An Open Source Library For Adding Sound Bytes To Print Journalism

When Texas State Senator Wendy Davis gave her 13-hour filibuster against an anti-abortion law, journalists filled the web with a heap of multimedia: videos, tweets, GIFs, and Internet memes that often outshined their written articles. But the Washington Post blog “The Fix” didn’t make its readers choose between listening and reading its filibuster coverage. By using SoundCite, a web tool that streams an audio clip behind the text, the Post’s account of Davis’s speech uniquely captured the event’s emotions in digestible snippets without awkwardly breaking up its written text.

The tool’s original developer is Medill School of Journalism senior Tyler Fisher, who originally conceived SoundCite to improve the way online music articles weaved sound clips and their text together. An arrow appears next to the words that are animated by the audio, and a moving progress bar slides across the text, so you stay focused on reading. At just over a year old, SoundCite has not only made its appearance in the music-sphere, like at WBEZ Chicago Public Radio, but has also entered other types of newsrooms, like the Washington Post, JSOnline, and Education Week. Startups aimed at content publishers are growing in numbers, with tools like Gui.de and SpokenLayer and Readrboard offering to give publishers easy access to the kind of functionality that users have come to expect from other parts of the social web.