Multiple Journalism

Mídia Ninja

Multiple Journalism — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 11:03:42 +0000

Mídia Ninja

An activist journalism network specializing in real time broadcasting.

When

2011

Where

Brazil

Who

Bruno Torturra and many others

Website

midianinja.com

What is it?

NINJA Independent Narratives, Journalism and Action (aka Ninja Media) is a decentralized network of volunteer journalists who produce and disseminate content based on collaborative work and online sharing. Ninjas are primarily involved in real time broadcasting, but also produce news stories, documentaries and investigative journalism in Brazil and abroad.

The collective became known internationally for its outstanding coverage of the 2013 Brazilian social protests but has existed since 2011. Its capillary organizational culture caters to the need for direct witnessing in an age of ubiquitous digital network communication.

Their statement on the Mídia Ninja website reads: “The Internet changed journalism and we are part of this transformation. We live in a peer-to-peer culture that allows people to share information without traditional mediators. New technologies and new forms of using technology have opened the way for new sharing spaces, in which people do not only passively absorb information, but produce and exchange information. In this new context – of networks connected to streets – multimedia citizens emerge with the capacity to make and share opinions in the virtual world. Connected, these new narrators make NINJA Media.”

Mídia Ninja emerged within the Circuito Fora do Eixo (“Off Axis Circuit”) a cultural cooperative founded in 2006 and devoted to fostering independent cultural production outside of mainstream broadcasting and radio systems in Brazil. Within Fora do Eixo a group of young journalists began to experiment with social media, blogs, and smartphones to report on the group’s activities, including concerts. This was the birth of Mídia Ninja. Its operational logic was based on using the web and spontaneous mobilization to create a network of independent, non-monetized production and diffusion practices.

Once a minimalist infrastructure for media production was established, the group confirmed its commitment to an agenda of social and civil rights reporting, but gradually expanded its scope by experimentally developing new forms of direct reporting not linked to Fora do Eixo events.

Mídia Ninja’s first work with a wider impact was the extensive coverage of the Marcha da Maconha (Marijuana March, May 21, 2011, Sao Paulo), a public pro-Cannabis and free speech demonstration, which was violently repressed by the police.

How does it work?

During the riots, the original group of ten Ninjas coming out of Fora do Eixo rapidly jumped to more than hundred. The majority were students, aged 18 to 24, with previous experience in social activism. For permanent video reporting on the protests, they used smartphones, small video cameras, light laptops and 3G Internet.

Mídia Ninja from left to right: Filipe Marçal, Bianca Buteikis, Bruno Torturra, Felipe Altenfelder and Thiago Dezan

The unpaid, networked coverage of the riots simply emerged as a spontaneous, collaborative reporting act, facilitated and centralized by the Mídia Ninja creators, who had previously built the production infrastructure and communication network, including a web TV channel, significantly called Pós-TV (After TV).

Mídia Ninja co-founder Bruno Torturra has always insisted on his vision of journalism as a civic tool, in direct contact with reality, and on a radical philosophy that abjures editing. Sometimes, Mídia Ninja’s broadcasting simply consisted of a three or four hour-long take of one reporter showing images and talking with people.

Mídia Ninja is based on the advantages of the digital capture and editing revolution of the past decade, allowing the radicalization ofcorpo- a-corpoapproach and techniques inspired by war journalism and reporting. The idea behind its non-stop shooting is a direct sharing of experiences, e.g. when arrested at a Rio de Janeiro demonstration, one Ninja kept transmitting from inside the police car on his way to the local police station.

After the riots, Mídia Ninja gained international notoriety and went through a process of rethinking, with the intention of rewriting the rules of the collective and finding new ways to financial sustainability, professionalization, and long term independence.

Why did we select it?

The agility of Mídia Ninja’s networked organizational form takes full advantage of the digital revolution to provide better journalism. It allows journalists “to be there at the right moment”, without a big, expensive infrastructure. They reinforce independent journalism by challenging the news monopoly of traditional media corporations. With its coverage of the 2013 riots, it illustrated a power shift taking shape on the ground.

Furthermore, Mídia Ninja has radically de-monetized news production and consumption and reframed journalism as a public good. Lastly, they revitalized the use of non-edited and live video reports, raising public debate about the definition of journalism in the 21st century. While Ninja’s critics have argued that good journalism always involves conscious and careful selection of relevant facts and analysis, Ninjas have emphasized that the decision to be at a certain place at a certain time, or to point the camera in a certain direction, are also editorial decisions.

Mídia Ninja’s riot coverage reminds us that new situations require new approaches and a continuous negotiation of arrangements.

Mídia Ninja

An activist journalism network specializing in real time broadcasting.

Next Media Animation

Next Media Animation provides the “missing images” of the news by producing news animations based on news feeds and factual reporting for international media outlets.

Firestorm

An online interactive story about a family’s harrowing experience during a severe bush fire in Tasmania that integrates various media in visually innovative ways.

Next Media Animation

Multiple Journalism — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 19:14:04 +0000

Next Media Animation

Next Media Animation (NMA) provides the “missing images” of the news by producing news animations based on news feeds and factual reporting for international media outlets.

When

2007

Where

Taiwan

Who

Jimmy Lai (chairman and founder), Richard Chuang (co-chairman), Kith Ng (CEO), Ben Wong (executive production director), Michael Logan (news director), Meggie Lu (head of production) and many others

What is it?

For many breaking news stories, images are not readily available. An airplane crash or terrorist attack is usually not captured on video, as footage is only recorded after the event. NMA’s News Direct service solves this problem by offering increasingly realistic, 3D animated news videos of actual events within two hours of breaking news.

NMA website: “Animation is the future of the news. When there are no video cameras present to capture a big story, NMA is able to fill in the blanks with animated news graphics for our viewers and clients in industry-leading turnaround times.”

Convinced that the future of the news is visual, business man Jimmy Lai founded NMA in 2007 to produce entertainment videos for online publishers and TV broadcasters. He then realized that NMA should also provide “the missing images of the news” to serious news outlets through a separate News Direct service, which produces realistic, 3D animations in a sophisticated, high speed production process.

Based in an industrial area in Taipei, NMA now is one of the largest animated news studios in the world, with a team of over 600 animators, script writers, and motion capture actors working on continuous shifts 24 hours a day. Using the latest technologies in 3D animation design, motion capture, and facial scanning, NMA delivers up to sixty 30-second unique news videos every day, equalling the production value and technical quality of a feature length, Hollywood style movie, produced in three days.

In addition to creating realistic news images that are “missing”, NMA also supplies animated graphics to clarify complex issues and visually enhance news reports by adding a new dimension that can help viewers understand news stories.

While the News Direct animations and graphics are sold directly to clients like BBC and CNN, and distributed by Reuters to more than 35 international clients, including Al-Jazeera, Univision, Yahoo!, MSNBC and so on, Tomo News offers celebrity news and other “funny video” mainly through its own website and other online publishers.

Together, NMA’s videos generate about 90 million views online each month and have been featured on the Daily Telegraph, Bild, Der Spiegel, Focus, Wired, The Huffington Post, The Globe and Mail, The Daily Show, NBC Bay Area, The New York Post, KDVR and other media outlets.

How does it work?

The production of animated news is a race against time. At NMA, it is organized as an industrial, 24-hour pipeline involving a sequence of teams, each executing a specialized stage of the production process in a continuous cycle.

Throughout the day, on the top floor, the news director monitors incoming news feeds and selects stories fit for animation. Every hour, the selected news stories are announced to the news writers and fact checkers, who write an animation script for the story based on factual sources and hand it down to the story boarders one floor below.

After approval of the scripts during a storyboard meeting, the storyboard is handed over to the animators on yet a lower floor. The news animator will draw from an extensive database of virtual faces, bodies, and environments to actually build the animation itself. The animation is then given a “soul” by the motion capture actors, who impersonate the animated characters with their human movements in a 24/7 motion capture studio.

After a layer of info graphics and titles is added to the story, the news video is offered to Reuters clients. Animations of breaking news stories are updated every hour. Kith Ng, CEO of NMA, believes that 3D animation in video news will change the digital news industry.

Next Media vs China

Next Media Animation is privately owned by Jimmy Lai, who is also the founder and chairman of the Next Media group, the largest publicly listed media company in Hong Kong. It is best known for introducing tabloid style journalism in Hong Kong and Taiwan, publishing lifestyle magazines, web portals and tabloid newspapers, including Apple Daily, Sharp Daily and Next Magazine.

Next Media is often perceived as supporting democratic groups in Hong Kong, sometimes provocatively, and regularly critiques the Chinese government. As a result, founder Jimmy Lai ispersona non gratain China and all Next Media publications are banned in the People’s Republic of China, though not in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Animated news originally started with Tomo‘s entertainment news videos about celebrities, offered through QR-codes in the Next Media magazines. The videos were extremely popular and shared on social media by millions of people in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

NMA founder Jimmy Lai realised that the lack of images of essential events in serious news media created a need for realistic animations. He then decided to start NMA’s News Direct service.

Why did we select it?

NMA opens the door to a future of journalism in which reality itself is (re)created in computers, raising important ethical questions about what it means “to bring the truth” in digital times.

In the new field of animated news, NMA is a pioneer and world leader with considerable impact globally. It has invented a new genre, accelerated the pace and scale of production, and continuously improves the aesthetics by investing in state of the art hardware and software.

CEO Kith Ng’s goal is to further speed up the production process and reach 100% realistic news animation in 2016. We can only begin to imagine what this will mean for news consumers.

The use of 3D animation in journalism raises important questions. To what extent is news animation telling the truth? How objective is it? Are storyboard artists and animators journalists? Is news animation different from photo journalism, which is often manipulated as well?

And how will news animations influence the credibility of news reports in the long term? These questions, relevant for the future of journalism as a public good, need to be debated.

Comparable to NMA?

The Taiwanese animation studio is the first company to produce news animations for media outlets on a large scale. There are no precedents and innovation happens by trial and error; often, for example, news writers draft scripts of news events deemed unachievable by the animators.

If we would like to show a scene of a hundred people running the marathon, it wouldn't be possible due to the limitations of computer capacity

Meggie Lu

Meggie Lu: “There are some restrictions on what we can do at this moment. For example, if we would like to show a scene of a hundred people running the marathon, it wouldn’t be possible due to the limitations of computer capacity. Currently, the computer isn’t able to render so many people in two hours.” Hopefully, says Lu, these technical problems will be solved in a few years time.

Mídia Ninja

An activist journalism network specializing in real time broadcasting.

Next Media Animation

Next Media Animation provides the “missing images” of the news by producing news animations based on news feeds and factual reporting for international media outlets.

Firestorm

An online interactive story about a family’s harrowing experience during a severe bush fire in Tasmania that integrates various media in visually innovative ways.

Firestorm

Multiple Journalism — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 01:36:15 +0000

Firestorm

An online interactive story about a family’s harrowing experience during a severe bush fire in Tasmania that integrates various media in visually innovative ways.

When

2013

Where

United Kingdom

Who

The Guardian; Jon Henley, Laurence Topham, Daan Louter, Francesca Panetta, Jonathan Richards, Mark McCormick, Iain Chambers, Jane Ulman, Mark Heather, Julia Chapman, Kim Chakanetsa

What is it?

Firestorm takes the dramatic personal story of the Holmes family during a bush fire as a narrative anchor and embeds this human story in a broader context of the history of bush fires in Tasmania and global climate change.

It makes use of various media – including audio and video footage, interviews, writing, photography and maps – to produce a visually compelling and immersive interactive story. This interactive story seeks a fine balance between personal and contextual information, interaction and linear flow.

The project is the result of an intense collaboration between writer Jon Henley and the interactive team at The Guardian. In connection with the launch of Firestorm, Guardian Books published an accompanying eBook relating the story of the town of Dunalley.

How does it work?

During the great bush fire, Grandpa Tim Holmes used his smartphone to take pictures of his wife Tammy and five grandchildren clinging onto the jetty of a lake where they sought refuge from the fire. Right after the fires, the pictures of the Holmes family became world famous, an event that provides the starting point for the multimedia storytelling in Firestorm.

The project for an interactive story was launched by The Guardian UK in collaboration with The Guardian Australia, which provided the opportunity to share resources and create a unique and labor-intensive story. The Guardian turned the Holmes family images into a rich magazine-like visual interactive, reconstructing the Holmes’ experience of that dark day.

Firestorm creatively embeds a variety of sources in a compelling linear storyline that uses the dramatic photos shot by the family to bring to life a wealth of contextual information. The project reads like an e-book, divided in chapters and enriched with loads of embedded content that smoothly pops-up to enhance the power of storytelling.

Firestorm, which took three months to produce, credits twenty-three people. See this analysis by The Poynter Institute: “How on-going teamwork fuelled The Guardian’s Firestorm interactive”. Although few newsrooms have the kind of resources that The Guardian was able to commit, the inspiring experiment with layered, multimedia storytelling that Firestorm represents can be replicated on a smaller scale.

The keys to its success were early and realistic planning, and smooth collaboration between editorial, design and technical departments, which allowed the story to evolve alongside technical editing.

Why did we select it?

Firestorm is selected for its creative and innovative multimedia storytelling. It connects compelling visuals and texts to develop a contextual story about climate change and smoothly embeds video and audio sources in a non-fiction narrative to create a new kind of immersive reading experience.”

A few similar interactive visual storytelling are Snow Fall, Last 32 hours of Martin Luther King (multimedia storytelling), and The New York Times’ Boston Marathon attack multimedia story.

Other fine examples are Medium (online platform for stories written by independent journalists and writers), and The Magazine (online paid-subscribers magazine, based on a theme with five medium to long articles of independent authors).

TED Books are shorter than a novel, but longer than a magazine article. TED Books are typically under 20,000 words and embed audio, video and social features in every book.

Networks