Myth 1: You can’t support a publication on online advertising revenue.

When you hear this line, here’s what the speaker really is saying: “I can’t support my publication on my online advertising revenue.” Just because one manager hasn’t figured it out doesn’t mean that the solution doesn’t exist. If you want to seek foundation support, great. Go for it. But don’t fool yourself for a moment into believing that “non profit” means “no money worries.” Non-profit is a tax status, not a business model. You’ll still need to find sources of income, and in the non-profit world those sources come with many more strings attached than advertising contracts have.

Myth 1 is often followed in the same comment by Myth 1.a: You can’t make money on AdSense. Again, what the speaker is really saying is: “I can’t make money on AdSense.” People who say this typically make the lazy mistake of thinking that AdSense provides incremental revenue each time it displays on a website, so they stick it into every ad slot on the site they can’t sell themselves.

Well, if your local or small-scale advertisers didn’t want to pay to deliver their message on a page, what makes you think that the big industry pros who are placing multi-million-dollar AdWords campaigns want any part of those pages, either? Slapping ads on pages that don’t convert causes Google to cut your payment on pages that do. Adding extra AdSense slots to your site can actually decrease your revenue. The key to AdSense is to limit its deployment to pages that will attract interested readers who will click through to big-dollar advertisers. Never use AdSense as remnant inventory. Use it as a tool to attract ads to pages of interest to national and global advertisers you can’t reach with your local sales staff.

Myth 2: Readers have short attention spans, so you must break up your content.

Readers only appear to have short attention spans because the media revolutions of the 20th and 21st centuries have left them bombarded with content options. They must make decisions within split seconds about which content to read or watch and which to ignore.

But once they make the decision to try your content they will stick with it as long as they continue to feel that it’s worth their time. People with short attention spans don’t spend hours without interruption playing Minecraft or Madden. They don’t read 800-page Harry Potter books cover to cover or sit through three-hour Lord of the Rings movies. But all of those were huge hits.

Breaking up content into multiple pages and components simply reminds people at each interruption that they have a choice and could be doing something else. Invest your energy instead into ensuring that your work is relevant and rewarding to your audience. Then craft an awesome lead or visual to grab their attention.

Myth 3: Online journalism = big Flash graphics

Back in the days of shovelware newspaper websites, staffers in the online department had to justify their existence while trying to define to their print-focused bosses just what this Internet thing was good for anyway.

Enter the big Flash graphic. Hey, I had a lot of fun with Flash presentations that turned investigative reports into facile video games, too. But there’s so much more for us to do today. And with poor or nonexistent mobile support limiting the usability of Flash content, I’d question continuing to invest significant resources in Flash development. Perhaps the bigger problem is the attitude illustrated by Myth 3.a: Interactivity = multimedia. No, they are not the same. Interactivity is the inclusion of the audience in the creation of a work. Multimedia is the use of multiple media, including photos, video, audio, text and animation, in a work. That readers must decide what to click on in a big Flash graphic doesn’t make it any more interactive than a Web browser, which also gives readers click choices.

Myth 4: You need a big editorial staff to do great journalism online.

This myth is a favorite of old-media managers who are trying to define away their competition. The market is evolving. Let’s deal with it, instead of trying to pretend that change isn’t happening. Devotion to large staffs explains why so many publications find themselves believing Myth 1, too. Their problem is using old-media models to compete in a new-media space. (Across-the-board cutting isn’t the solution, by the way. Reinvention is.) One-person websites can do great work. They’ve even won Online Journalism Awards in the past.

Myth 5: Paywalls are the best (or only) way to paid content online.

Paywalls work when you offer (a) highly-specialized, unique content of tangible value to people (see Wall Street Journal or Cooks’ Illustrated), or (b) offer enough free passageways through the paywall that the pay scheme becomes a voluntary contribution system (see The New York Times).

Despite how great you think your content to be, if you’re reporting daily news, your site probably doesn’t fall under (a). And if you are not a beloved national brand, you probably won’t make much money from (b), either. If you really want to sell content directly to the reader, do as I’ve been urging for the past two months and look into eBooks, an established market where consumers have shown that they’re willing to pay for content at higher price points than many paywall schemes have offered.

Have fun at the conference. Go ahead and poke the trolls. And, as with any conference, don’t forget to give yourself a daily goal of meeting at least five new people, then talking with each one for at least a couple of minutes. You’ll learn more from those interactions than from listening to any of these old myths.

And I’m not the only person using Apple’s mobile devices who’s reading my various websites. The percentage of iPhone, iPod and iPad users reading my sites now stands just a hair under five percent, but it’s growing swiftly – up from just over one percent at the beginning of 2010.

So it’s as both a consumer and a publisher that I’ve been following the ongoing battle between Apple and Adobe over the latter’s Flash technology. Journalism educators should be watching this conflict, too, as they need to be making decisions today about what technology their students will need to be able to use in 2011 and years ahead. Today, I’m offering a collection of links for OJR readers who want to get up to speed on this controversy.

Apple’s mobile devices do not display Flash content and won’t be in the future, for reasons Apple’s Steve Jobs laid out in his famous open letter last month. As an iPhone user, that’s led me away from websites that rely on Flash and toward other, more mobile-friendly alternatives.

I’m finding myself doing the same even when I am using my laptop. Ten years ago, I adored Flash photo galleries. Today, watching stuff move on my computer screen isn’t enough to excite me anymore. I prefer user interfaces that allow me to skim and scroll through information quickly, lingering on that which I find interesting and moving swiftly past the rest.

I don’t like having to click and click and click to see something. Nor do I like having to wait for large presentations to load, or annoying transitions instead of instant display when I do have to click. (My wife late last year expressed frustration with Flash-driven websites more eloquently than I could, so – as I often do in life – I defer to her for further argument.)

My experience as a consumer is leading me away from using Flash as a publisher. Is that the case for other publishers? I don’t know. But I think that journalism educators would be smart to start thinking about alternatives to Flash-based presentations when working with students who are trying to find the best form for their online storytelling.

Apple and other platform developers are pushing HTML 5 as an alternative to Flash for displaying motion on webpages. Streaming Media and Wired offer some interesting background suggesting why Adobe’s not been able to convince companies such as Apple to embrace Flash on mobile devices.

But what is HTML 5 and how can it do what Flash has done so long? Roughly Drafted offers a great timeline for the development of HTML 5, tracing it back to the early days of hypertext markup.

Online journalism’s go-to source for Flash training long has been Mindy McAdams, so it’s no surprise that she’s stayed on top of this issue. She defends the continued use of Flash in journalism while offering a sound overview of all that HTML 5 can do. And in a follow-up post, she goes into greater detail about the use of HTML 5′s “canvas” tag, which provides the Flash alternative that many developers are beginning to explore.

Please take a look at these links. Even if Flash survives and thrives as a publishing tool into the 2010s, its use will be influenced by the development of HTML 5, potentially narrowing and sharpening what constitutes the “best use” of Flash.

The controversy over Flash, at the very least, provides journalism educators a teaching moment in which to reinforce the important message that no publishing technology is eternal, and that journalists must be prepared to either train themselves, or seek training, on new publishing tools and techniques throughout their careers.

Flash accompaniments to major investigative or feature projects have become a mainstay of newspaper.com departments over the past several years. But how well does the format serve the audience? What have we learned about storytelling in the Flash medium and what ought newspaper.com journalists be doing to help production conventions evolve?

So I asked Jean Buchanan, assistant managing editor/projects for the Post-Dispatch, to reflect via e-mail on this project, then take a look ahead based on what the paper’s staff, online and off, have learned from it.

OJR: What projects at other news organizations or websites inspired the design for this project?

Buchanan: For the multimedia part, we basically started from scratch. The primary online programmer on this project, Rich Rokicki, says he went into this kind of blindly without checking out too many things beforehand. The idea was to keep it very simple.

OJR: Do you think that this is the most ambitious online project that’s been done to date at the Post-Dispatch? What are some of the Post-Dispatch’s notable previous online projects?

Buchanan: Yes, this is the most ambitious online project we’ve done to date. Here are some of our previous projects:

The Blues project
http://stltoday.com/bluesmusic/

From Afghanistan
http://graphics.stltoday.com/online/afghanistan/

Feeding Africa
http://graphics.stltoday.com/online/africa/

Recovery and Salvation
http://www.stltoday.com/mds/news/html/365

Stan the Man
http://graphics.stltoday.com/online/musial/

OJR: What do you think is unique about the design and functionality of this project?

Buchanan: The “Meet the Squad” page was one of our favorites. The short video interviews with the recruits early in their training were very revealing and the flicking of each person’s pictures was engaging. The photos helped connect each of these recruits to readers because the treatment showed their humanity. We also put together a movie-type trailer that we released in advance of the project to generate interest. Once the project launched, that video became our introduction to all the videos.

OJR: What personnel and processes did the Post-Dispatch need to have in place in order to make this project happen?

Buchanan: A photographer comfortable with video and video editing, an online photo editor and Flash programmers. This project was a major test because the photographer, David Carson, had shot limited video before this, and this is the first project by Rich Rokicki, the primary Flash programmer. We learned that our processes need to be refined to ensure that we aren’t trying to change a lot of things in the last week or two.

OJR: Did you consider other formats before deciding on this design and functionality for this project? What were they and why didn’t they stick?

Buchanan: No. But after the project was over, we realized some things just did not work. For instance, viewing story copy in the Flash presentation did not work well. The stories should have been on their own webpage, not in the multimedia presentation. We’ve certainly learned more about the questions to ask next time.

OJR: How have readers responded to the project’s online presentation? What’s the traffic, especially in comparison with previous online projects and Post-Dispatch feature stories?

Buchanan: The traffic to this project is very strong, relative to other multimedia/interactive projects we’ve done in this manner, but it doesn’t show up strong in our pageview counts relative to other stories or features.

The one thing no one likes, and which we would definitely do differently, is the presentation of the story. Because of the limitations of the design, the window for reading the story is too small and people have complained about having to scroll so much. We’ve talked about a way to present the stories outside of the Flash next time up.

OJR: What’s the lesson that you’ve taken away from this project, that could be applied to others in the future to make them better?

Buchanan: We need to:

Figure out a more systematic online marketing campaign to get exposure for our work.

What is your reaction to the Post-Dispatch’s project, or to similar Flash news presentations? Please tell us in the comments.

]]> http://www.ojr.org/071018niles/feed/ 1 http://www.ojr.org/070621colombo/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=070621colombo http://www.ojr.org/070621colombo/#comments Thu, 21 Jun 2007 08:00:45 +0000 Sarah Colombo http://www.ojr.org/?p=1332 With more journalistic sites using games as an interactive way to package content, a $250,000 grant from the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge contest will help one nonprofit news site take these games to the next level.

A pioneer in this format, The Gotham Gazette has featured games about New York City policy issues that are an effective and entertaining way for users to weigh decisions and deal with consequences.

Online Journalism Review spoke to Gotham Gazette Editor-in-Chief Gail Robinson about what makes a successful game and why they work well for journalistic sites. Proving good games can be built on a modest budget, Robinson discussed why simplicity works but dumbing down doesn’t.

Online Journalism Review: How did you first become interested in utilizing games at the Gotham Gazette?

Robinson: In 2002 there were a lot of discussions about what to do with the World Trade Center site, so we created a game [Ground Zero Planner] to let people try to envision what they wanted the site to look like, and we got quite a good response.

We’re very focused on New York City policy, and we try to make the material accessible and interesting to people, not just to policy wonks or people who work for city government or bureaus. So our games [become] almost a story set to a game.

OJR: How do you actually conceptualize and build these games?

Robinson: As the editor-in-chief, I’ll be involved and we have a technical director and a design director. We don’t have an illustrator on staff and we’ll probably get [a freelancer] to do the technical work. But probably the writing and content will all be done in house.

OJR: How involved are the journalists on staff in the creative process?

Robinson: In the past we were very involved. [For example] The Budget Game sort of jumped out at us. The city was having a lot of problems after 9/11, so we thought it would be good to dramatize that by letting people make choices with the caveat that because the city was legally required to balance the budget, you couldn’t play the game unless you balanced it.

There were other similar games, so we did a lot of research and played a lot of other games. And then we came up with assignments and writers were assigned to various aspects. I’ve written a lot about education so [I researched] how much would it cost for x number of teachers.

OJR: What kind of content works well when it’s incorporated in this game format?

Robinson: Almost anything can work with a game if you have an intelligent way of flushing it out– I think it’s important to not be too complicated. That doesn’t mean you can’t have people making lots of choices, or you can’t have graphics and animation. But I look at some games where I feel like they’re asking me to do too many things, to play too many roles.

OJR: You do have a consistent thread of simplicity that runs throughout your games.

Robinson: What we tried to do was create something simple that would show people the story but would still be fun to play. I think you get a lot of that enjoyment partly through the animation and the way you present material.

The infrastructure game called Breakdown is basically a glorified quiz. But we had a wonderful clip of animation showing ways that New York was going to crumble under it’s own weight. And my son who was then 11 (who I don’t think has a lot of interest in New York City infrastructure) loved that animation and played the game several times and then he showed it to his friends. I think that indicates how you can build something straightforward and still make it a lot of fun.

OJR: Can games stand alone as a good storytelling technique or are they best purposed as part of a package?

Robinson: I think they can stand alone. For example, someone can make a decision about something like how to build an affordable housing project in New York. Just by playing the game, the user would probably learn about some of the tradeoffs and then could click on things for more information.

In our case the story is sort of behind the game, and it can be incorporated into the game itself or it could [stem from] a separate article. We’ve actually done both here. The Judges Game [was inspired by] the big probe of whether the bench is basically bought and sold. It had actually started out as an article and then we built the game.

OJR: The games on your site are effective because they help users to understand the consequences of their decisions.

Robinson: Right, that’s what we’re hoping for. That was a big thing with the budget game. People say I don’t have a cop on my corner and why is my child is in a class with 20 students and why are my taxes so high? And this is a really good way [to illustrate that] because you see the money go up or down. You see what things cost to make it clear that you couldn’t have both really low taxes and pay for really tiny classes.

OJR: Do users expect to win when they play games? What kind of reward do they expect aside from obtaining information?

Robinson: We haven’t had winning in these games. For example there’s obviously not a right way to plan Ground Zero, and if there is one the city still hasn’t discovered it. As for winners and losers, my sense is we would like to try both models and determine what people prefer. Part of the Knight project (in general) is to get information out there that other people can use.

On games where people don’t win we hope we’re offering an educational tool. We’re also hoping to get answers back from the readers that we will share with decision makers in the city and [incorporate the responses] into articles.

OJR: From your standpoint what are the technical challenges of building a news game?

Robinson: Knight wants everything to be open source here and that’s probably our biggest challenge. Most games are done in Flash and we can’t use Flash.

OJR: What are some of the games you’re considering now?

Robinson: All the games are pretty tentative at this point because we’ve always let the news dictate the games to some extent. We’ve always had a news peg on the games.

One of the games we’re considering is related to garbage in New York. It’s an endless issue here and it’s one of those situations where there’s no ideal wonderful solution.

In the course of this grant there will be two important political campaigns, one being the presidential and congressional race. Then as the grant ends in 2009 we’ll be right in the middle of electing a mayor, so we imagine we’d somehow want to address that.

OJR: Have you learned anything about what doesn’t work with these games?

Robinson: I think they do have to be clear. I think we have one game that didn’t work–The NYC Preservation Game–although I’m not sure all my colleagues agree with me. I think we could never really decide what exactly we wanted to do with it. We could never figure out if it was a quiz where you’re trying to decide what makes a building a landmark or if you’re playing landmark commissioner.

So it just seems to be that the game has to be well designed and have a clear purpose, whether you’re playing a role or making decisions.

OJR: How do you strike the balance between entertaining and the balance of delivering the news?

Robinson: I think you can do both [if] you keep information very solid. Don’t talk down to someone just because it’s a game. You can put people in interesting, genuinely challenging situations.

Also I think the visuals on these games are enormously important. You’re not debasing the information if you have really clever animation. You’re just engaging people in another way. If you put a really ripping, entertaining lead on a news feature you’re going to pull people into the news feature who might not normally want to read about that subject, and it certainly doesn’t downgrade or dumb down the information that follows.

OJR: How can indie web publishers add a game element to their site if they lack the budget and have technical constraints?

Robinson: That’s one thing I think that Knight is hoping we’ll come up with ways to do. [All the grant winners] are going to be writing, blogging and sharing ideas with each other about that. I assume the plan is to make those ideas available to people. I hope people can learn from what we did right and also learn from our mistakes.

]]> http://www.ojr.org/070621colombo/feed/ 0 http://www.ojr.org/070614paul/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=070614paul http://www.ojr.org/070614paul/#comments Wed, 13 Jun 2007 10:59:53 +0000 Nora Paul http://www.ojr.org/?p=1330 During the month of May we rented the Tobii eyetracker to conduct a variety of studies about online news design decisions. Different designs for displaying “breaking news” and supplemental links were tested. We also looked at three variations of New York Times story level pages (the difference was the intensity and variety of supplemental information links available.) All three of these studies need some time to digest the data (from both the eyetracking behavior recorded and the survey responses by the participants.) They will be reported on in later columns.

But as a little “add-on” study, we asked 34 of the people who did one of the other tests to also take a look at the Washington Post’s “Cuba by Korda” slide presentation.

We were interested in seeing how people decided to navigate through this package which included every possible option for moving through the slides.

There was a thumbnail view:

You could click on an arrow next to the photo to go forward or back. Or you could use the “Next” button.

There was an “autoplay” option that let you change the speed of the slide transitions.

Or you could click on the individual numbers lined along the bottom which would reveal a thumbnail of the image associated with that number.

We had a number of questions about use of this complicated navigational suite.

Seven (20%) did not look at the slide captions

There was no predominant method of viewing the slides that resulted in a more careful reading of the text. Of the eleven seen as carefully reading the text, 4 used the “number”, 3 used the “next”, 3 used the “arrow”, and one used “autoplay”

Observations

In terms of practical advice, this observation of navigational methods use makes clear that if you can only have one navigation method – the “next” method, moving linearly through the set of slides is the one to use. It was the primary choice of the majority of the participants and resulted in viewing the most slides.

However, if amount of time spent with the story package is your primary goal, people who clicked from slide to slide using the “arrow” spent almost a minute longer than the “next” users.

The reason for some of the other observations (for example, why no one selected the “thumbnail” view as an initial navigation method and why so few (2) selected autoplay) is not known – we did not ask people about their choices (or about their possible confusion about the choices.) This would be an interesting project for a future time – to do more of a “think aloud” session about people’s navigational choices. But this observational study does provide some insights into the choices made by people faced with a variety of methods for navigating to through rich and deep slide shows.

But perhaps the most interesting observation was the very low level usage of the non-linear approach (and when it was used, how few slides were observed.) Is the linear orientation to looking through material so hard-wired into our media usage that it is, and will continue to be, the preferred way to take in media? Even when it was visual information – as this was – and did not logically need to follow a narrative thread – people preferred to move through in the order it was presented. What does this observation tell us about innovation in digital storytelling and our audience’s tolerance for new design paradigms.

]]> http://www.ojr.org/070614paul/feed/ 4 http://www.ojr.org/070523ruel/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=070523ruel http://www.ojr.org/070523ruel/#comments Wed, 23 May 2007 12:21:13 +0000 Laura Ruel http://www.ojr.org/?p=1326 Sometimes the best research is the voice of experience. Alberto Cairo, former director of infographics and multimedia at elmundo.es in Madrid, is known worldwide for the work he has done using animated graphics as a powerful storytelling tool. While at elmundo.es, his staff won more NetMedia, Malofiej, and Society for News Design awards than any other publication in the world. In the 2004 edition of the SND.ies, the Society for News Design’s Best of New Media Design competition, Cairo’s department won the first gold medal ever given for breaking-news coverage.

Now an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (and a colleague of co-columnist Laura Ruel), Cairo has been taken his hands-on knowledge and moved it into the classroom. Here is a link to some of his students’ work: http://www.albertocairo.com/jomc/projects/index_projects.html.

International animated infographics expert Alberto Cairo is writing his first book, Visual Journalism: Print and Multimedia Infographics Storytelling.

Many online journalists are anticipating the book’s release, which should be in 2008, because there is an urgent need for the guidelines it provides. So, below we have offered you a form of a “sneak peek” – Cairo’s advice for multimedia storytelling using informational graphics.

Q: Define animated infographics and describe why they are a powerful storytelling tool for journalists?

A: Traditional infographics consist of the use of the tools of graphic design, illustration, cartography and statistical representation to convey journalistic information. Web infographics increase the number of tools to include the ones of online storytelling: 3D and 2D animation, interactivity, audio and video.

Infographics are difficult to define precisely because of their multiple and flexible nature. Almost any informative representation where verbal and visual elements are combined, and that is intended to tell a news story, can be considered an infographic.

Infographics have been crucial throughout the history of journalism to explain things that could not have been told otherwise. It is obvious that there is not better way to display large sets of data than with a good statistical chart, or to provide geographical context to a story than with a map. In my book I explain that, on an abstract level, an information graphic is an aid to thinking and understanding. This is not a new idea, of course. A good infographic makes patterns arise, discovers trends, condenses enormous amounts of information in a very small space.

To understand why infographics are so important to modern journalism, try to think about stories such as September 11th, the invasion of Iraq or the shootings at Virginia Tech without them.

Q: What are three current examples of excellent animated infographics? Why are they effective?

A: The New York Times has the best statistical online infographics in the news industry at the moment. They have finally understood that in the Internet era infographics cannot be just static, linear representations. Sometimes you have to let the reader transform the information and play with it. You have to let the readers adapt the data to their needs.

Cairo believes that the work of nytimes.com is some of the best online inforgraphic storytelling. The graphic above is one where users can interact and “play” with the numbers themselves.

Among the best recent multimedia coverage, I would highlight the Times’ interactive about the Virginia Tech shootings. The combination of audio, video and information
graphics makes this breaking news coverage one of the best I’ve ever seen. You see, almost any publication can create a good long-term, feature project online. It is much, much more difficult to do that in a tight deadline.

The Times’ ability to create quality animated storytelling on deadline is noteworthy, according to Cairo.

With their most recent hires, The New York Times is trying to emulate the model we used at elmundo.es back in 2000-2005. The are focusing more on breaking stories, rather than on features. Don’t get me wrong, features are great, but a newspaper should focus first on up-to-date information.

The best animated diagrams can still be found in Spanish news organizations. Elpais.es and Elmundo.es keep publishing great linear explanations. Athough their work is still a great source of inspiration for professionals worldwide, both news organizations need
to think about new ways of presenting information. They cannot continue to succeed if you by using the same formula over and over again. In the current environment, your work gets dated quickly if you do so.

Spanish news organizations, such as elmundo.es, still are producing the best animated diagrams and linear explanations.

There are news organizations in the United States that currently are taking steps in the right direction. I would mention The Dallas Morning News, San Jose Mercury News, and The Boston Globe. The Sun-Sentinel is still a major reference for multimedia graphics as well.

Q: What are the most common mistakes multimedia journalists make when creating animated infographics? How can they avoid them?

A: The first and gravest mistake that individuals make believing that infographics are a branch of graphic design or that they have anything to do with illustration.

Infographics, like any other form of journalism storytelling rely on solid, accurate content. It is great if you can create cool 3-D animations and great interactive scenes, but if your content is weak, the presentation will be weak. There are not good infographics without good reporting.

As a second mistake is the fact that many people think that online infographics can be created just by “translating” print pieces to the Web. Unfortunately, this is what is happening in many newsrooms worldwide. That’s the wrong approach because what you usually end with is with a still picture with a bunch of roll-over buttons. In order to create a great multimedia infographics piece, you have to think about it from the very beginning, on the planning process, rather than consider it a subsidiary element that depends on the content generated by the print side. Print and online use different languages that share the same root grammar. They are dialects.

Q: Can you provide us with a checklist of questions for editors to ask themselves when deciding if an animated infographic is the best storytelling method for a given topic?

A: Checklist:

[More suggestions from Cairo at: http://www.albertocairo.com/infografia/articulos/2006/design.html
http://www.albertocairo.com/imagenes/articlesndsummer.pdf]

Q: What suggestions do you have for individuals in an online newsroom who want to begin creating animated infographics?

A: It’s quite simple: give it a try. You don’t need to be a Flash guru to create online infographics. Learning just the basics (something that can be done in two or three days of training) can give you the main tools needed to start working. Then, with experience, you will incorporate new tools and techniques. That’s the path we followed at elmundo.es back in 2000. Nobody in my team had any experience.

The conceptual side is also extremely important: you need to educate yourself. Read about the psychology of vision. Understanding the basics of cognitive science is crucial. Study cartography, statistics and information design. There are many great books out there.

Q: What are some things the industry can do now to challenge itself to move in the right direction with multimedia infographics?

A: Understand that to obtain profits, you have to invest in training, equipment, innovation and good staff. Cutting expenses might be good in the short term, but it will hurt quality in the long term. The quantitative evidence suggests that publications that increase quality and focus more on stories the readers care about (not necessarily local stories) don’t lose readership – or they lose it in such a slow, steady pace that it will give them time to become completely online. Innovation is crucial in this equation: create new ways to convey information.

If you want to survive in the current environment, you have to attract online readers by offering them content presented in ways they will not be able to find anywhere else. Any citizen journalist can present information using words or pictures. It is much more difficult to find good user-generated multimedia or infographics content. Engage your readers by offering them breaking-news, accurate and spectacular infographics presentations. My experience in events such as the March 11th 2004 terrorist attacks in Madrid tells me that readers really appreciate the efforts.

Elmundo.es’ March 11 graphic got millions of page views in just a few days.

Other breaking-news presentations at elmundo.es did not generate so many visits, but they were extremely successful in other ways. In some cases, they were local breaking-news stories. Again, any newspaper can do an infographic on the latest NASA mission, but only a few can do a sophisticated online presentation on the state-of-the art steel bridge that is being built right next door. You have to find the right balance between global and local. Never forget one of them because you’re focusing too much on the other.

Q: Who has influenced you most as a professional?

A: The people I’ve worked with: the folks at La Voz de Galicia, Spain, who accepted me as an intern. My partners at Diario16, DPI Comunicacion and elmundo.es, of course.

After that, almost anything I read or see influences me. I am like a sponge. My own students have a huge influence on the way I think about infographics, too, especially those that participate in our multimedia documentary projects. When they participate in those projects they are usually a few months away from graduation and cannot be considered mere undergraduates anymore. They are professionals ready to get an entry-level job as infographics journalists – and to surprise you with their creativity.

]]> http://www.ojr.org/070523ruel/feed/ 0 http://www.ojr.org/070508niles/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=070508niles http://www.ojr.org/070508niles/#comments Tue, 08 May 2007 11:39:08 +0000 Robert Niles http://www.ojr.org/?p=1321 What can online journalism students create with no budget and no programming skills?

That’s what I set out to find with my J309 class at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Journalism this spring. The class is Annenberg’s “Introduction to Online Publishing,” a required capstone course in our undergraduate core curriculum and students’ first (and only) required course in online journalism.

This is the first year for the course and I wanted the students to leave the semester with an individual final project that showcased what they’d learned in both this course and the core curriculum. Along the way, I provided a brief history of Internet media and an overview of ethical and economic issues surrounding online publishing. The heart of the class was their individual blogs (linked in the blogroll), where I assigned weekly writing and reporting exercises.

Ultimately, I hoped that at least a few of the students would develop a love for online publishing, while the others would at least recognize how they
could create interactive and multimedia news projects with little technical effort.

To that end, I challenged students to find free online tools that would support such work. Below, I list the tools my students used this semester, followed by links to their final projects. (I did teach students basic HTML hardcoding skills, as well.)

Of course, online journalists can create far more engaging work with custom-programmed Flash movies, purpose-built content management systems and smart modification of a variety of open source development tools. But that is work for the advanced online journalism student. For these undergraduates, I did not want potentially intimidating development tools to squash what I hoped would be an emerging passion for working online.

And to further encourage that, I turned students loose to choose whatever topic they wished in reporting their final projects. Predictably, I got several food- and sports-related websites. But I don’t mind. Passion developed in personal web publishing projects can help inspire students to enliven more serious reporting projects in the future.

Tools

None of the following tools required programming skill to implement; all provided point-and-click user interfaces. And the price was right for a student budget, as all the following tools are free.

Blogger.com
Google’s blogging tool remains one of the Web’s more popular. Students used Blogger for their weekly class blogging assignments, and several used the tool to publish their final projects as well.

Google Maps
Google Maps weren’t on our radar until late in the semester, when Google introduced a customizing tool that allows users to create multipoint maps with user-supplied links and photos for each map point. Previously, one needed to use often-clunky third-part tools, or Google’s API to create such maps. With the new tool, however, tech novices can publish sophisticated custom maps with minimal effort. (Now, if only they could be embedded in a remote webpage….)

Google Pages
Google Pages allows users to publish flat webpages, using a selection of templates. Users can control the HTML within the template design, but do not have the flexibility that they would with hardcoding the page from scratch. As with many Google projects, Google Pages are in beta, and students encountered frequent connectivity problems when updating pages. Still, this proved to be a convenient alternative for students who were looking for Dreamweaver-like production environment, but who didn’t want to make the trek to a campus computer lab or buy their own software.

Jimdo.com
Lying somewhere between Google Pages and WordPress, Jimdo is another free, hosted webpage tool that allows users to create websites that break from the traditional blog format.

mixmonsta.com
Mixmonsta enables users to create embedded audio and video mash-ups through a relatively simple Web-based interface.

ProBoards
This is a handy, free, hosted online discussion board tool, which allowed one student to create a question-and-answer board for her project site, without having to install or manage a PHP or Perl application.

Slide.com
Slide’s been the go-to source for crafting Flash frat-party photo slideshows for MySpace pages. But there’s no reason why a journalism student couldn’t use the Slide tool for a news project. No, you don’t get the craftmanship of a custom Flash movie, but you can put these shows together in less than five minutes, and with zippo tech expertise needed.

Webshots.com
Webshots has long offered free photo hosting, but now also offers a Flash slideshow feature, like Slide.com. Some students preferred Webshot’s Flash app, saying that it looked more professional than Slide.com’s.

WordPress.com
WordPress seems like the king of blogging software at this point. But my students opted for the hosted WordPress.com platform, rather than take on the more technically challenging task of managing their own WordPress installation.

YouTube
There’s no easier way to put video on a blog than YouTube. All my students have used YouTube in the past, as viewers, and were pleasantly surprised to find how simply they could employ YouTube as publishers.

The Sites

ATLA Music
Helza Irizarry
Irizarry, and Atlanta resident, employed a variety of audio and video tools, along with WordPress, to create an online guide to the collision of Southern- and West Coast-flavored hip hop.

The BBQ Fanatic’s Guide to Texas-Style Ribs in L.A.
Megan Seely
Food blogs proved popular among my students, who embraced the chance to take care of meals and homework at the same time. Seely tried several cuisines before settling on her online homage to L.A.’s best B-rated BBQ dives.

Best Jazz in L.A.
Elsa Bertet
Bertet used still and video photography in her attempt to capture the viewing experience at a selection of clubs popular with USC students.

The Conquest of South Central
Carley Dryden
Dryden set out to investigate Conquest Housing, the largest private landlord for USC students living off-campus. She recorded many students’ horror stories with Conquest, the talked with university and real estate experts to provide perspective.

Down with Downtown
Kyle Cabodi
More USC students are living in downtown L.A., a mile or so up the road from USC’s campus. That, along with new commercial and entertainment development, are helping support revive residential development in the city’s historic core. Cabodi shot several photo galleries of downtown development and conducted interviews with developers and residents for his project.

L.A. Dinner and a Movie
Lindsey Kaiser
This project blended a smart mash-up of Blogger with custom Google Maps to provide a venue-based guide to good restaurants located near popular Los Angeles movie theaters.

The O.C. Source
Cindy Santos
Santos, an Orange County resident, said she wanted to create for Orange County what LAObserved publisher Kevin Roderick has done for Los Angeles.

Ride Hard
Sandra Altamirano
Altamirano documented her and her friends’ obsession with motorcycling on this blog, which used first-person accounts, interviews and, rather graphic, photo galleries.

Rotting Off the Vine
Geoff Rynex
Chicago Cubs fan Rynex used Jimdo and Blogger to reflect on his favorite baseball team, from 2,000 miles away, while providing links to other virtual gathering places for away-from-the-friendly-confines Cubs fans.

Ventura County Burger Shacks
Leland Ornelaz
Ornelaz ate is way across L.A. County’s northwest neighbor, eschewing chains for historic hamburger stands, which he photographed and reviewed for this blog.

Wine 101
Calli Fisher
Fisher turned 21 during the semester and celebrated by creating a site where students like her could learn to become knowledgeable wine drinkers.

Students and instructors from other universities are welcomed to describe their online journalism projects on OJR. E-mail editor Robert Niles — rniles [at] usc.edu — for more information.

]]> http://www.ojr.org/070508niles/feed/ 4 http://www.ojr.org/070210ruel/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=070210ruel http://www.ojr.org/070210ruel/#comments Sat, 10 Feb 2007 23:10:15 +0000 Laura Ruel http://www.ojr.org/?p=1282 One of the greatest opportunities of multimedia journalism is the ability to make different design choices. Although most online organizations present digital derivatives of their “parent” products – newspaper sites present columns of text, radio sites feature audio files, and TV sites provide video – we are seeing an increase in the number of sites embracing all design options. Radio sites are complementing their audio with photos and/or text, newspaper sites are presenting video and audio slide shows along with their text, and TV stations are supplementing their video pieces with text stories.

Increasingly, news organizations are challenging themselves and their staffs with stepping outside of their format expertise and trying to produce news packages that take full advantage of the array of media formats available. Online news sites are trying to integrate different media types into the story package – creating rich multimedia experiences for their audience. Exploration in the use of Flash helps designers create a common interface that transitions easily from graphics, to video to photos to audio without interrupting the user.

Creating these rich media experiences is a commitment of time and specialized talent that news organizations cannot – and should not – afford for every story. This is the biggest challenge for news designers: Given all the design options now available, how does one evaluate effort over return? When does an integrated, interactive story work best in terms of users’ enjoyment and/or comprehension? When is it warranted to help with understanding of the topic? Bottom line, when is it worth it?

In this column we will find and report on the beginning efforts to research and evaluate story design effects on news audiences. In this month’s column we discuss the findings for the first project of our research consortium – DiSEL – the Digital Story Effects Lab.

Comparing Static / Passive Text and Dynamic / Active Multimedia Stories

DiSEL study: Overview

In 2002, working with a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, we attempted to “catalog” the areas where design decisions could be made when crafting stories online. These “Elements of Digital Storytelling” (www.inms.umn.edu/elements) looked at a variety of attributes of digital stories.

In our first DiSEL study, we looked at two of these attributes, both related to “action.” We wanted to compare the impact on user attitude and experience between different approaches to content and user action.

Stories can be designed with either static content (the material just sits there, there is no movement) or dynamic content (the material moves.) In terms of how the user must engage with the content, stories can be designed to be passive (once the user has clicked to the page they can sit back, there is no action to take) or active (the content is designed so that the user must engage with it in order to fully experience the full set through selection of options or clicking to see the next portion.) Dynamic / active content is the type that is typically crafted using Flash. There is motion and choice. Static / passive content describes HTML coded, there is no motion and what you see is all you get.

We found perfect pieces to test these two presentation styles in the BBC’s material on health effects of recreational drugs. They had created two packages – the static, encyclopedia-type page display here and the dynamic interactive package here.

The integrated, interactive piece about recreational drug use creates a scenario where users give various drug combinations to a dancing clubber and witness the effects on his body.

The encyclopedic-type presentation lists various drugs, describes their effects with text and an image.

In addition, we decided to see if the motivation for going to the site would change the user’s perception, attitude, and information retention.

In late 2005 we collected data from 63 subjects (the target audience for this content was young adults so we tested 18-29 year olds), using four different testing conditions, resulting in a total count of 15 subjects tested under each condition. (Three of participants had unusable data.)

The conditions were:

• Condition one: Users who viewed the dynamic / active Flash site and were told they had received the link from a professor telling them to explore it to complete a research paper. This was the “information” motivation scenario.
• Condition two: Users who viewed the Flash site and were told a friend e-mailed them the link as something interesting to check out. This was the “entertainment” motivation scenario.
• Condition three: Users who viewed the static / passive HTML site with the “information” motivation.
• Condition four: Users who viewed the HTML site with the “entertainment” motivation.

These conditions allowed insight into the effectiveness of each form based on what the users’ motives were in seeing the presentation, and also allowed for enough subjects to generate statistically reliable results in some areas.

Research participants filled in a pre-exposure survey intended to gauge their overall use of the Internet, their preference for certain styles of presentation, the use of news sites, and their attitude toward drugs. Then their movements around the page they were sent to were “eye-tracked”. A post-exposure survey provided feedback on their attitudes toward the experience and the news organization that presented it, the ease of navigation, and their retention and recall of information presented.

The challenge in this type of research is determining what it is you want to test. There is a variety of hoped for outcomes when a news organization creates and presents an online news package. Which is most important? Effective presentation of information as seen in greater retention and recall of facts? Stickiness as seen in length of time spent with the content and greater depth of examination of the material? Brand enhancement as seen in reported enjoyment or appreciation of the organization presenting the information? With this study, we tried to get at the impacts of the presentation form on a variety of these areas.

DiSEL study: Findings

This comparative study showed that for the two sites tested:

Interactive presentations work best when you want users to…

• spend more time with the presentation;
• describe the experience as “enjoyable;”
• recall more of the information;
• recall your brand;
• feel entertained.

Static presentation work best when you want users to…

• “click to” all the of the presentation’s materials;
• perceive the site navigation as easy.

Either form is equally effective if you want to…

• increase the likelihood a user would return to the site.

In terms of the motivation for going to the site, there were some interesting differences in people’s responses to the two presentations.

If users are seeking information…

• They will spend an average of two minutes longer on the site than if they are looking to be entertained;
• They will have greater recall and comprehension of the information than those seeking entertainment.

Motivation did not matter in terms of…

• How enjoyable a user found the site.

DiSEL study: So what?

This research shows that the choices made in presenting information will have significantly different impacts on the audience. No one presentation form is going to be the most effective by all measures that you have in your newsroom for determining successful design. What the research does seem to reveal is that the highly interactive content results in more time spent online with the material and a greater level of reported “enjoyment.” In addition (and counter to some other studies which show a negative impact) the Flash version seemed to help people recall the information being presented. So, if your goal in presenting a story – particularly one that has potential for a long “shelf-life” – is to entertain, inform, and keep people online longer, then investing in a creative, interactive presentation could be well worth the effort.

Supporting Research

A portion of Poynter’s Eyetrack III study tested similar situations. In this study, two distinct story designs were considered. With the help of NYTimes.com, text versions of two news stories were edited to 3-5 minute reads. Then, existing multimedia presentations were condensed to 3-5 minute experiences.

The text version of the story “Dangerous Business” that was used for the study

The multimedia version ofo the story “Dangerous Business” that was used for the study.

The text version Al Hirschfeld’s obituary that was used for the study.

The multimedia version Al Hirschfeld’s obituary that was used for the study.

Half of the test participants (approximately 25 people) experienced one of the stories in text and the other in multimedia. The other half experienced the opposite formats. (All participants saw a control article beforehand.)
After they read or viewed the stories, participants were given the same recall quizzes.

Eyetrack III: Findings

This study shows that:

Interactive presentations work best when you want users to…

• recall unfamiliar terms and processes/procedures more effectively.

In one test story an animated graphic showed how cast iron pipes are made – an essential component to understanding the overall story content. Those who received this graphic had better recall of the terms and processes involved than those who received the same information in text form.

Static text works best when you want users to… correctly recall specific factual information, such as information about names and places.

It was found that with both stories, individuals had better recall of the names of people involved and the locations of specific story events if they read the text version.

How this research can help: the checklists

Common threads from findings in this work can help guide multimedia editors and designers to make more effective decisions. Here are lists of questions that can help. (Also available in a printable PDF.)

Should we present this story as an interactive?

Before undertaking any large story project be sure to ask:

• Who is the target audience for this story?
• What do we hope to accomplish in telling this story to them?

Then use this decision-tool to see which approach to storytelling is best supported by the research in these studies:

1. Does the story concern elaborate or unfamiliar processes / procedures?
   • Yes – 1 point
   • No – no points
2. Is the level of interest in the topic high enough that people would be willing to figure out story navigation?
   • Yes – 1 point
   • No – no points
3. Does the story have value beyond the first few weeks? Is it likely to be a topic in the news again?
   • Yes – 1 point
   • No – no points
4. Is entertaining the audience more important than simply informing?
   • Yes – 1 point
   • No – no points
5. Is it important that the audience be able to recall specific facts from the story?
   • Yes – no points
   • No – 1 point
6. If the story is told in separate components, it is essential that all the components be viewed by the audience?
   • Yes – no points
   • No – 1 point
7. Do you hope the audience recalls where they saw the information?
   • Yes – 1 point
   • No – no points

If you get five or more points, then you should strongly consider an interactive story approach.

Coming in March: Journalism-applicable results from the Nielsen/Norman Group’s first eyetracking study.

Coming in April: An interview with Poynter Eyetrack ‘07’s researchers.

Coming in May: DiSEL research results about:

• the design and placement of “Breaking News” and supplemental links
• how people move through different slide show designs.

But since Nov. 16, 2005, New York city-based MediaStorm has gathered force in its second coming as a multimedia journalism website, winning accolades and awards. OJR spoke to Brian Storm about how his boutique media company continues to crank out high-quality journalism.

OJR: What was the impetus for taking a fresh look at MediaStorm in 2005?

Storm: I looked at the landscape and I remembered vividly in 2000 when broadband penetration at home was 10 percent. But by 2005 or 2004, we actually hit 50 percent of the online households where broadband enabled, and that’s a sea change. You remember surfing with dial up. That was a different experience. Now it’s always connected. Broadband gives you real video speed.

The other thing that I was noticing was the desire for video advertising. Madison Avenue now was looking at the Web saying “Pre-roll video ads are a big deal,” to the tune of $275 million business in ’05 looking to go to $640 million in ’07, looking to triple in ’09 to $1.5 billion. I think those estimates are low. I think it is going to grow faster and bigger than that.

The other thing I noticed was there was a supply problem. Everybody was saying, “look there is demand to place these video ads but there is no content to place it against.” There was no inventory. And if you look at circulation going down and fragmented television programming, and about viewers moving to the Web, now all of a sudden you have Madison Avenue wanting to place $25 dollar CPM video ads in front of content. This is a huge financial opportunity that just didn’t exist a couple of years ago.

The other thing that has happened is what I call the democracy of production. So you think about things like this magic box that we are sitting next to. This is a Mac with 3 terabyte hard drive in it. I mean, it comes with a seatbelt. It’s a multimedia powerhouse machine. This is like a Hollywood production facility that we are sitting in front of in my apartment. And it’s not that expensive. Final Cut Pro is 1,200 bucks. And it’s like a Avid system that used to cost $250,000. HD video camera used to be $70,000. Now they are $5,000. I own a HD video camera, man.

So that’s the democracy of production–that’s a revolution in my mind.

So I wanted to get back to my publishing roots, frankly. I had seen a lot of great projects and I felt like I had developed a model for financing and producing and creating them. And I felt completely empowered because of production tools because the way the medium has matured.

It was just the right time to do it… to start this thing again.

OJR: You said you had developed a model for financing. How are you financially staying alive in the middle of Manhattan with four employees and putting out publication that is really about socially aware journalism?

Storm: How do you do that? You cash in on your relationships and you go build really high-end stuff for big name brands.

The Los Angeles Times hired us to produce a Gail Fisher project. It’s called “Blighted Homeland” it’s about Navajo living in Monument Valley where they’ve been doing all this uranium mining and so the people you know have been affected adversely because of that the mining. We’ve produced this project for the LA Times.

OJR: So their photographer collected the audio you worked with them to produce this?

Storm: Exactly, Gail actually came to New York stayed in our guest room–we have a guest room exactly for that reason. And Pam Chen produced this project. And I do the oversight.

Early on, MSNBC.com hired me to produce video projects for a magazine called “Take 3″ which was targeted at baby boomers. There was the story about “The Vanishing Americana” about the “Milk Man” and it was laden with sexual innuendos; it was really funny.

And then we did a piece called “The Sandwich Generation” which is also now on our site but we first produced it for MSNBC. It was at the level at which I want MediaStorm projects to be so it was also on MediaStorm.

Plus we do a lot of consulting. It’s standard interactive Web stuff but most companies don’t have teams that can produce that for them.

The other thing we are doing is that we really are acting as a multimedia agency. And I am really excited about this element.

There is the technology that we deployed for them so we work as both a consultant and a production arm. We help them tell the story but we also help them get up to speed with doing video.

OJR: Tell me about the auction model you tried out for selling a project last year?

Storm: I sent an e-mail out to 25 key clients inviting them to participate in a private auction to license the exclusive right to premier “Iraqi Kurdistan.” So the premier was auctioned off eBay-like. So what happened is I actually had ability for people to write their name, and publication, their e-mail address, their bid amount, and they’d hit send, and that would come to my cell phone in my e-mail and I would say yes, approve it. So we now have a template for doing digital auctioning of editorial content where we are allowing the client to drive the price up. I mean, I could have said $10,000. I could have guessed what that that’s what it was worth. It was far better to let the industry sort of decide. You know I mean that’s the key issue. Producing great content and trying to get it to the right publication and you get paid an appropriate fee to do it. I mean that to me seems to be the Holy Grail of trying to do these kinds of stories.

OJR: With the ability to route your content to TiVo over cable, you are poised to be a broadcast company…

Storm: In my mind we already are a broadcast company. We have this unique place on the web right now that we can do pretty much anything we want to do. I can publish any story I want. I know the next nine projects that we are going to produce for MediaStorm. I am sitting on 200 stories right now. Thirty of which I would love to produce for this site.

OJR: Your roots are of a photo editor… how do you see the Web’s impact on photojournalism?

Storm: So with this idea of a photojournalist going in and taking a picture but also doing audio reporting, we can give our subject a voice and I think that that is such a critical element. That changes the equation.

Most of us as photographers, we got into this because we didn’t want to write. We love journalism but we wanted to tell the story through photography. And because we are not necessarily great writers, the thing that’s so beautiful about sound is that we don’t have to write the story we can let the subject write it for us. And it’s just refreshing to hear the subject of a story tell you their story as opposed to some beautiful television person telling you… standing in front of the situation saying this is what you should be seeing and what you should be thinking. I don’t feel we need that.

I always describe it as documentary photojournalism meets National Public Radio. It’s like a combination of the fly on the wall of “This American Life” and the story telling approach they take meeting the sort of fly on the wall hands off approach that we take as a documentary photographers.

OJR: What does that say about just journalism in general? There is no more division of labor… the photographers, the print reporters, the radio reporters, the television reporters…. You have to be good at multiple things?

Storm: That’s the trend but for economic reasons and that bums me out. It shouldn’t be an economic decision.

What we should be doing in journalism is figuring out the very best way to tell a story. There’s division of labor on a breaking news story, where you’ve got people doing multiple things to try to meet the deadline. That’s one form of news.

The stories I work on are long term. The difference is that these photographers are authors. Only Olivier Jobard was on the story with “Kingsley’s Crossing.” He spent six months of his life on that story. Now if we would have had the resources to send a crew on that story, I think it would have changed the intimacy of it.

So I think there is a fine line between our just redoing this because it is just flat out cheaper to not send a sound guy.

OJR: Right, so you’ve been in this field for about 14 years. What’s really surprised you with MediaStorm about audience feedback? Enthusiasm for this kind of work?

Storm: Honestly it’s not surprised me that the “audience” has responded, because this medium is completely different from television, for example. The television has a signal that they send out there and they have to homogenize it frankly, because what they are trying to do with that one signal is trying to get as many people to watch it. So therefore they get stories on Britney Spears’ belly button because that’s going to give you more numbers.

The Web is completely different. I can have thousands of stories on my website and its exact opposite mentality which is I want to do a story about AIDS that will stand the test of time because those sort of affinity groups will find it and promote it. You will find people promoting “Bloodline” off their blog or off a foundation site or charities. They want advocacy work to be able to get people to be inspired and act and give.

There are a lot of interesting things about the way the audience is different. About 70 different countries hit our website. How do they find us? It’s all word of mouth. We don’t do any marketing. It is all viral conversation and its exact opposite of broadcast. When we launched on November 16, 2005, maybe 500 people watched our project that day. Today there are thousands of people watching those same projects who have never seen it before right so the whole time-shifting capability is really critical to this medium.

I wouldn’t say things have surprised me I think what they have really done is to encourage me to believe what I always believed about people: that they really do care and they do really want quality stories. I think mainstream journalism isn’t always set up to deliver that. They’ve got to feed the beast. They’ve got to shoot for numbers. The biggest problem with big journalism right now is answering to shareholders, instead of to their readers. They are trying to drive a profit margin at twenty seven percent instead of saying let’s invest in journalism and you know satisfy and gain readership. They are answering to the wrong matrix in my mind.

I hope this is just one example of the kind of company that is going to say that it’s time to take journalism back. I know I’m not going to make a pot of money with MediaStorm. I’m not going to. I’m just continuing to do stories that I believe in.

You know that’s that whole living a rich lifestyle thing. You know making money is a necessary evil to stay in business but it’s not our focus. It’s not like any of us got into journalism to make tons of money. We got into journalism because of the experiences—the rich lifestyle.

OJR: Nicholas Kristof, a columnist at the New York Times, recently invited readers to “tell the story” using the material he has gathered with his producer Naka Nathaniel on a trip to Darfur. What are your thoughts on audience participation-–helping with the process of production?

Storm: Well that to me, honestly, sounds like a gimmick–and that’s what that is. But if that gimmick gets more people to care about, and learn about, and understand what’s going on in Darfur, I’m for it.

I think citizen journalism is incredibly exciting because we need to engage the audience. We just do and getting them to tell their own stories or to comment on a story. I think that’s super important and valuable. I think we as professional journalists have to contemplate what that means. Breaking news is really not for us any more because there are going to be tons of people on the scene. We need to be the people who come in with our rich journalism skills and do the definitive story… the story of record if you will.

You can see more MediaStorm projects at http://mediastorm.org. Brian Storm can be reached at brian [at] mediastorm.org.

Want to put multimedia content on the Web? You’ll quickly find out that the free Flash player and the Flash authoring application top the list of solutions at most online news organizations.

“[Flash] allows us to put together audio, video, still pictures and text in a single format and put it out as an executable file. There’s not much else that really allows us to do that across platforms,” said Jim Ray, a multimedia producer on the broadband team at MSNBC.com.

“It provides a way to distribute a variety of media without having to download different programs. It’s the only program that can do it all,” said Jen Friedberg, a staff photographer at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

“For producing graphics online, it’s the tool of choice,” said Juan Thomassie, a senior designer at USAToday.com.

The Singular Plug-in Solution

Flash addresses two key needs in online journalism: integrating multiple media (content), and reaching the widest possible audience (compatibility). Other browser plug-ins allow online users to watch video or listen to music, but the Flash player has the advantage of working well on both Windows and Mac platforms, in multiple Web browsers, and without popping up branded or unpredictable players outside the browser window.

“Flash is the only thing that brings everything together,” said Ray Villalobos, director of multimedia for Mega Communications and former senior interactive producer for the Orlando Sentinel. “The penetration of the Flash plug-in allows me to assume people will have some version of the plug-in.”

In June 2005, more than 93 percent of Web users in North America, Europe and Asia had a video-capable version of the Flash player already installed, according to a study sponsored by Macromedia.

But beyond the utility of Flash, what’s more interesting is what journalists are actually doing with it.

Putting the User into the Story

José Márquez, a producer at KQED Interactive in San Francisco, creates online animations to explain California’s political issues. He feels optimistic about the potential of Flash for journalism.

“It absolutely taps into what a computer can do that TV, the radio and newspapers can’t do: Allow the user to determine what they’re interested in, as well as to place them within the polemic of the story,” Márquez said.

Users appreciate having the ability to choose, according to Mega Communications’ Villalobos. “The things we get the most traffic out of is when the users get to decide what they’re going to see,” he said. “You can’t do that on TV. You can’t do it in print. Online is the only place where you can redefine how stories are told.”

Both Villalobos and Márquez talked about tapping into their experiences as video game players. Designing an online story is “more like playing or writing a game,” Villalobos said. “You can have a completely different experience every time you play the game. That’s what makes the Web exciting. People like the infinity the Web provides.”

Users’ active engagement distinguishes online from other media. “Every medium has a type of project that’s perfect for it. Print lends itself to a good linear story. Movies can have a flashback at the beginning and then bring you forward to the present. Online is really the only medium where the users define their experience by their actions,” Villalobos said.

Márquez has a lot of freedom for experimenting in his current position, in which he produces interactive graphics for the companion website to a public affairs news magazine TV series, California Connected.

“I’m just beginning to figure out some way to create an environment that’s welcoming, surprising, engaging, human and also humane,” Márquez said. “An environment in which people can actually learn something about themselves. That is the role of a journalist — to tell a story so that the listener can learn something about him- or herself.”

Alison Cornyn, director of Picture Projects, said her studio’s online work aims to create spaces where people can both understand things in new ways and share ideas with others.

“In time, I think more organizations will be thinking about ways to attract audiences and create ways for them to participate. Not just to chat, but to change things. News organizations may not want to be part of that, but audiences do want that,” she said.

“Flash doesn’t provide in and of itself a way to be participatory, but you can use Flash and other programs to bring that about,” Cornyn said.

Naka Nathaniel, a multimedia producer for The New York Times, said he considers multimedia journalism to be “much more intimate” than other journalism. “That’s probably why many people get into journalism in the first place — to try to make a difference. To really make a connection, whatever the story happens to be,” he said.

Because of the intimacy of “the way the technology works — just you and your keyboard and your mouse,” he said, “you [the user] really feel for these people. You want to help them. At the end, we’re able to provide a pathway for you to follow. You can contact an aid organization, or contribute. It’s a step beyond newspapers, television, magazines. That’s one thing Flash allows us to do — pull everything together neatly into a circle.”

An Era of Experimentation

Jen Friedberg, a staff photographer at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, said her first Flash project took about three months to complete. “I didn’t know Flash. I didn’t know Pro Tools. I didn’t know how to use the MiniDisc recorder. I had to go buy the MiniDisc recorder. It was a lot of trial and error,” she said.

“So I finally got that one up [online], and my editor said, yeah, that’s cool. But it took you three months. And everyone else [on the photo staff] said, that was too much work. We’re never going to do that!”

That was three years ago. During this past summer, most of the photographers who work with Friedberg have started gathering and editing their own audio. No one forced them. It’s something they’ve decided they want to do.

“Captions get cut down or rewritten. That’s been a source of long-term frustration (for photographers),” Friedberg said. “People like the audio because they finally get to tell what’s really going on in the photo. The majority of photographers here really want to get that information out, and they are frustrated by not being able to.”

She prefers the audio accompanying an online photo story to feature the voices of people in the photo, not the photographer or a reporter. “That sends me into a rage, when the reporter talks for the people,” Friedberg said. “It makes me think some slacker didn’t get his audio in the field and they’re trying to cover it up.”

New York Times multimedia producer Naka Nathaniel pointed out that sometimes the circumstances in the field prevent him from gathering audio. “In North Korea, they seized all my gear,” he said. Except for two cases where military officers wanted to be videotaped, Nathaniel was limited to taking covert shots with a small digital still camera.

“I walked away with only a fifth of the art that I normally have because of the limitations placed on us there,” Nathaniel said.

The resulting story looks quite different from many of the collaborations between Nathaniel and Nicholas Kristof, an Op-Ed columnist for the Times. Lacking in visual material, Nathaniel resorted to “documentary tricks” such as zooming in on headlines from newspaper clippings to help move the story forward.

“That’s not my preferred way,” he said. “But the bigger picture is, you don’t have to limit yourself. You can find what’s appropriate for the story.”

Nathaniel’s documentary techniques will look familiar to most people. There are other people out there, like KQED’s Márquez and his colleague Marc Phu, who try to tell stories with Flash in a way that’s not comparable to any traditional journalistic style. “I don’t think that what I do is considered to be journalism,” Márquez said. “But I believe that in five to 10 years’ time, it will obvious to people, to people younger than us, that what we are doing is journalism.”

The work of people such as photographer Friedberg may be more recognizable as journalism, but on reflection, it’s not exactly like anything that exists outside the digital realm.

“Multimedia is its own entity,” Friedberg said. “It takes the best out of documentary radio and the best out of documentary photography. Television doesn’t have the time to tell a long narrative. Newspapers don’t have space anymore to run 60-inch stories, or more than one or two photos with a story. Flash allows us to bring all that back together and tell a story with more depth than in any other medium.”

The Best Tool for Certain Jobs

Theresa Riley, director of P.O.V. Interactive, has a staff of two working for her; together they create a companion website for each documentary aired on the PBS series “P.O.V.” When they agree that a site needs a Flash element, they hire freelancers to produce it.

For a recent documentary explaining how guns from New York end up in Kosovo, the team wanted to combine an animated map online with video clips from the film. “We didn’t want the annoyance of another pop-up window,” Riley said, and that’s why they decided to use Flash.

In the “P.O.V.” documentary “Speedo: A Demolition Derby Love Story,” the central character talks about modifying cars, and it’s not exactly clear what he does to them, Riley said.

“We thought his voice and personality were so compelling, and we wanted to do a photo gallery of his cars. We wanted him to tell his own story. That’s why we wanted to use Flash,” Riley said. “We really wanted to show big pictures of the cars, and with video, we wouldn’t have been able to do that.”

Mark Adams, a freelance multimedia producer and photographer based in Atlanta, said his desire to combine sound and motion with still photography goes back to Kodachrome. “I remember sitting around with friends and putting together a slideshow, popping chromes into the tray, turning on the stereo and hanging up a sheet in the living room,” he said. “I loved that immersion with all your senses.”

Reproducing that experience in Flash can be a challenge. “It’s really hard to integrate it really well,” Adams said. “It’s easy to put too much in there and overwhelm folks.”

The challenge must be faced, though, according to Jim Ray, a multimedia producer at MSNBC.com.

“If you haven’t started to think beyond telling stories with photos and text, you’re walking into the tar pits,” Ray said.

Not Your Father’s Breaking News

The caveat about learning new skills and experimenting with new ways to tell stories is that you usually cannot do it with day-to-day headlines.

“We’re not out breaking Watergate,” Ray said. “It’s not the right medium for that. What we can do is take a complex issue and make it personal to a user who comes to our site and help them understand it better. We can provide a context and a different way to experience that story.”

KQED’s Márquez admitted that what he does is “certainly not investigative journalism. But I am taking facts — often very dry facts and statistics — and trying to turn those into a story that will motivate people to take action or to learn more.”

At many online news sites, text still dominates the home page — but the journalists who work with Flash have a different perspective.

“Animation has become part of the way we tell stories online. It’s an option we use to give more credibility and reality to the piece,” said Juan Thomassie, a senior designer at USAToday.com. “We’re always thinking about making the story animated if we can, and more interesting to the readers. I think it has changed the way we tell stories dramatically. You can’t just copy a news graphic and paste it on the Web page and expect it to engage the reader.”

Sometimes there’s just not enough time. Deadlines still dictate what’s possible.

“Ideally, early in the planning stages, before reporters and photographers are assigned to a story, we like to be involved at that point, to make sure the content gathering keeps our needs in mind,” Thomassie said. “If we don’t find out about it until the night before, we’re often not able to produce an interactive graphic.”

Animated graphics do have a place in breaking news, though. Alberto Cairo was in Madrid, creating infographics for the website of El Mundo, on March 11, 2004, when train bombs killed 191 people and wounded more than 1,500. While the news site had multiple millions of page views that day, “about 1 million” were solely for the infographics pages, he said.

What’s Coming Next?

Alberto Cairo spent five years working with animated infographics online at El Mundo. This past summer he moved to Chapel Hill, N.C., to teach multimedia journalism as an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina.

“For me, as an infographics designer, the capability the program has to integrate a database into infographics is very important,” Cairo said.

The appeal is not only that Flash can be used to display data clearly and compactly in graphical formats. The data can be pulled from the database into Flash dynamically. If the ActionScript allows it, the Flash package need not be revised. It can display new information as soon as it is added to the separate database.

“Flash will generate the pie chart or the bar chart automatically. It’s a very new world for us, all of us [who] have a print infographics background,” Cairo said. “It’s very demanding, but at the same time, it’s very gratifying. It lets you develop your skills as a designer in a very broad sense of the word.”

Alison Cornyn, director of Picture Projects, explained how the Sonic Memorial Project incorporates a database with the Flash-based Sonic Browser to allow users to explore a collection of audio recollections about the World Trade Center.

“The Sonic Browser makes the project much more special than it would be if it were just an online database,” Cornyn said.

Not everyone agrees that Flash makes a good partner for databases. Adrian Holovaty, an editor at washingtonpost.com and former lead developer for World Online, the Web companion of the Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World, argued against using Flash in cases when users might want to link to specific segments of the package, or send a link in e-mail.

“Flash is good for things such as video that can’t be broken down into nuggets of information. But otherwise, information should be broken down,” Holovaty wrote in an instant-message conversation.

Information broken into discrete chunks can be linked to other chunks. “Linking is pretty fundamental. Every piece of information should be linkable,” Holovaty said.

After looking at The New York Times’s Flash map of the 2004 U.S. election results, Holovaty said it would be better if individual Web pages in that package were devoted, for example, to the 1964 Texas election results and to a state-by-state comparison of 1980 results. “We’re not talking about manual HTML pages, though — it would be all automated,” he said. A comparable example (without Flash) would be the chicagocrime.org site he developed.

“Flash is certainly appropriate in some cases, but my opinion is that if a small news organization is going to invest resources in the Web, it ought to invest more into databases and making data ‘smart’ than into one-off Flash projects,” Holovaty said.

No Software Is Perfect

Joe Weiss, an interactive producer at The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., was one of the earliest adopters of Flash in journalism, but that doesn’t mean he’s unequivocal about it.

“Flash is a bridge technology for me, and while I can praise its limitations the way an artist would praise the limitations of watercolor paintings, I dream (literally) of a better, more powerful tool,” Weiss wrote in e-mail.

“The limitations [of tools] always invite very creative solutions,” observed Alison Cornyn, director of Picture Projects. “I don’t think of them as frustrations. I think about how we can do what we need and how we can push it. Let some of the limitations create new ways of solving the problem.”

“I view Flash as just another tool in your bag when you’re trying to tell a story,” Mark Adams said. “Would the story benefit from being told with the help of Flash? Not all stories will.”

Before Flash reached its current level of utility, “we used other software, other means, [such as] JavaScript rollovers and animated GIFs,” said Juan Thomassie, of USAToday.com. “We all still use Photoshop. We all still use FreeHand or Illustrator. But it always seems to come down to Flash when it comes to putting it on the Web.”

Another solution for multimedia might emerge and displace Flash, just as Flash displaced some previous tools and methods. The Web never stands still for long.

“With all the changes we’ve seen in just the past six years, it wouldn’t surprise me if something else came along,” Thomassie said. “But they would have some serious catching up to do. With each year and each version of Flash, it becomes harder for anyone else to catch up.”

Links

Interactive Narratives

Joe Weiss’s blog

Work by Naka Nathaniel for The New York Times

Multimedia from the Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram

chicagocrime.org, a non-profit browsable database developed by Adrian Holovaty

California Connected interactives

Jen Friedberg’s portfolio site

Ray Villalobos’s online portfolio

Mark Adams’s portfolio site

Picture Projects

P.O.V. Home

P.O.V.’s Dying in America: A Chronology

P.O.V.’s Speedo: A Demolition Derby Love Story photo gallery

Interactive graphics from elmundo.es

Interactive media from USAToday.com

Multimedia from MSNBC.com

Digital Storytelling, a panel session including Theresa Riley, Director, P.O.V. Interactive