately closes the package that was, after all, called, “The Life and Death of Sitara Achakazai.”
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Rohan Venkat 
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