When I volunteered to coach students producing a documentary multimedia Web site in Spain this past July, I harbored no delusions that I'd pass the days sipping sangria on the beach. I was a student last summer on a similar project, and the unparalleled learning experience taught me the true meaning of the phrase, "Multimedia never sleeps."

This year's project, "The Ancient Way," involved almost 30 students from universities in the U.S., Chile and Spain. An international faculty of journalism professors and professionals guided them through photo choices, audio editing, infographic design and more.

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The Ancient Way (www.theancientway.org)

We were based in Santiago de Compostela, the capital of Galicia, the northwest region of Spain known for its rocky coastline, Celtic heritage, and the Way of St. James, an ancient pilgrim route culminating in the capital. But the region is feeling the effects of modernity. Many young people will not take up the trades of their parents –- opting to work in factories instead of on family farms –- and our site shares the stories of the Galician people as they forge ahead in a world where age-old traditions are slipping away.

Teams worked around the clock for a month collecting content and producing the Web site. Armed with digital cameras, audio recorders and video cameras, students set out on foreign roads in search of their stories. Others hunkered down in computer labs, creating 3D animated graphics, designing pages and building the media player.

The journalism school at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has produced six of these projects abroad, including the award-winning Chilσe Stories, but this was the most ambitious yet. It was the first project to include an infographics team, which provided an added depth to the stories, but more content to manage in a short period of time. And the site would be viewed in three languages: English, Spanish and Galician.

These projects provide students with a cultural experience while challenging them to produce professional quality work on deadline, which is the vision of executive producer Rich Beckman. Beckman is head of the visual communication sequence at UNC's School of Journalism and Mass Communication and a past Poynter faculty fellow.

He said the projects also help build ties with international journalism schools and share stories that educate, inform and promote cultural understanding.

While I am an admittedly partial critic, I think these young journalists, with the help of their dedicated faculty, produced an extraordinary Web site that exceeds industry standards of excellence for multimedia storytelling. There is an underlying innovation to this project that deserves recognition.

Most online news sites use labels to distinguish different types of multimedia –- audio slideshow, video, gallery, interactive feature –- but we made a conscious decision not to differentiate between stories in this way. Beckman said labels get in the way and only confuse the viewer.

"We don't label stories as text, text with photo, text with graphic, etc.," Beckman said. "It is the content that is important, and we are just using the appropriate tools to best convey each aspect of content within each multimedia module."

We tried to move away from current multimedia storytelling models and craft one of our own called integrated multimedia storytelling. Rather than present content as separate pieces, all the assets –- audio, photographs, text, video, graphics, design and interactivity –- are integrated into one seamless story.

Screenshot of www.theancientway.org

We looked at each story individually and decided how it could be best told using the tools at our disposal. We wanted content to drive the stories, not technology, with the end goal being a richer viewing experience for our audience.

Infographics director Alberto Cairo, professor of visual journalism at UNC and former director of online infographics at El Mundo in Madrid, said this is a landmark example for infographic reporters in particular.

"Readers love visuals and love to understand complicated stories in a few minutes, and if those explanations can be animated and interactive, that's even better," Cairo said. "But infographics today cannot be run as standalone assets. They have to be an integral part of the storytelling flow."

Associate producer and design director Mike Schmidt, an instructional media designer at UNC's Institute for Science and Learning, said the challenge of this storytelling model lies in creating a seamless product. "The story as a whole can suffer if the disparate elements are not integrated carefully," he said.

Obtaining this seamlessness involved lots of extra production hours, and we didn't always pull it off as flawlessly as we would have liked. Our highly skilled programming team devoted considerable time building the site interface and backend to support our storytelling model, and worked hard to make sure each story flowed right.

Programming director Tom Jackson, a graduate student at UNC's School of Information and Library Sciences, built the versatile media player we needed to showcase diverse elements in a customized fashion.

Everybody was really excited to watch the first finished story as it shifted from video to infographic, then jumped back to video and ended with an interactive game –- all in one seamless stream. Sure, it would have been a lot easier to show the story as separate elements, but this was so much cooler.

Screenshot of www.theancientway.org

Can newsrooms utilize this same integrated storytelling model? Beckman said the industry is still evolving and it's a challenge for most newsrooms to employ the level of programming we attempt for our projects.

He noted, though, that many industry leaders are already doing this, including MSNBC and The New York Times. "Give the industry a few years to catch up and you will see more integration," he said.

Schmidt said this project was an effort to present an alternative to the common way of thinking about multimedia storytelling. "I think this is an obvious direction for journalism," he said. "We're just beginning to learn how to do it."

More importantly, the integrated storytelling model does a better job of communicating. Viewers don't have to click away from the video to view the infographic. Fewer clicks mean fewer opportunities to lose viewers, and a stronger likelihood that your audience will stick with you through the entire story.