Q&A with Travis Fox, video journalist for washingtonpost.com

September 16, 2006 by

Shortly after Travis Fox joined the Washington Post in 1999 as a photo editor, he picked up a video camera that was sitting in the newsroom and slowly began producing a few pieces for the Web. Not that anyone was watching these videos–not even the Website’s editors. The joke in the newsroom at the time, says Fox, was that he didn’t want the executive editor to watch the videos because the pieces would invariably crash his computer and he worried that might dampen the editor’s laissez-faire attitude.

“It was a great place to learn and to let my own style come to forefront,” says Fox. “I didn’t have deadline pressure, I didn’t have editorial pressure, I didn’t have many viewers.”

How times have changed. Fox is now one of seven “Video Journalists” for the Washington Post. He has produced pieces out of the Middle East, Asia, Europe and the United States, viewable here. This year, two of his pieces “Fueling Azerbaijan’s Future” and “Hurricane Katrina Coverage in New Orleans” are nominated for Emmy awards.


Travis Fox in 2004 reporting on tsunami damage to a Sri Lankan fishing village.

OJR spoke to Fox about how the role of an Internet video journalist is evolving at the Washington Post and what makes compelling video for the Web.

OJR: You said that hardly anyone was watching videos on the Washington Post site at first. What was the turning point that led to the creation of a “video journalist” at the Post?

Fox: I think it was the Iraq war. And it was doing stories that are high profile enough that people couldn’t help but notice. That’s when the top editors both at the Website and the newspaper noticed. They had known me before, obviously, but this was a chance to show that in a high pressure, dangerous situations we can tell stories and we can do journalism that’s on par with the newspaper.

OJR: How were these videos different than those on television that they made the top editors want to nurture this media?

Fox: I can’t speak for them but the fact that it was different from television was not necessarily so important. It was the fact that we were doing it. And I think my style in general is different from some parts of television but not all. It’s not reporter driven and it’s not celebrity-anchor driven. That’s not to say that it’s not heavily reported and heavily narrated because a lot of them are. I would say the ones we did in the beginning were more different from television–they were more character-driven pieces, less narration. We still do those types of pieces as well but we mix it up with more heavily-narrated pieces.

OJR: What is your subject’s reaction to being in a multimedia presentation versus being in the print version of the Post? Is there still a preference nowadays?

Fox: I think when I say I am from washingtonpost.com and I have a video camera they automatically think Washington Post and they think video and the two don’t match up–much to their surprise. I think it depends on where you are. I do a lot of foreign coverage and I think abroad it is not as surprising as it is here in the States. But I think here especially, in the last year, Web video is becoming so common that it is surprising fewer and fewer people. I should also say that a lot of my pieces do air on television in different forms. So I always say both. I say that it’s for the Washington Post online but also for possibly for other places.

OJR: So do you frame shots differently for the Web and for TV, or do you work with the same material for both?

Fox: In terms of the production of the video, I think they are pretty close to being the same. You can make the argument that the video screen is smaller on the computer monitor, therefore we should shoot tighter. But shooting tight is a good technique, whether you are shooting for television or for film. People typically sit closer to their computer screens than to their televisions, so proportionally the Web video looks bigger. I don’t think it makes any difference.

In the beginning, there was the notion that you should have everything on a tripod to be stable because any sort of camera shake would cause the pixels to be refreshed, which would slow down your processor, which would slow down your computer. So that’s still a concern, if you are dealing with slower computers.

I would shoot it the same way, whether it was for television or whether it was for the web. I have a certain style and a certain way of shooting, that’s considered a Web style or Web way of shooting perhaps because that’s where I learnt how to do video. But it also works on television.

OJR: Do you cut it differently for TV than you do for the Web?

Fox: These are interesting questions. You know my friends who work for television tell me that I am so lucky because people actually click my videos. That means they want to watch them. Whereas their shows on television are in the background when someone is making dinner. And at the same time I am jealous of them because it’s a better experience when you are on your couch and watching it on television than when you are on your computer monitor.

So there are different ways of thinking about how to cut it. This is something we constantly talk about and we constantly deal. How tight and how fast moving to cut it? On television you want it to be fast moving because you don’t want anyone to click on their remote control and go to the next channel, right? You want to keep their attention all the time.

Whereas on the web you don’t want someone to go to a different Website. Obviously you want it to be tight and you want it to be fast moving. I don’t have the answers but it’s a different medium and it is interesting to
think of it in different ways.

OJR: What new ways of conveying a news story have you tried with which you were pleasantly surprised?

I think the key is always finding the right balance between the different media. So when to do a video? When to do some sort of Flash graphics? When to do panorama? What’s the combination? When to do a blog? And how to integrate them all? How to do that without getting completely overwhelmed by everything?

There are several projects that I think have been successful. Those would probably be ones where you took the various media and combined them in a way that was logical, using a blog for user feedback and conversation; using the panoramas to give you a sense of place; and using videos to give you a sense of people, the character, the location, and then combing the two to give you a full picture of the story. As opposed to just doing a video, just doing a blog, just doing a photo gallery. I think those are the most successful examples.

OJR: What new ways of conveying a news story have you tried that fell flat? Can you tweak it to make that idea work?

Fox: The project I am thinking of is both a success in some ways and a failure in others. I did one in Sri Lanka after the Tsunami. It’s using videos to capture the characters’ stories, panoramas for a sense of place and destruction, and a blog to update the stories that you initially got from the videos. In the beginning I feel like it was very successful in combining those media and telling the story, but at the same time this was one where we underestimated how much effort it would take to maintain the blog over the days and the months after the Tsunami.

OJR: So when you try something like that again or if you’ve tried something…

Fox: I’ll think twice about it…

OJR: …you’ll think twice about it. That’s a big issue: maintaining a blog.

Fox: Yeah, I think the lesson is that you just need to decide whether the story is worth that long-term work commitment or not. Or you see how it is for the first few months and you see what kind of readership you get and
then you decide what to do with it at that point.

OJR: Is there a model that has worked well that you plan to keep working with?

Fox: My job now is really to do evergreen projects. I’m not really doing news. I covered the Lebanon war and Gaza this summer but typically I am supposed to be doing these evergreen-type projects. And I think that’s also a good model that we have tried in the past and we’ve liked so much that it is now kind of institutionalized.

These projects are thematic in nature. The themes will be reoccurring in the news. The themes, the issues that have been in the news, and will be in the news over and over again. The nuclear issue, and Iran, groups like Hamas or Hezbollah, for example. I did a piece a couple of years ago on the fence in the West Bank that Israel is building. This is an issue that’s in the news over and over and over again. The piece had stories from each side of the fence, panorama photos, and a Flash graphic showing the route of the fence.

And now every story the Post has about the fence (we have had several and we will continue to have several in the future) this project will be linked to them This project gets traffic over, and over, and over again. Traffic on the web is not like a subscription to a newspaper–the same people reading it over and over again. You are going to get new traffic from different places constantly. Because this project is a couple of years old, our regular users have already clicked on it but the new user who are coming in to the new story from Yahoo or from Google are going to click on it. And it is going to draw traffic and it’s going to give depth to the article. Now I am setting out in the next year to do these types of projects that are reoccurring themes that are in the news.

That’s not the nuts and bolts but that’s an example of trying something that has worked well. This Israel fence story is more than two years old and it continues to get good traffic and that’s something that we noticed. So that’s essentially a good model–not covering news on a day in and day out basis but the kind of stories that have legs and can go on for several weeks, several months, several years even.
OJR: You started with photography and moved on to video. How do you think your role is likely to evolve over the next five years?

Fox: I am content with video. Video is where I have made my mark. Video is what I want to do. I am not interested in doing still photography. There are many gifted still photographers out there. But it’s more difficult for single individuals to produce videos from start to finish because traditionally television news has worked in a crew. It is a more unusual for people like me who produce video from start to finish. I’d like to keep exploring that. This video journalism vision of single authorship throughout the process will get you some really interesting results. And as the technology gets simpler, if more individuals shoot and cut video–like they create writing–you are going to get a lot more interesting styles, and a lot richer body of work as a whole. I am very committed to that process.

OJR: What about the role of video journalist within the paper and Website?

Fox: I think I it will be much more integrated with traditional news reporters at the newspaper. I think we will be working much more collaboratively. I would guess we are going work on their stories or work with them to develop their stories into video. We have had some successes with that but we haven’t nailed that down as much as we really need to find the right working relationship. We don’t want them to turn into television reporters, obviously. I don’t want to produce that type of video and we want to give them the time that they need to do newspaper reporting. But we want to be able to leverage their expertise into the video.

I would say the direction we are headed in is that I will continue to do my own video reporting, but at the same time probably become more integrated with the newsroom–both the dotcom and Post newsrooms are becoming more integrated.

I did a piece in Azerbaijan with Philip Kennicott, a Post reporter, that was nominated for an Emmy. That’s an example a successful collaboration. We didn’t actually work together ever– even our trips didn’t overlap to Azerbaijan–but we compared notes and we shared the reporting. He went first then I went second. He wrote the script and I voiced the script and then I fed him my reporting and he fed me his reporting and we came up with something. So to me that’s the kind of collaborative effort I am talking about.

OJR: Are there compelling pieces like that that you decide not to cover? Not because of time, not because of budget, not because of the topic itself, but that a new media treatment just won’t be compelling.

Fox: No, I think there is always a compelling way to cover a story. But I don’t think that that means in video. Certain stories are visual and good for video. Katrina, the tsunami, they are good in video and photographs. Certain stories are better in video but not so good in still pictures. And some stories are tough to do in either medium. For example, in Lebanon we did a series on Hezbollah during the war and this wasn’t war action stuff, this is more of a behind the scenes of Hezbollah as an organization. I think in video it worked out really well because you get a sense of the characters and how the organization works. But in still photographs that would not be a very compelling photo essay. In southern Lebanon I was working with print reporters and photographers and it was really interesting to see where the focus of each of the group lied. I chose to go do video somewhere in the middle between the print reporters and still photographers.

A story about the new budget on Capital Hill would probably be tough to do in either stills or a video. That would be more of a print story or a Flash graphics story.

OJR: The Azerbaijan piece, did it appear on Web only?

Fox: Online and it also appeared on television on PBS’s “Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria”, it’s on the podcast, it appeared as an article in the newspaper. This is convergence. We are leveraging this over multiple platforms.
We said that in some ways we are functioning like a production company. We are producing videos for the Website, for our podcast. We were also selling them to television.

So this is an example where we sold it to television, which is not only a very good money maker, it essentially pays for the expense of going abroad and covering the stories which aren’t cheap. It is also a way to market our content to a lot of different audiences. Something like ten times the people that saw it on PBS saw it on the Website and at the end of the show Zakaria said something like “for more of this video go to washingtonpost.com.”

OJR: Collaboration in the newsroom is more of a journalistic change. What impact do you expect from technical changes?

Fox: What’s really going to be exciting is the Internet as a delivery means not as an end media. For us to really compete with television, we have to get our videos to your living room television screen. Because no matter how good it is on the computer it’s never going to be as good as when it’s on your TV or when it’s on your high-definition plasma screen, right?

So I think in the next five years–or even sooner than that–we are going to see the Internet used as a means of delivery to compete with cable TV. We are already seeing that it’s technically possible. Getting Internet content delivered to your television–either through your TiVo or through the new Apple set-top box that is going to come out or through whatever box–and watching it on television in the same high definition quality as cable television, that is exciting. So think about that when you are setting your TiVo or whatever box you are going to be using in the future, you select a Survivor episode, news reports and the latest Washington Post documentary. And the next day, when you sit down to watch them, they will all look the same but one of them came through the Internet and two of them came through cable TV. But for the user it won’t matter.

I think a glimpse of that is through our video podcast that’s on iTunes. That’s kind of the first glimpse–it’s a small screen but it’s essentially the on-demand television that we need to get to. We sell the advertising against that. So we reap the benefits of that and we put it up and users download it and do whatever. But you know as soon as we make the jump onto your television, that’s really when things are going to get exciting. The industry is excited about Web video not because it’s good content or unusual content or it’s better than television, but because of the advertising. Advertising on television in general is lucrative and to be able to capture that type of lucrative advertising by bypassing the juggernaut of cable or broadcast is very exciting.

It’s not just for me or for newspaper sites, it’s for people running their blogs. You can now essentially be your own broadcast station. It’s another one of those milestones that we are crossing on the Internet.

Sandeep Junnarkar is an associate professor at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism (The City University of New York). He has reported for @times, the New York Times’ first presence on the Web, as well as News.com. If there is a new media journalist who you would like to see featured in a Q&A, email Sandeep here.

Filed Under: Reporting Tagged With: , , ,

Convergence personified

August 13, 2006 by

[Editor’s note: Sandeep Junnarkar is an associate professor at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. He is also the editorial director of Lives in Focus, a website that uses video, audio and photographs to present the voices and stories of those who are rarely given space or time in traditional news media. Junnarkar is joining OJR as a contributing writer, offering a monthly Q&A which visits online reporters, producers, editors and executives to talk about the challenges they face, and the ideas they are experimenting with, as they try to compete in an ever-changing media marketplace.]

This month: Angela Morgenstern, Supervising Producer MTV News Overdrive

Angela Morgenstern has the unusual experience of hopping back-and-forth for the past decade between television and online journalism and landing in, perhaps, the best of both worlds.

Now 31-years-old, Morgenstern began her journalism career as a television producer for PBS’s “The Democracy Project” and later for “Livelyhood” where she served as a producer and then managed online projects. At the height of the dot-com boom, she briefly left journalism to work at a political action group which was attempting to harness the Internet for outreach. In less than a year, Morgenstern returned to the newsroom and worked for several years as an on-air reporter and producer for different PBS shows like “Springboard” and “Frontline/World.” She also had a stint with PBS Interactive.

In early 2005, Morgenstern joined MTV Networks and is now the supervising producer for digital products at MTV News. MTV News, however, is not all song and dance. Between coverage of Ashlee Simpson, Outkast and Christina Aguilera, the news division even managed to be nominated for an Interactive Emmy for its broadband coverage of the 2005 Pakistan earthquake. “The path of my career has been going back and forth from TV to online until the point I’m at today which is really a true convergence of the two,” says Morgenstern. “My career reflects this buzzword, convergence, where TV and online are not so separated anymore and you really need to understand multiple mediums to succeed.”

OJR recently spoke to Morgenstern about how to navigate this converged world to produce compelling journalism.

OJR: You’ve been back-and-forth for sometime. How and when did you transition to online journalism?

Morgenstern: I was working in San Francisco as an associate producer for a PBS Television series called “Livelyhood” which at that time was about ordinary and extra-ordinary American working people and of changes in the work place. This was right at the tip of the “dot-com” boom and I just became interested from a content perspective in material that we were not using and in this thing called the “Web.” So frankly, without having a particular expertise, I started to question what we put up and asked if we could put up more–thinking about what parts of stories might make for good web content. It was up to the producers as to how we utilized that space.

As I moved forward in web production, I was fortunate enough to work for a series [Frontline/World] that really understood the importance of original content for the Web. The series combined what I consider to be the best standards in journalism with the opportunity to experiment in new platforms and with the idea that we could bring new voices to public media. I was actually lucky enough to build the Frontline/World site from the ground up and for that we really put an emphasis on this idea that original stories could find a home on the Web and you could break important news and tell stories in an important way online.

OJR: Tell me about where you are now, MTV News Overdrive. What do you know on a daily basis?

Morgenstern: I moved to MTV a year and a half ago where I am now the supervising producer for digital production for MTV news. I helped the staff at MTV launch what would become Overdrive, which is a broadband channel driven by this idea that the audience is getting its information in new ways and MTV wanted to be there. News was a big part of that.

My day-to-day at MTV: I’m overseeing the digital production–the technical and creative production–around programs. There are now two breaking news editions as well as all the MTV News specials that have a corresponding show on air or not. I am interacting a lot with people who are producing other channels for Overdrive.

OJR: What technical skills do you need on the job now and what skills have you acquired in your new role at MTV?

Morgenstern: I think a good way to approach that question is to consider the kind of people we bring on as opposed to me specifically.

I think in my role, the skills are more broad-based. There’s an incredible need to be able to handle a fast paced environment because not only are you dealing with an enormous amount of news daily, but you are seeing the product change constantly. You are seeing the audience’s habits change and you are seeing the technologies and the tools that are available to you change just as quickly.

So it’s really having an understanding of what different technologies can do for your news organization. I have to be able to analyze quickly and be able to work with my team to change on a dime when needed. Another broad skill was my television production background. I’d been in the field and conducted tons of interviews and followed different types of stories so I have an understanding of editorial issues. That makes it more comfortable when dealing with traditional television producers or print reporters because you can talk about the story and then figure out the best way to convey the story online.

In terms of specific skills, we have a smart team of people who are doing digital production for the news department. Almost everyone knows HTML, and is familiar with publishing in a database environment. Photoshop is an absolute must. In most cases they’re familiar with other Web languages. On the video side, they are familiar with as with non-linear video editing. In the beginning they might have familiarity with Final Cut or Adobe Premiere but eventually Avid Editing. That knowledge usually extends into audio editing and other things. So really specific skills are required, but what’s more important is sort of a propensity for new technologies and the ability to pick up new tools with very little training.

OJR: You went from an organization with a smaller budget to one with greater resources. Are you able to present content now that you weren’t able to before?

Morgenstern: Being part of a big structure is helpful. But I found that some of the entrepreneurial skills that we picked up because of need when you are working on a public television show or documentary are just as valuable in a big environment–like finding ways to optimize your pages for a search engines, or finding creative ways to recruit people to help you on a project or story. Those are similar regardless of whether you are in a big environment with lots of resources or sort of entrepreneurial smaller environment.

At MTV we are charged with the same mission as you would be at any smaller organization, like figuring out what you are going to do about podcasting, RSS feeds, wireless phones, and broadband.

OJR: Going back to the idea of limited budgets, how do you decide which news story will get the full Web treatment? Or is that now something that’s become part of covering stories: we are going to use video, audio, and send it on a cell phone?

Morgenstern: I think that figuring out the right formula for making those decisions is the holy grail of online journalism–or journalism in general. I don’t think that anyone has quite figured that out. When I was at KQED one of the executives there had a fantastic matrix that helped evaluate decisions about whether to do a particular program on particular platforms. I think that those formulas are still being worked out but can at least lead you to the right conversations.

At MTV, where we have weekly meetings in addition to the daily meetings where we decide what we are covering with cameras as opposed to sending a journalists with a note book. And at those meetings, we are conscious about what medium we are going to try to hit. Will this also be a broadcast? Is this something that will go into daily news on your phone? Is Video-On-Demand going to want this? Is International going to want this and all those things are considered at the outset.

Regardless of where I’ve worked, I have had to strike a balance as a new media producer between the new media newsroom and the traditional newsroom. You want to be an advocate for new media and get reporters enthusiastic about using new media to get to tell their story. So, if you do your job right, what happens is that you end up with a lot of people with a lot of ideas for new media. Then you have to ask how do you strike the balance between that enthusiasm where you want to do everything, use all your material that you didn’t use in one medium and where you want to make smart decisions and really be strategic about which element of the story you tell where and why and how you toss from one medium to another.

OJR: So you are not just using material off the cutting room floor for MTV’s Website? Is the content that is going on the Web simply material that hadn’t found a home in broadcast or print or has that practice and attitude changed?

Morgenstern: I think it has changed tremendously. We are more sophisticated about how we think about what we put online. I like to think of the unique attributes of each medium. It’s no longer a place where you place things off the cutting room floor. It’s now more about thinking about the particulars of the medium. I like to think of the unique attributes of each medium, as all of us in this industry do when we are planning projects. I tend to think of television or video as an emotional medium. Radio can be a very intimate medium and text is a great way to convey factual information. So what’s the online extension of that or the multimedia extension of that? In some context, it can be the right combination of those elements. In another context it might be the ability to give users choice and shape their own experience.

OJR: There is still resistance in some newsroom against harnessing the Web beyond shoveling print to the site. What advice do you have to get more support for new media coverage?

Morgenstern: I think that if you are in an organization that’s running up against some legitimate resistance–like a lack of resources or a lack of understanding about the possibilities– the first thing that online journalists or new media journalists can do… and this sounds obvious… is to understand how traditional reporters work. Understand the process and what the pressures are in the field and back in the newsroom when a reporter returns. With that understanding, you can really see the smart places to insert yourself or your team into that process. There are sometimes better places for the new media team to get involved. Sometimes it’s at the conception of the story or further along when ideas are honed to begin the discussion about what makes sense for new media.

When you are working with journalists it makes more sense to talk about the story and the goals of that story than it does it talk about specific technologies. You use the technologies later to illustrate what you want to convey creatively.

Another thing is providing examples of the kind of journalism you’re talking about even if they’re examples from other organizations. This can really help garner support from the people you need for support of your project. Once you have that support, you can try new things.

MTV is a big organization but in my limited experience, I have seen that a lot of projects are the results of groups of people who went out on a limb and experimented with ideas that they had and then presented later what they meant by those ideas.

OJR: Thank you Angela.

Suggest a new media journalist whose Q&A you would like to read. Email me at sandeep [at] livesinfocus.org.

Filed Under: Reporting Tagged With: , , ,

Redefining freelancing with entrepreneurial Web journalism

December 15, 2005 by

Sandeep Junnarkar is an award-winning journalist who writes frequently for The New York Times and was one of the original New York Times CyberTimes writers in the 1990s. A former New York bureau chief for CNET News.com, he is currently a visiting professor at Indiana University School of Journalism.

After a decade of writing articles about technology, I decided earlier this year to cover the impact of India’s new patent law on the medical treatment of the country’s HIV-positive population. The 2005 law fulfills India’s obligation as a member of the World Trade Organization to recognize and protect international patents. This Indian domestic law is likely to have global repercussions in the treatment of AIDS patients — especially those in the developing world — who depend on India’s generic drug industry to provide medications well below the prices charged by multinational pharmaceutical companies.

I was motivated in large part by my dissatisfaction with the superficial coverage of this issue by the American mainstream press. I wanted to work outside the traditional freelance options of magazines or newspapers so I could allow those affected by AIDS to describe their experiences in their own words. Their lives, I reasoned, should not be reduced to a traditional anecdotal lead and kicker.

Lives in Focus, a multimedia blog, was the result. The project is an effort to document the lives of families struggling to buy anti-retroviral drugs in order to keep a family member healthy, and to show the challenges that stigmatized AIDS patients face while trying to earn enough money to buy lifesaving treatment. My colleague, Srinivas Kuruganti, a photographer, took portraits, while I interviewed on video more than two dozen men, women and children.

While most blogs use stories published or broadcast by news organizations as fodder for discussion and debate, Lives in Focus required first-hand reporting. We gathered over 1,500 photographs and 13 hours of video, giving us enough material to update the blog every week.

Using a blog as a publishing platform, the Web provides the ideal outlet for freelance journalists seeking editorial control and unlimited space for text, photographs and video — and that’s especially good for showing people’s lives in detail as we wanted to do. But self-publishing posed two major hurdles. First, we need to raise the funds required for two to travel to and within India, to buy basic equipment such as digital audio and video tape, and to cover post-production costs. The second hurdle was generating an awareness of a blog that lacked the built-in readership or viewership of a news organization.

Below are the steps I used to raise funds and to increase traffic to this new site.

Fundraising for blogs

First came the rejections.

When I turned to foundations that might award grants for reporting such topics, I quickly learned that most grants are aimed at funding print projects. In addition, few of the foundations we approached understood the potential of blogs to disseminate information. But I suspect that will change over time.

Discouraged by the lack of support from traditional funders, I decided instead to turn to the Internet. I posted on my website a proposal that detailed the project, its importance and the budget required to complete the reporting.

At a time when the first impulse is to distrust an email solicitation and to automatically click on the “trash” or “spam” buttons, showcasing my credibility was paramount. At this stage in my career, I had more credibility as a “professional” journalist than as a blogger — and I emphasized those credentials in the proposal. I wanted people to feel confident that they were supporting a legitimate project rather than a new twist to the Nigerian email scam.

I linked to a page on my site that in turn linked to several of my bylines on the NYTimes.com site, and to a list of awards I have received. I also provided links to a page on the South Asian Journalists Association website that notes that I am a board member of the organization, and to the Indiana University School of Journalism site where I am listed as a visiting faculty member. I also posted links for Kuruganti’s recent work. Obviously, however, this fundraising process may not work for those bloggers with no “professional” credentials.

I opened a PayPal account to allow people to make instant credit card donations electronically to support the effort.  I also provided the mailing address for the IU School of Journalism (prospective donors could verify for themselves it was a legitimate address) for those who might be more comfortable sending a paper check.

I sent an email to numerous AIDS-related news groups and listservs informing them of the project. I also emailed friends and family, asking them to mention the project to other like-minded people. Hoping to avoid turning the email into a chain letter that spreads to the point of bothering people like spam, I asked everyone that the message not be forwarded to more than two people whom the sender knows personally. I also emailed several bloggers who I thought might be interested in the project.

Traffic to the proposal page rose slowly at first, but then became steeper as the emails and blog postings increased. Donations also began to trickle in. The first was for $50. Each day we received donations in the amount of $10, $15 and $25. The Indiana University School of Journalism also pitched in with a generous $1,500.

I created a bar chart that showed the amount we had raised in green and the amount we needed to meet our goals in red. I updated it every day hoping that as people saw the green grow taller and the red shrink, they might make a donation just to close the gap. I also had to underscore that the project would not be a tax-exempt organization, so donations would not be tax deductible. Perhaps forming a tax-exempt organization might have resulted in greater support.

This fundraising tactic unexpectedly underscored the growing symbiotic relationship between blogging and traditional news. On a Sunday night, Glenn Reynolds posted a link to the proposal on his widely read blog Instapundit.com. The next morning, I received an email from a producer at the BBC’s Five Live radio program requesting an interview. When I asked how he had heard about the project, he told me he read about it on Instapundit.com. Once the Five Live interview ran, the donations started pouring in. The amounts varied from as little as $10 to, on a rare occasion, as much as $500.

I also turned to an old trick — well-known to most freelancers — that involves approaching organizations and telling them you already have travel costs covered, then offering to do some reporting while there. In this way, I took on a job doing background research for a foundation interested in gathering some information on AIDS in India.

Within three months, the effort raised more than we anticipated and provided the funds necessary to complete the reporting of the project.

Exposure: Stumbling upon a blog

Once you accept the money, you enter into a pact with your supporters to prepare and deliver a compelling story. One of the inherent implications in this pact is that you will spread this material far and wide. How do you ensure that the general public actually reads the reporting on the blog?

One step was to find an appropriate name, based of course on availability of the domain name. Kuruganti and I wanted to insure that the name would remain relevant for future projects on other topics. We didn’t want to have to create yet another site later and have to rebuild a readership. This is analogous to Amazon.com and eBay choosing names that allowed them to expand their services without being boxed in by their branding, such as was the case with the likes of eToys.com and CDNow.com.

Using a domain-named blog (i.e., www.example.com) rather than one on a blogging service like Blogger.com or Live Journal.com is useful for two reasons. First, you avoid convoluted and difficult-to-remember website addresses like http://www.livejournal.com/community/newsworld/ or
http://free-newspaper-dvd.blogspot.com/. Some services like Blogger.com and Typepad.com allow you to domain map your individual address to their blogging service but the address everyone sees is your own. Livesinfocus.org is domain mapped to a blogging service.

Secondly, having a blog at your own Web address might help generate credibility. Howard Rheingold, the author of “The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier,” told me for a New York Times article that it shows that someone is more invested in their blog. He added, “They are hanging out a shingle as being an expert or maven on a particular subject.”

Google, of course, cannot be left out of the discussion these days. Rahul Bhushan, a graphic designer who provided some advice when I was building livesinfocus.org, noted that search engine optimization is complicated but “there is a voodoo science to getting high search engine rankings and lots of traffic.” To build a strong, Google-aware site, he recommended avoiding domain forwarding (different than domain mapping), using strong descriptive URLs, titles (the text that appears in the browser bar) and Meta Tags.

While I have followed part of his advice (providing full titles such as “Lives in Focus: Condoms and moralities”), I have yet to create clearer URLs. The site currently has URLS like “http://www.livesinfocus.org/voices/2005/08/ambulance_ride.html” but Google search would prefer
something like “http://www.livesinfocus.org/AIDS/ambulance_ride.html.” Nonetheless, Lives in Focus has moved to the top of the results for many Google searches for key words. Here are some of the actual terms that directed people to the site: “experience of ambulance ride,” “sexually neglected women and health” and “asian stereotypes.” What remains unanswered, however, is whether the people who stumble upon the site through a search phrase actually read the content.

The traffic at livesinfocus.org is steadily increasing as new websites add links to it each week. As far as I can tell, a posting on the Online News Associations CyberJournalist site led to our being linked to by European sites. A link on Indian blog DesiPundit led to a posting on Harvard’s Global Voices. As links to the site continue to proliferate, it seems that this form of media is taking on a life of its own.

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