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.

Connecting the dots

The lead story in The Observer today was a good old-fashioned pork-barrel project with a new twist. The Associated Press Managing Editors Association created a project to train reporters in how to use new online research tools through the Sunlight Foundation. The Observer's McClatchy's Lisa Zagaroli participated and reported on government pork projects in North Carolina.
It's a step forward for the group of newspaper leaders, especially since the Sunlight Foundation is led and funded by new media people: Craig Newmark of Craigslist, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, and Pierre Omidyar, founder of EBay.
We live in interesting times.
And a second connect-the-dot: The Observer's Forrest Brown spoke Saturday in Greensboro for the Society of Professional Journalists' Citizen Journalism Academy, about reporting and writing basics. I haven't talked with him about it yet, but have it on strong (Twitterfriend) authority that he was good and funny. I can't wait to hear more.
So connect the dots, and think about the nonprofit, nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation's mission. They seek to use:
“new information technology to enable citizens to learn more about what Congress and their elected representatives are doing, and thus help reduce corruption, ensure greater transparency and accountability by government, and foster public trust in the vital institutions of democracy. We are unique in that technology and the power of the Internet are at the core of every one of our efforts."

And another thing: A relationship button?

Mass Comm law 101

Remember that journalism law class you took? When was that? Where was that?
Ryan Teague Beckwith of Raleigh's Under the Dome offers a shop to get a tuneup.

How online journalists see themselves

Ryan Thornburg of UNC surveys online journalists in North Carolina, with a little help from Phil Meyer, Teresa Edwards and McClatchy's own Julianne Mulhollan.

A snippet, about the "Gannett" effect:

"Several panelists from Asheville ... contacted me to say they really didn’t work online. In their email signatures and in phone conversations, the job titles that they chose for themselves never included the online elements we found next to their names on the paper’s masthead. Among this group who declined to participate in the survey were people who I found had created online-only content for the Citizen-Times during the month the survey was conducted. I’m fascinated that despite what I perceive as obvious participation in the creation of online news, they still declined to self-identify as someone who worked primarily online."

Watch for more results at Thornburg's blog.

Go, Trevor

Trevor has five more days to get about 200 hits to keep an upward trend at Fantasy Baseblog.
The math looks like he'll hit it. Help by giving him some blog love.
And yes, this is unabashed PR for a colleague. Isn't that what the social web is for?

How to keep eating and doing journalism

As gloom and gossip bloom, take a few moments to wander over to Global Vue, a blog for a class at UNC fall semester, and read and think about some other ways that journalism can pay for itself.

See how easy it is to add Twitter to a site?

OK, so I'm coming a bit late to this whole Twitter thing and am still trying to figure out its appeal potential ...

But, imagine if every reporter were texting updates from meetings, from crime scenes ... from the newsroom. And all those Tweets were collected on a page on Charlotte.com ... Talk about the latest in breaking news!

We all know frequent updating draws users back to news Web sites. With enough of the right people contributing to a Twitter stream, you can't get much more frequent than this...

Thoughts?

Hat tip to WCNC's excellent Twittering of the election. But does it just have to be for "big nights"?