Jailbreak in the Philippines (Clip file 9/15)
Every once in a while there comes a long a story that I love to read and learn a lot from. On BBC.co.uk I found a story about a jailbreak in the Philippines that resulted in 31 military detainees being freed. This story was yet another example of why I like to read articles written by the BBC. It started with a very short video showing the hole that the prisoners crawled through to freedom. I liked how they provided that for the same reason I mentioned in my earlier piece about the Market in Pakistan. It provides a bit of visual representation about the topic and allows the reader to picture in their head what was happening. This is different than how the NYtimes usually sets these stories up because the New York Times tends to provide a video on the sidebar or at the end of an article so that the reader gets a little bit more info than just reading the article rather than introducing the article with video. Another thing that I enjoyed about this article was the fact that on the side bar there were links to other stories that were either about the Jailbreak in the Philippines or profiles on the Philippines as a country.
(They even provide a timeline that I decided to click on. This was a very very cool interactive feature. It provided bits of information on the Philippines from 1542 all the way to this Jailbreak today. Along the way there are pictures linked to stories. This BBC “Country Profile” is perhaps my favorite example of New Media in action. You can literally look up any country in the world and get info on any major event that has happened since the founding of said country.)
Back to the article: There was one small thing that I did not particularly like about the article. This was the map. Usually the map has some sort of explanation but this one was straight up confusing. I first thought that maybe these places marked are where the prisoners were from. I later found out after some research that the points marked on the map were areas where conflict was present in the country. Maybe a little comment on the bottom saying that would be nice so that I wouldn’t have to leave the website to figure out what I was looking at.
ARTICLE: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8410364.stm
TIMELINE FEATURE: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/country_profiles/1264117.stm
