Critique of "Afro-Latin Americans" article

“Afro-Latin Americans”
http://www.miamiherald.com/multimedia/news/afrolatin/multimedia/map.html

The above multimedia package was designed by Marco Ruiz and researched by Monika Leal, both associated with The Miami Herald. The package was created to inform readers that nearly 25 percent of Latin Americans have some form of African ancestry. The inter-racial crossing is largely attributed to the slave trade, when over 10 million African slaves were brought to Latin America. This article not only includes an interactive graph, but slideshows with audio and print articles highlighting various aspects of the Afro-Latin race. To a region like Miami, with a high Hispanic population, this story would be especially interesting to The Miami Herald’s readership.

The intended purpose of the multimedia article is to show readers how Afro-Latin Americans are highly discriminated against in their home countries, despite being a consideration amount of the population in each country examined. By clicking on a specific country, the interactive graph in the beginning of the presentation allows readers to see what percentage Afro-Latin Americans are of the population. The pop-up boxes also give readers an introductory sense of how black descendant are treated within the countries. For example, the pop-up box from Brazil describes a 15.4 percent illiteracy rate among blacks and nearly 50 percent less wages than whites of the country. The discrimination is further explored in the written segments, part 1-5, which cover the lack of anti-discrimination laws in Nicaragua, Brazil and Honduras, as well as a lack of racial pride among woman in countries like the Dominican Republic. The discrimination issue is further exemplified in the multimedia slideshows, which show how Afro-Latin activists Latin America are fighting for civil rights.

The presentation is divided into three types of sections: the interactive graph to give pop-up boxes about individual countries, written articles about issues in several countries and a multimedia section with multiple slideshows of Latin American countries. Immediately upon clicking on the click to the article, a very brief introductory pop-up box comes onto the screen to give a few sentences about how Africans came to Latin American. After clicking out of the box, readers can click on the red numbers on the individual countries to read about the percentage of blacks compared to other races. After interacting with the map, readers discover a list of subtitles below the border that say “Overview” and “Part 1-5.” If readers click on any of these links, they will find articles about various discrimination issues against blacks in the Latin American countries. For example, Part 1: “Afro-Latin Americans: A Rising Voice” describes the poor living conditions of blacks in Nicaragua. According to the article, only about 20 percent of the country’s 477,000 blacks have clean water and between 4 and 17 percent have electricity. The rest of the article describes how the movement to change the status of blacks in Latin American is growing and improving. To the left of the articles in each section are links to related articles and slideshows. The “Afro-Latin Americans: A Rising Voice” article has links for an article about Garífuna, a small community in Honduras and slideshows with audio and picture about Honduras and Nicaragua. The other parts follow a similar format, giving a full experience and overflow of information about each featured country. If readers want to watch the slideshows without the text, they simply click on the multimedia subtitle to click on any of the visuals.

I feel that the strongest aspect of the presentation is the complete coverage of all aspects of media: detailed text, an interactive graphic and photographs to help viewers visualize the articles. Without the text or slideshows, the presentation would greatly lack appeal. The staff at The Miami Herald understood that a graphic with pop-up boxes would not be nearly enough; detailed articles were needed to greater emphasize the purpose: to tell the public about discrimination of the Afro-Latin Americans. Reading full accounts of black citizens in Latin American countries as lower class fully bring the issue into the forefront for readers.

Despite the immense amount of information presented in the article, I felt that it lacked an explanation of the various types of ethnic and racial groups in Latin American. For example, if you click on Columbia in the interactive map, it says the population is divided into whites, blacks, Mulattos, Amerindians, and mixed blacks and Amerindians. As a reader, I cannot get a true sense of which of these groups is discriminating against the Afro-Latin Americans. If you read through some of the articles, it will briefly describe some of the ethnic groups, but if you briefly want to know, that is too much information to sort through. An additional subtitle with descriptions of the other Latin Americans would be quite helpful.

Finally, I felt that the interactive graph at the beginning of the presentation should be smaller. I found that when I first looked at the article, I nearly passed over the links to the articles and multimedia because they were so tiny in comparison. I feel that it would greatly benefit the reader if the links were bigger and to the left of the graph, clearly pointing to the additional information. Despite minor complaints, I felt that this article included basically everything it needed in general. Not only was there an interactive and attractive graphic, but text, audio and visuals that all tie together, making this a genuinely fulfilling multimedia presentation.