OJR: The Online Journalism Review

RockyMountainNews.com launches 33-part, multimedia series

This past week, we published the first five chapters of a 33-part series called The Crossing. The story follows the longterm implications of how a 1961 school bus crash affected 17 survivors and the families of the 20 children who died.

Submitted by Mike Noe

Posted: 2007-01-29

I wanted to share our latest multimedia project with you. This past week, we published the first five chapters of a 33-part series called The Crossing. The story follows the longterm implications of how a 1961 school bus crash affected 17 survivors and the families of the 20 children who died.

The online version will eventually offer 22 videos, 33 slide shows and scores of supporting documents. Two video producers worked alongside our reporter and photographer in reporting the series. The result has been some of the best video we have produced.

We combined the story, photos and video in one presentation to encourage our users to check out all of the elements. The Crossing was the number one story on RockyMountainNews.com last week, generating more than 96,000 page views. Our statistics also showed that half of the visitors spent more than 3 minutes with each day’s installment. A quarter of them spent more than 5 minutes with the presentation.

Mark Wolf, our “Web host,” conducted live chats with reporter Kevin Vaughan and also invited our users to comment on the series in his blog. Victims of the tragedy are taking part in the discussion and several readers have left notes for the reporter about the series.

I’d enjoy hearing what you think about the presentation. You can see it at http://cfapp2.rockymountainnews.com/crossing/index.cfm.

Responses:

From Laurie Niles on January 29, 2007 at 11:22 PM

It's visually gorgeous and does draw the reader in. It gives that Greeley-like feeling of expansive geography and isolation; I think that very remoteness is part of what makes it seem impossible that something so dramatic -- 20 children in a bus colliding with a train going 80 mph -- could happen there.

I have to say that I'm rather overwhelmed by 33 parts. The way I experienced the piece was a bit disjointed, trying to piece together which was then, which was now, whether the writer was speaking for himself or his subject. One makes a leap when asserting what is in another man's head! Old-fashioned reporter ethics, perhaps, but this jumped out at me.

From Jeff Wilson on January 30, 2007 at 11:21 AM

This worked well for the RMN last year when one of their top reporters did a huge special on the families of slain Iraqi soldiers and Marines. The reporter tagged along with a Marine Captain as he traveled the Mountain west and delivered the terrible news to relatives.

They put audio/video etc upon the website, and the reporter's work was one of the "Best" newspaper articles in the ASNE's 2006-2007 book.

For me, the website loads a bit slowly, but that's probably just because it's getting a lot of hits today.

From Jessica Roberts on February 1, 2007 at 9:27 PM

I also thought the site was visually wonderful, but the enormous amount of information made it overwhelming. It is a great example of what is possible in multimedia coverage as it blended various elements to tell the story -- it exemplifies the buzz word at Annenberg: convergence.
How long did it take to put together the whole site? I can see this approach working well for a long-term story, such as an election, the war in Iraq, or disasters (Hurricane Katrina, the 2004 tsunami). I wonder, though, whether that type of coverage is possible for most news networks to pull together for spot news, "breaking news" stories or just daily news.
And why aren't more news sites doing this? (Memo to latimes.com: here's how to boost your site's usefulness and appeal)