As an online news consumer, nothing bothers me more than sites that are merely digital reproductions of a printed paper but with flashier ads. This all-too-common approach ignores the many potential uses of multimedia in delivering news.

The Daily agrees. As the first multimedia editor ever, I’m excited to share our ambitions for mndaily.com

Our venture into video began in 2005, when we started covering University news online in short video segments. What began as an experiment grew into a formidable audio-visual department, and each week we now produce multiple videos. This year we are starting to use video to expand stories online providing background to in-depth reports and interviews with writers of larger stories.

Starting this semester, every week’s Arts & Entertainment section has fresh video and multimedia beyond what is in print. In the coming year, we’ll be improving the visuals of the A&E site and growing its online content.

A relatively new A&E blog is alive with chatter about happenings in the music and art scenes, and it will be chalk full of photos and videos that couldn’t fit into the newspaper. You’ll also see more photos of concerts, plays and art than ever before online – not just one per story. Look for Daily-exclusive band interviews in video and expanded coverage of the Twin Cities scene in the coming year.

We’re doing new things with photos online too. We recently launched a new way to navigate the paper through our homepage. You can click on “View Today’s Photos” to navigate through the photos from the day’s paper with blurbs about the stories and at any time you can click away to a story.

In the coming year we’ll be experimenting with multimedia storytelling. We’ll add photo essays and audio slideshows to stories, we’ll create interactive graphics and we’ll add videos inside stories that are relevant and interesting.

We’ll also create independent video reports that investigate University and local issues with the same high standards as the Daily’s newsroom.

We will always inform you in the printed edition when there is additional content online, so expect to see the mndaily.com graphics in stories more often this year.

MNDaily.com will not just reflect our paper but will also expand on it.

We’re excited to innovate new ways of using multimedia in telling stories, and we’re committed to making MNDaily.com nationally respected in its use of multimedia.

Chris Roberts is the Daily’s multimedia editor. He welcomes comments at [email protected].