Interactivity

Sometimes, you just have to "see" a story to get an idea of its scope. Merging video, text, photos and graphics gives such a richer story than just reading an article or watching a video.

StarTribune.com proved the power of this with its "13 Seconds in August" project looking at the I-35 collapse.

Now, the folks at DesMoinesRegister.com have shown us -- in ways made possible only by using the power of the Web -- the terrible damage to a town destroyed by a ferocious tornado. The Des Moines team has assembled graphics, photos, data and stories into an amazingly interactive package that's worthy of emulation.

Charles Apple, at VisualEditors.com, quotes the Registor's data editor, James Wilkerson, about how the project came together:

For base data about the properties, I scraped the county assessor’s web site using a perl script and put the results in a spreadsheet. There were about a thousand records for Parkersburg.

One of our graphics people, Kelli Morris, walked the route of the storm, taking pictures and talking to survivors. She then used the property spreadsheet to link to “after” pictures and built a library of survivor stories from her data and stories we published. We later went through all of the properties for which Kelli had pictures and downloaded the “before” photo from the assessor’s web site.

A parcel map shapefile was not available in a timely and affordable manner. So another graphics person — Craig Johnson — built his by hand. He then built the Flash display using some dummy xml data. Putting Kelli’s spreadsheet in mySQL, I built an xml page in php, which was used to fuel the final display.

The end product is something I believe is truly unique and visually powerful. It also shows what can be accomplished by graphics folks who understand how to use data and think ahead about how to best weave it into their work.

Wonderful example of the power of merging data and multimedia.

Notes from the Intertubes

• The latest in photo manipulation: content-aware resizing. And I thought Photoshop's rubber stamp tool was cool...
  
  


• Over at VisEds, Robb Montgomery and David Dunkley Gyimah post a clip on what it takes to be an "interactive multimedia video journalist." Whatever you want to call it, it's a pretty cool clip (imagine a news segment produced by the director of "Se7en." Much different from anything you'd see each night on the TV news. But is something like this feasible in a world filled with deadlines?
  
  


• Given that we're in the midst of a redesign, I'm surprised there hasn't been more discussion here (or even in my nook of the newsroom) about how the Merc is going about its redesign. I like the idea that they're trying to make things transparent, opening up the discussions, etc. I'm not sure I like the three-section idea they're going with. But desperate times do call for desperate measures. What do y'all think?
  
• Here's the Merc's Rethink site ...
• And the blog about the redesign (which features a lot of talk about "how to stay innovative").
  
• There's an interesting Google Groups thread.


• Finally, I'm not sure who to credit, but there's a pretty cool (and helpful) Google Maps mashup of Mecklenburg's missing people. Wonder if we could use these sorts of features as a springboard to a full-out crime map a la Raleigh or Chicago. Now, we need to get advertisers on board to sponsor these sorts of Web features. With all the investment we've made in video, why do we still not have ads accompanying the videos? I'd much rather watch those than have to deal with one of those accordion ads that floats down from the top of a page, or from that annoying guy who pops up at the bottom of the home page and starts talking to me.

Travel and learn vicariously

A challenge over the next few days: Walk away from boring football on that other screen and go read the personal journals of some traveling Charlotte Observer folks. These are personal sites not affiliated with The Observer. You'll get lots of inside baseball but also travel vicariously.

From Cambridge
Mary Newsom is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, writing about her Nieman time. She's getting to hang out with people like Tom Fiedler, former editor of the Miami Herald, and she's continuing to study urban design and transportation while walking to class. Her husband, Frank Barrows, former m.e. at The Observer, is studying sports statistics (surprise, surprise). And daughter Maggie is Live Journaling (surprise, surprise), and jealous that her mom gets to read "Pride and Prejudice" for class.

From Cuernavaca
Reporter Deborah Hirsch is writing and posting photos about her time as a Rotary International scholar.
Blow some stereotypes by reading about Yom Kippur in Mexico. She's using Wordpress and posting lots of photos (hint, hint, Mary). She's also occasionally sending dispatches to Observer blog Enterese Charlotte, like a report with photos on the recent floods.

Reader submissions from activists

When should news organizations display reader-submitted photos from activists? When should we link to outside websites affiliated with specific causes? Can we institute some common policies that approach visuals, words and links the same way?
How can we find the time to research any conflicts of interest from readers making submissions and check their credentials? Should we?
And what can we learn from how such activist sites are using technology?

The Rainforest Action Network targeted Bank of America in Charlotte for an action Tuesday, with protesters climbing one of our city's ubiquitous cranes, dangling precariously after posting a large banner that made great visuals. The Charlotte Observer's online staff smartly solicited readers for photos and video of the very public event, likely increasing hits by making a slideshow to accompany a story.

The story did not link to the Rainforest Action Network's website, which explains in detail why it is targeting Bank of America. In the past, such a link would likely be seen as crossing over the boundaries of reporting and publicity.

However, on the visual end of things, we included a photo by Luke Smith of RAN in our slideshow of reader-submited photos. It was one of the better photos, silhouetting the banner and crane against a cloudy, pink-tinged sky. Very similar photos -- if not the same ones -- are posted on the RAN's Flickr group, shot by ranflickr. (One of them is on this post, under a Creative Commons license). It's unclear how much Photoshopping went on to enhance the sunrise, if any.

Other reader-submitted photos did not identify whether contributors had affiliation with the network.

So the questions remain: When is it right to link to an outside site that is seeking publicity? When is it right to include visuals submitted by readers with an agenda? How do we determine whether those readers even have an agenda when we have limited resources?

I don't know the answers; I do know that policy should be clear and apply in a logical way to words, links and visuals.

Many readers are submitting amazing fire photos from California. Our policies should be clear for such catastrophic events in the future as well. Can we make sure we avoid any unintended consequences, such as volunteer firefighters getting sidetracked by gathering photos and videos? How can we make sure submissions aren't Photoshopped beyond our internal policies? Should we care?

What else can we learn? I'm awestruck by activists' use of the Internet to distribute visual PDF documents to support their causes, map their plans and build their networks. I hope we've marked Nov. 16 and 17 on our newsroom calendars to be on alert to more publicity-seeking RAN events, since they're telling us about their plans on their website. I hope we talk about about policies on covering such events in advance.

Carolina wins SNDies

UNC's photojournalism program gets honored through the SNDies online multimedia journalism again.
Mindy McAdams has the headlines and links. UNC's dean of the j-school, Dr. Jean Folkerts, visited The Observer recently and expressed a wish that the great work from the program would have a wider audience. So go visit.

We're all journalists now

"Journalism is an endeavor, not a job title; it is defined by activity, not by how one makes a living, or the quality of one's work. Although we are not all engaged in the practice of journalism, any one of us can be if we want to. In that respect, we're all journalists now."
--"We're All Journalists Now: The Transformation of the Press and Reshaping of the Law in the Internet Age," by Scott Gant, available to read online free at Google Books.

Dan Gillmor said the same thing in a Wired article with the same title three years ago. His book, "We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People," avoided the Us vs. Them arguments so prevalent these days.

The difference now: Gant's book sits on prominent shelves in major bookstores. Friends, neighbors, politicians, P.R. people and children of journalists understand that a major shift has occurred in the journalism force. We can all be spies on Stalkbook, otherwise known as Facebook, and we can all be journalists. It has to cause uncertainty among those who count on journalism for salaries, and for those who worry about who is being granted and denied access to news. See photographer Gary O'Brien's thoughts from the Minneapolis bridge story in an earlier posting by Leslie.

At the same time, as business and government make access more difficult for a dwindling number of professional journalists, it's heartening to know that others are accumulating skills. A firefighter with a camera might get a shot that the photographer from the paper is forbidden access to; employees of a contractor delivering soldiers' bodies from Iraq get shots heard around the world despite government rules. They lose their jobs, but tell the story.

The amateurs will make many missteps. We all have. But it makes me wish for a "master journalist" designation, much like many communities have master gardeners. In exchange for further training, the master gardeners volunteer by spreading their knowledge in the community. Each one, teach one.

About the photo: The photo is from Flickr, and is of Maurits Burgers, a vlogger with xolo.tv and also a beta tester for Joost. He has an interesting video of a Flickr meetup in the Hague, Amsterdam, in the top 10 videos at his site. It's called "1st haags bakkie," poorly translated as "first CB-set in the Hague."

Flickr and the MN bridge, part ii

I sent a few of the photo editors the link to the bridge collapse slideshow on Flickr. Gary O'Brien, photo editor and tech guru, had an interesting take on the photos. While I was completely amazed by the quality of the photos that were posted by average joes, he pointed out that there may have been issues around media access. Gary wrote:

"Judging from their surroundings and the taglines, I'm guessing the majority of these weren't taken by citizen-journalists. I think this is mostly the work of a couple of firefighters, first responders or their friends - someone who has access to places the media isn't allowed.

This is increasingly a problem across the country - often, media photographers (as we know from past experience) are harrassed, while non-journalists are left alone or even allowed special access. A recent local example is the funerals of the two slain policemen - a fire department photographer had prime access, even to the point of creating a distraction to the mourners, while I was 300 yards away. We never saw those photos, nor did the public. ...

It makes me uncomfortable that we're now cut out of the equation in these situations and the best photos from the event are being made and edited by non-journalists who are public servants or their friends. They have a dog in the hunt - we won't see anything but what they choose.

I would like to see the work trained professionals could have done given this level of access. So would the rest of the world. "

Citizen Journalism and the MN Bridge

Good summary from Cyberjournalist.net on the citizen journalism that was going on around the collapse of the Minneapolis bridge.

Highlights:

• Twitter was a very quick way for people to keep track of loved ones immediately after the collapse.
• Citizen journalists were surprisingly competent, both with quality and volume of reports and with the quality of photos and video. That's not to say that there wasn't bad stuff. There was.
• Photos are the best example of what the public can do. Check out Flickr (more on that in another post. A photo editor had some interesting perspective on those photos).
• "The eyewitness blog posts, the on-the-scene photography, and even the handheld and cell phone videos complete with their jerky motion and blurry, overcompressed images, all contribute far better than the mainstream media, to giving you a more accurate sense of being there."

Flickr and MN Bridge photos

I can't seem to look at enough photos of the bridge collapse in Minneapolis. When I looked at the Star Tribune site late Wednesday night, there weren't a whole lot of reader submitted photos or stories. Today's a different story. Not as many on the Strib or TwinCities.com sites, but Flickr's seeing all kinds of reader submissions.

Check out the Flickr slideshow.