All of the radio tips apply to TV, too. But on television, you’re adding a visual element to your presentation, one that can undermine your message if you don’t take the time and make the effort to work within the opportunities of the medium.

So prepare as you would for a radio interview – know your “talking points” and have those easy-to-remember facts and anecdotes ready. Warm up, but keep your cool when you’re on the air. And follow these tips, too:

As a journalist, you learned how to cultivate sources. As a publisher, you should apply that skill in cultivating relationships with other media outlets, as well. Your colleagues in radio and television can help you spread the word about your publication, and your credibility as a voice covering your beat. I hope you’ll embrace these tips to help you present yourself even more effectively through radio and television.

In my experience, many reporters freak out at the thought of becoming a source. Especially a source on camera or on a live mic. But you don’t need to be nervous or feel intimidated. You’re a communications professional, after all. If you feel comfortable asking questions, you should feel comfortable answering them, too.

Or, at least, you should feel comfortable with learning how to answer them. That’s what we’re going to talk about today, and next week, here on OJR. I’ll be listing some of my tips for writers and editors who need to appear on radio and television to promote their work. We’ll start with radio today, and add some television-specific tips next week.

First, you need to get the gig. Use the contacts you’ve built during your career. If you’ve got a project, a site or a book that you think would be of interest to the audience at a particular show, reach out to the people you know at that program and offer yourself as a guest. Keep the focus on the audience, though. Don’t “pull strings” or call in favors to get on shows where you or your work isn’t a good match. That won’t help you build readership or sales, and will only damage your relationships with colleagues. (Not to mention their relationship with their employer. No one wants to be the one responsible for booking a bum guest.)

Next week: Tips for handling a TV appearance.

For this week’s post, I spoke with Evan Ratliff, freelancer for publications such as Wired, The New Yorker, and others, turned digital entrepreneur and – if you believe some of the press – possible savior of the longform narrative with his new project, The Atavist.

NOTE: We met on a collaborative document and you can playback our unedited conversation here.

Evan, thank you for taking the time to “meet” for a quick chat about the project you are working on.

My pleasure!

So, let’s start there… can you describe what The Atavist is?

Sure, so The Atavist is a kind of hybrid publication: We sit right in between magazines and books. From the magazine angle, what we do is called “longform nonfiction” or “longform journalism:” We produce stories that are 6-7,000 words and up, all the way to maybe 30-35,000. All nonfiction, all written by people who have spent weeks or months reporting them. They are published digitally, through our app for iPad/iPhone, through Kindle (Kindle Singles, which we can talk about), and Nook. From the book perspective, they are almost like short ebooks.

We also license our software, but that’s our more non-journalism side of things so maybe less of interest here.

How did this idea come about? You have a background in longform storytelling… but how did the idea of an app and this “concept” of a custom storytelling platform come about?

It started with a pretty basic, and unformed, idea: Was there some way to do longform writing/journalism online? It was an idea I’d been thinking about for a while, but not doing much if anything about — I applied for a Knight Foundation grant but didn’t get it, in maybe 2008 (2007? Can’t remember). Anyway, originally Nick Thompson, my editor at Wired, and I were just saying that there must be some way to do longform that was more designed for the digital world. Instead of just translated straight from a magazine. The real conceptual ideas of how it might work didn’t come about until we sat down with our other partner, Jefferson Rabb, who has both the design sensibility and coding chops to actually conceive what something like that might look like. It was in talking to him that we stopped talking about the Web and started talking about an app.

Technically speaking, you could do these custom, interactive stories on the Web… what made it appealing on the iPad, Kindle, etc.?

I think that first, we just wanted to kind of get away from the idea of people reading it at their desktop, where they are skipping from one bit of information to the next all day. The emergence of phones – and actually we first were looking just at smart phones, noticing how much we and other people were reading on them – and then tablets, ereaders, etc, pointed a way to a different kind of digital reading experience. Marketing types now call it the “lean back” experience, which I don’t cotton to that much but the point is the same one we were going for: this is a different kind of reading than you do on the Web.

Full disclosure, I think the concept and platform a fantastic idea… and it’s an ideal mashup of interactive/digital and traditional storytelling. I’ll embed the video from the site, but can you briefly list the features/media/interactivity/etc. a user would find in a “typical” Atavist story?

So, I should probably first offer the caveat that of course you get different versions of Atavist stories in different environments. On Kindle – for the moment – you’ll get just the full text of the story, and photos, maybe some footnotes. In our app, the standard features are a bit different, just because we are able to control the whole environment and use multimedia however seems to suit. The standard features on every story in the app are: the text and full page photos (of course), an audiobook version of the story (you can flip back and forth between reading and listening), usually some elements of other media (music, video, woven into the narrative), and then what we call inline extras: Parts of the story that serve as a kind of substrate. These are links to characters, photo galleries, maps, timelines, audio clips that you can turn on and off. If they are on, you tap a word or phrase and the feature pops up.

I purchased and read your piece, Lifted, and thought it was a natural experience… I did find myself torn between reading or listening to the audio version of the story (I am a podcast junkie, though). Granted, you’ve just launched, and this is a brand new form of storytelling… custom-crafted, interactive pieces for each story. What new things do you have to factor in that you never had to think about in the past… like when you wrote a Wired piece?

It’s true, all these new questions arise pretty quickly, and we’re still trying to figure out how to answer them. Take the video, for instance. That piece Lifted had a critical piece of video, the surveillance tapes from the heist that was portrayed in the story. I wanted that to form the lede of the piece. Which instantly created two problems; no, three: 1. How do you write a kind of secondary lede, to follow a piece of video? Do you assume that, with a written lede, someone will have read everything up to that point? Or might they have skipped part of the video? 2. What to do on other platforms, where the story would not have the video? The text itself had to work as an intact narrative, without the video. And 3. What to do about sound? The video had no sound, so it can’t really be “included” in the audiobook version.

Those are all questions that obviously wouldn’t come up when writing a magazine place, not to mention: where to put it, how much to use, how to edit it, whether and how to score it, etc. etc.

What’s also exciting, is that those questions were tied to that one story… they may not be asked again or exactly the same in another Atavist story, right? Or the answers would be different, depending on the story. With what you’ve produced so far, can you say what makes for a good Atavist story?

Right, some of them may be moot in other stories. We had another piece with a lot of music in it, and it had a whole set of other questions around the soundtrack that haven’t come up elsewhere.

I think we’re still feeling it out when it comes to what works well. There’s no question that the story – as in the real plot and characters portrayed – is always going to make the biggest difference.

Well, let me ask a basic yet complex question… how is this whole thing going?! Are you a zillionaire? Is this a new revolution you are a part of? Have you ever thought you’d an entrepreneur? How’s the experience of launching The Atavist been?

Let’s just say this: If things keep going like they are, I’m pretty sure I’m going to be able to get a new chain for my bicycle. Which I think we both know that only a hundredaire could do.

HA! I love that journalism pays the same in all platforms. But it’s a passion project with endless possibilities, no?

Indeed. But there is a financial element that is not as bleak (I hope) as I tend to joke. So, there’s a few levels I could talk about how it’s going.

Without a doubt, you have a business model that makes sense… in fact you have two. Individual stories and licensing.

Yes, so let’s take the stories first. We knew going in, and nothing has yet proven us wrong, that it’s very difficult to build up a readership from scratch. If you recall the heyday of big magazine launches, they would do things like buy up subscriber lists and just send them the magazine, and lose millions of dollars trying to gain a substantial readership. Our marketing budget so far topped out at right around $0. So we’re pretty pleased with the number of readers we’ve had (everybody asks; we always say “tens of thousands total, for all the stories,” but not much more than that). We’ve used the first few stories to get enough revenue to fund some more, which was our first milestone we were aiming at. Next up is proving that this sort of small-scale, small-team version of longform journalism can consistently make the money to be sustaining. That means getting more readers, and getting them to come back.

On the licensing side we haven’t announced anything yet, but we’ve found a huge, frankly kind of shocking to us in size – we can’t deal with the influx of interest at the moment – interest in utilizing the app platform and CMS for different types of publishing. Some of them you’d only loosely think of as “publishing:” in the financial field, the medical field. So we are really hoping that that side can help support the journalism side while we are starting out, to give us time to grow the readership.

And maybe even pay ourselves something some day!

It will be a new, gold chain on that bike! Seriously, it’s no easy task what you’ve done. Congratulations, by the way. Do you have any lessons you’ve learned that you can share with those thinking about experimenting, developing an idea?

Solid gold. Thanks! It’s been a bit harrowing at times.

Well, a couple things I learned quickly: In the digital world, if that’s where your experiment is going to exist (and most do these days, I suppose), you have to find a designer/developer who understands what you are trying to do. In our case, we got incredibly lucky with Jefferson Rabb, who not only understood, he actually was able to create it in ways we hadn’t thought of. Now, if you are one of those new-style journalists that can do it all: write and report and code and design, well, that’s amazing. But if not, befriend great coders! Find ones who like to read!

The second big thing is—and I think I probably used to scoff a little at “entrepreneurial journalism” courses, or that sort of thing (I didn’t go to j-school, so it’s all a little foreign to me) – knowing how to do really mundane things to make a business work is actually incredibly useful. I’ve lost hours, nay, weeks, months, and lots of sleep, and probably hair, trying to puzzle out issues that were easily solved by someone who knows the first thing about running a business. So if you can get that somewhere, through experience or coursework or whatever, it’s going to save a lot of time that you could be spending on the thing you love, which is the writing and editing and publishing.

Great advice… you mentioned find developers who “like to read” … you spoke at SXSWi about longform storytelling and a lot of articles about The Atavist focus on the “death of longform” and how this may “save it” (no pressure, by the way). What do you think of the tltr (too long to read) culture. Is there a real threat here? Is this hype? Or is it all true and you found the silver bullet to save the world (no pressure).

Yeah, I love those stories…

To be really honest, I have no idea. I’m always asked, in panels like that, what I think of it, and I hate being the guy who just makes sh-t up because they happen to be connected to a field. My answer is: I don’t think anybody knows, and mostly the folks who pontificate about attention spans and reading and news are substituting what they do and want for what “readers” do and want. At some basic level, obviously we are ingesting a lot of information in shorter chunks, more constantly, and all of that, which is written about ad nauseum. At another basic level, people still buy a lot of books. People still buy a lot of nonfiction books. People are buying more and more ebooks, in huge numbers. So for us, I don’t really care if at some broad level, some people are saying “nobody reads long stuff anymore.” It’s just not true. The only question for us is: Can we get the people who do read long stuff to read our long stuff. And I think there are plenty of those people out there, and (as Byliner, newly launched, is also proving), maybe even untapped folks who are ready for / looking for great stories of this style and length.

I completely agree with you. People are consuming more media in more ways. But, a good story is still a good story. Make sure you are using all the new — and old — storytelling techniques to engage your reader/listener/viewer/user.

Right, and it’s the same with multimedia. People say: “Readers don’t really want videos and audio in their story.” By which they mean, they don’t. But some people do. And if the story is better told with it, why not try to find that balance that makes for the most gripping possible narrative?

So, I just “tweeted” (I feel awkward typing that word rather than saying it) out that I was chatting with you and am crowdsourcing any questions. I got one from @mattvree, who asks, “Any plans to move beyond just longform written journalism, and expand to multimedia and documentary?”

Not at the moment. We’ve got our hands full with our current efforts. Of course we think about the possibility of expanding into different areas down the road. But we feel like we’re barely getting started with our current approach, and it would be madness to try and take on new types of efforts before we feel we have the old one nailed. One thing we may be doing is a piece or two that are more visual than they are textual. So the current balance of text-to-image is almost reversed, and the story is told primarily through visuals. But that’s still in the works.

Let me ask you some questions that I, some type of Web journo nerd, routinely like to ask other journos.

First, I’m always fascinated with names/branding, so where did the name The Atavist come from? I assume it wasn’t inspired by the metal band Otep, which put out an album with the same name (thank you Wikipedia).

It’s out today!! We’ve really been anticipating the release date, because our Twitter stream is filled with absolutely insane OTEP fans who have been counting down the days for almost two months.

HAHAHA! Okay, so, what’s the backstory to your use of The Atavist?

But no, not inspired by. I started using it as my personal domain years ago, it’s a tiny sideways allusion to Hunter S. Thompson‘s work; atavist and atavistic are words that, if you read a lot of HST (as I once did), he drops in quite often. And then when we wanted to start something, we went through literally hundreds of possible names. Actually Jefferson once made an app that just randomly generated names for us. But then we came back to it, and decided that the actual meaning, a biological feature that’s disappeared and then suddenly reappears, had some salience. Storytelling reappearing in the digital realm, or whatnot. And it’s fairly unique, which means people can find it in the app store — more important than you’d think. Some people seem to hate it, but overall it seems like people are ok with it.

Second, this has become one of my standard questions…. in these “tough times,” why are you a journalist? What drives you and keeps you going in this field?

For me, it’s probably not as noble as it is for some journalists. On the writing end, I just really like digging into things, getting obsessed with topics, meeting fascinating people, and getting to go interesting places. On the publishing side of things, now I want to give other writers the chance to do all of those things. Of course sometimes the more noble aspects are part of it: shedding light on an important topic, investigating some malfeasance. And sometimes the least noble parts: seeing ones name as a byline. But mostly it’s just fun to go out into the world, find a story, and then figure out how to tell it.

And as someone who has freelanced for 10 years, it’s always seemed like tough times. It’s always full of rejection, and failure, and dry periods, and occasionally empty bank accounts. So I don’t see much difference now from when I started (although of course I realize other folks do).

Well, Evan… thank you for taking the time to chat with me. I hope this format wasn’t too awkward. I really enjoyed out conversation and wish you luck on your current and new adventures.

Thanks, I enjoyed it!

Robert Hernandez is a Web Journalism professor at USC Annenberg and co-creator of #wjchat, a weekly chat for Web Journalists held on Twitter. You can contact him by e-mail (r.hernandez@usc.edu) or through Twitter (@webjournalist). Yes, he’s a tech/journo geek.

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.

So what next for the paper? Rumours that it will be given away free like Lebedev’s other newspaper, The London Evening Standard, continue, despite its new owner apparently assuring Prime Minister Gordon Brown that it won’t be.

Yet what will happen? Certainly Lebedev will invest a considerable amount of money in the paper, not least because his media properties back home in Russia have always had both his wallet and his backing to rely on, though presumably avoiding any conflict with him. Yet whether this will translate into a viable – let alone profitable – newspaper remains to be seen.

As a broadsheet (despite being tabloid-sized since 2003), The Independent sells only 183,547 copies a day, its Sunday edition a mere 155,661. Compare this to its closest rival, given their shared centre left outlooks, The Guardian, with 284,514 a day, or the right wing ‘qualities’ – The Times and The Telegraph – with 505,062 and 685,177 respectively. It is perhaps with good reason that The Sun’s* notorious ex-editor Kelvin McKenzie described this sector as the ‘unpopular press’ – certainly even The Times makes a yearly loss, whilst The Guardian continues to haemorrage money.

It may simply be the case that there are too many titles in an already over-crowded and undervalued sector of the press. A cynical observer may at this point argues that Lebedev’s actions are those of a billionaire oligarch who has just bought an expensive toy, perhaps evidenced by his son, Evgeny, being placed in charge of the operation. Yet this misses one important point – quality journalism costs money and may in fact be economically nonviable in today’s climate. Outside of rich benefactors and public bodies, how else is it to be funded?

This brings us to the online angle. One possibility Lebedev could pursue is to simply close the newspaper’s print arm altogether and focus on its online version, much as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Christian Scientist Monitor have already done. This does however still pose problems. Apart from the difficulties of making a profit from advertising alone, the centre left web news market has arguably already been colonised, by The Guardian whose site attracts 20,499,858 unique visitors a month versus Independent.co.uk’s paltry 7,215,928. The TV licence-funded BBC News Online also poses a considerable obstacle – not least with its 350 million page impressions a month. It has better resources, an internationally renowned brand and, some critics argue, a left-wing bias that competes with the Independent’s own similar editorial line. What niche can an online-only Independent occupy?

One suggestion comes from an unlikely source. Libertarian politics blogger Paul Staines, also known as ‘Guido Fawkes’, has always been scathing at what he refers to as ‘The Dead Tree Press’. Yet he also seems to have an attachment to The Independent – going so far as to suggest the paper should go completely digital and become moderate conservative, but also embrace technology the other newspapers have so far not explored – namely an application that allows it to be read by iPhone subscribers, an option Staines sees as a possible financially viable future for print media. Though, perhaps simply by dropping out of print altogether, The Independent could both save a small fortune and provide some room for the other broadsheets to expand into.

If not, then there is the possibility that The Independent may simply fade away, as other UK newspapers such as The Daily Sketch and The Sunday Correspondent** have done. A sometimes innovative newspaper’s final legacy may be that it is the first major UK casualty of the post-print age.

* The Sun’s present circulation is 2,972,763 – almost five times as much as The Telegraph, which is the UK’s most popular broadsheet.

** This publication closed down in 1990 with a circulation of 149,241 – dangerously close to The Independent’s present circulation.

Having sat through so many PBS shows and pledge drives where hosts offer up copies of the network’s documentaries on DVD for $20 a pop and up, Newsday’s initial steps into documentary production suggest, to me at least, a possible alternate medium for newspapers to pursue their so-far elusive paid-content dreams. Forget about reading text on the Web for a moment. How about getting folks to pay for newspaper-produced investigative documentaries on Blu-Ray and DVD? Or pay-per-view or short-term rental via cable, satellite or movie distribution networks such as Netflix? What are the possibilities for long-form video news storytelling?

Robert: Walk us through the short tour of what you folks did, and how you did it. Whose idea was is it to do the video element, and how long did that take to produce?

Thomas: From the very earliest stage, this project was conceived as a multimedia investigation because of the wealth of photos, archival footage of nuclear bombs bursting in air, and the dramatic life stories of the Marshallese who were put back deliberately on their radioactive island as part of Brookhaven National Lab’s 43-year study for the U.S. government. Ideally, we were hoping to combine Newsday’s tradition of hard-hitting investigative reporting with a narrated “Frontline”-style documentary that could be shown on the Web in nine “chapters”, averaging about five minutes or less. With our new owner, Cablevision System Corp., there was also a new opportunity to offer this 32-minute documentary as a single complete presentation without “chapters” on Newsday’s on-demand channel — a new emerging medium that offers the chance to tell our story not only on the small screen of a laptop but also on the much larger at-home TV screen, where the visual and story-telling impact is even greater.

In 2006, I stumbled across a university website that contained many once-confidential documents about U.S. nuclear testing during the Cold War that was made public during the Clinton Administration. Though much has been written about the 1954 Bravo hydrogen bomb blast that covered many Marshallese in radioactive, the little-known story about Brookhaven Lab’s actions in the Pacific– with serious allegations of treating people like human “guinea pigs” to learn about the impact of radiation on the human body – emerged by piecing these documents together. By 2007, Newsday decided to send photographer and video journalist John Paraskevas and myself to the Marshall Islands. John and I have worked together for many years at Newsday, beginning with an investigation of police corruption that won the national Sigma Delta Chi prize in 1986. John is generally known as Newsday’s most accomplished video journalist, and I’ve had a long interest in video journalism, dating back to Columbia Journalism School where I won the 1982 documentary prize for an investigation of the mob’s influence at the Fulton Fish Market. Although things at Newsday have been topsy-turvy with three owners since our 2007 trip, John and I continued working on this project when our schedules allowed until the documentary finally appeared along with a 5,000 Sunday magazine piece and on-line sidebars in August.

This project revealed how Brookhaven researchers deliberately returned 250 people to their bomb-contaminated islands in 1957 in order to study the flow of radiation through their bodies. When the Marshallese developed cancer and thyroid problems over the coming decades, more than 100 were paid $25,000 to have questionable thyroid surgery, often without their informed medical consent. For years, they were not told about the rising amount of radiation in their bodies from living on their contaminated homeland, not until they all fled in 1985, leaving their islands abandoned. Now the Obama administration and Congress is being asked to pay for 2007 Nuclear Claims Tribunal award of $1 billion to those from Rongelap, the most affected Marshallese people, whom the Tribunal ruled were deliberately put back on their islands for “military and scientific concerns.”

Our print story and on-line sidebars detailed exactly how things happened, while the video was meant as a epic-like narrative, capturing the sights and sounds over five decades of the Marshallese and the team from Brookhaven, one of Long Island’s most esteemed institutions where six Nobel Prizes have been won. It became Newsday’s first investigative documentary, with hopefully many more to come.

Robert: Did you have to go outside the newsroom for help on this – with production, or at least, training? What help did you get? Did Cablevision get involved?

Thomas: John Paraskevas and myself produced this whole thing as team, with the support of investigations editor Steve Wick, magazine editor Tim Healy and multimedia editor Arnold Miller. In the reporting, John filmed all of our interviews and I edited all the sound bites into a log sheet with time codes, and wrote the script along with numbered photos and clips that pertained to each segment. We were very fortunate to find and collect photos from Brookhaven Lab’s files, the Defense department’s color footage of US nuclear testing, videotaped testimony given before the Nuclear Claims Tribunal as well as personal photos and footage from those interviewed. Both John and I worked with Final Cut Pro (something I think ALL print reporters should know how to do) on various segments along the way, as well as the narration and the use of Soundtrack Pro in providing background music. John kept an eye on the visuals and I did on the story-telling. We both have a deep and long-time interest in documentary-style video. John has produced more in-depth video segments than any Newsday photographer and I’ve produced about 25 separate video stories in the past year. Yet neither of us had been involved in something this seemingly overwhelming.

Although Newsday produced this project independently, Cablevision’s News12 news director Pat Dolan was very gracious in his support. I’m particularly excited by the prospect of making a full-length version of the 32-minute documentary, which we called “Fallout”, available on Newsday’s new on-demand channel on the Cablevision system.

Robert: Is this the most ambitious video project Newsday has done to date? What does a typical Web video project at Newsday look like?

Thomas: By far, this is Newsday’s most ambitious and complex project of any sort involving video. Most newspaper videos are raw visual grabs off the daily news, usually with little or no narration and largely defined by the persons or events being filmed. It is still rare for print reporters to play the role of producers or narrators, synthesizing reporting into a script that is written for the ear as well as the eye. Increasingly, though, this “YouTube” approach is giving way to a more polished presentation, more like the videos found on “Hulu”, which will undoubtedly be appreciated by a smart, affluent suburban audience like Newsday’s readers. Both John and I have been involved in other videos stories of more than five minutes in length, but nothing fully integrated as a 32-minute investigative documentary. We wanted to tell this video in the best form of narrative writing, centering on two main characters – Dr. Robert Conard, the long-time head of Brookhaven’s program and John Anjain, the mayor of Rongelap, most seriously contaiminated Marshallese atoll whose own son died on radiation-related cancer. Over the years, the initial friendship of these two men – which turned to distrust and bitterness – reflected the essential drama of our documentary.

Without a doubt, this was a full-fledged investigation in Newsday’s tradition, both with some really tough reporting here with Brookhaven and U.S. Energy Department officials, and with some very real human logistical and linguistic challenges in the Marshall Islands. During our trip, for instance, we flew about 800 miles in a prop plane to the still abandoned radioactive island of Rongelap, accompanied by two Marshallese bomb survivors who recounted their experiences. Some told us of loved ones who died from radiation, how they got sick or had surgery because of “the poison,” as they called it. In taped on-the-record interviews, they told us what it was like to have their growth retarded by radiation or to worry about birth defects among their children. With the help of a translator, we returned with more than 50 hours of taped interviews and B-roll from our two-week trip.

Down the road, I think the emerging medium of Newsday’s on-demand channel will provide a wonderful opportunity for multimedia projects. If newspapers are going to go “behind the wall” – asking readers to pay for their website offerings – quality journalism will undoubtedly be a main draw. But on-demand cable offerings by newspapers – with HD television viewed on large screens, selected from a menu available whenever people want to watch – may become a natural showcase for investigative and indepth reporting. Where those watching a postage-stamp player in a computer during lunchtime at work may get antzy after a few minutes, a well-produced local documentary report told in “60 Minutes’ or “Frontline”-style may be very appealing to both the audience at home and advertisers. But for John and myself, the sheer challenge of this project – of “flying by the seat of your pants” with a new, emerging medium – was enough fun and excitement to carry us through days and nights of exhausting work.

Robert: How did you decide to draw attention to the video, in print, on the website and within the article? Did you look at any studies or existing data on effective promotion, on-page placement and linkage of online video? If so, what did they tell you?

Thomas: How the stories were played and promoted were decided by Newsday’s editors. With help from our multimedia editor Arnold Miller, we prepared a 15-minute promo – pulled from some clips of the documentary – that appeared on Newsday’s website starting five days before the project appeared. Of course, down the road, newspapers like Newsday might offer a permanent window on their site where in-depth documentaries can be highlighted, and in-house print ads might draw the readers attention to upcoming documentary productions that would be of interest to potential viewers. I’m sure as things change, we’ll get much smarter.

Robert: Have you considered a broadcast/cable presentation of the video, in addition to the Web presentation?

Thomas: Yes, indeed. We’re in the process of re-editing the nine-part Internet version of the documentary into a full-length, non-stop 32-minute presentation for Newsday’s on-demand channel, available to Cablevision’s Long Island audience. We’ve also discussed the possibility of showing the documentary some night this fall at a local cinema along with a panel discussion.

Eventually, I think this new medium of on-demand cable will be the most defining place for newspaper-produced documentaries, particularly if the topic is wide enough and interesting enough to attract a sizeable audience. It will allow video presentations to “breathe” with better visuals and sound presentations, and a pacing that is more engaging to folks sitting on the livingroom couch at home.

Robert: How do you measure the impact of the project, and the video in particular? Circulation, traffic, media mentions, social media links? Policy changes? How do you think you should be measuring the impact of a project such as this?

Thomas: The project had an immediate impact, with the Marshall Island president requesting a meeting this fall with President Obama to discuss the 2007 Tribunal award and whether the U.S. pay will any of the $1 billion damages, including $34 million for “emotional distress” to those people who were deliberately put back on a contaminated island. Ultimately an investigative project like this one showcases your intent to keep your audience informed of the most vital issues in the community. Long-time Newsday readers have come to depend on this “watchdog” journalism. Our late editor, Bob Greene, would be proud of that Steve Wick and I, two member of the old Greene team, were now producing investigative documentaries, trying to carry on the tradition.

Robert: Why did you break the video into so many parts? How do you find the sweet spot between overloading people with a too-large file and losing viewers by having too many segments to click through?

Thomas: Getting a feel for just how long a segment should be turned out to be one of the most vexing questions for us. Our opening chapter was built around our trip with the bomb survivors to abandoned Rongelap island. We used that trip as the vehicle to briefly summarize the consequences of the decision by Brookhaven and U.S. officials to gamble with the lives and health of 250 people, by putting them back on a radioactive island with the intent of studying them. So that first segment – sort of a billboard for our findings — was our longest. The rest of the chapters – which recounted the entire story from the very beginning in the 1950s and reaching chronologically up to today – was told in smaller segments, each around 3-4 minutes. I’m not sure there is an easy answer — except to edit things so that not a moment is wasted. When writing books, I’ve learned that short chapters keep the reader moving along. But I didn’t want to create a rigid template that squeezes out the essential pleasure derived from story-telling (a growing problem in print newspapers these days with cost constraints). Ideally in the future, each chapter in a video documentary on the Web should automatically be linked on a playlist, so they effortlessly move from one to the next. In this case, the chapters were on a carousel and Newsday viewers simply had to click to get the next chapter. Obviously, this documentary wasn’t a quick video grab of a car accident or celebrity sighting, but a long-form story on a website where people usually spend time during their lunch break. Down the road, the name of the game will be to get our viewers to stay with our website for more than a few minutes, and I’m sure hard-hitting investigative videos, if they become a steady diet, will allow newspapers to extend the amount of time that viewers spend on their websites. Great stories, well told. It’s the oldest, hardest, most successful skill of all.

Robert: I notice that you have links to buy the video: How’s that going? Is the revenue there significant?

Thomas: Videos produced by Newsday are routinely offered for sale, and I’m not in a position to comment about revenues and such. We’ve had some inquiries about whether we’ll be selling the whole documentary as one unit, and I think that format may be the best way to go. I’ll be curious to see if we soon offer documentaries like this for sale through on-demand channels. In the near future, I think Newsday’s effort to produce videos on news, sports, documentary and local programming — offered via on-demand channels for cable viewers at home — may emerge as a big part of the newspaper’s efforts and may be even more attractive to advertisers than the Web. This is, of course, for others to decide. Speaking as a journalist, I’m looking forward to more projects told through HD images, vivid sound and music, and becoming a better narrator of my own scripts.

Robert: How do you would justify future multimedia of this magnitude to a skeptical, cost-conscious management? (And if your management loves you now and is willing to fund future projects, how would you advise journalists in other newsrooms to elicit that kind of support?)

Thomas: The future for smart literate newspapers and magazines is clearly in multimedia presentations, showcased in ways that reflect who you’re trying to attract as an audience. The old style of newspaper editors who prefer simply car accidents and cop arrests, turning the Web into a police blotter, are quickly fading. The challenge for newspapers will be in translating the “brain” of the newsroom – all those reporters working beats and developing sources and able to write print stories on deadline – into compelling and complementary video that can be quickly produced, scripted, narrated and edited with the quite efficient technology already available today like Final Cut Pro and Avid. Developing video and print stories together – under the same newsroom umbrella and not as separate units wary of one another – is the only way to go. That’s especially so if your idea is to extend and capitalize on the affluent, well-educated audience of a suburban paper like Newsday and bring it profitably into the video age. This is no easy task, but it should be embraced by any journalist who wants to bring their stories to the widest audience possible. I do believe any print reporter – armed with a small HD camera and after some quick training on Final Cut Pro – can produce a five-minute video to accompany the next important print story you do. In this particular case, John Paraskevas and I worked together because of the sheer volume and complexity of the materials and because we’ve worked together as a team, not only as friends and colleagues for years but also as each’s toughest editor. Documentary-making is the natural video expression of the newspaper investigation series. It’s only a matter of time until newsrooms and their audience realize this.

Join us on OJR on Wednesday, when Kathlyn Clore writes about a coverage opportunity that many local news sites are missing – municipal traffic reports.

Suddenly, and without warning, one student, who had been working quietly, excitedly exclaimed, “I feel like I can do anything!” She was sitting in front of a computer screen, editing video in iMovie. Obviously proud of her creation, she was moved to this empowering declaration. Here she was, a female undergraduate student, getting excited about something she created on a computer and associating that with a general sense of agency and confidence. It warmed my heart to the core.

I have taught numerous students in technology labs over the past ten years, and the majority of them have been female. This is due mainly to the gender representation in the communications discipline in general, which in most programs I would venture is in the 70% female/30% male proportion. It’s not unusual for me to have a class in which only one or two men are on the roster (we had two men in the recent class). I have had much experience in watching female students move from the attitude that “the computer hates me” to a swelling sense of accomplishment as they complete each project. Many have expressed that these skills helped to increase their confidence with technology, and several have gone on to careers in which technology was an integral aspect, including Web design and development roles as well as marketing or communication positions in which usage and understanding of online and social media are essential. It makes me proud every time I hear one of them talk about the latest issue of Wired or explain the professional benefits of Twitter to a fellow student (or professor).

We have a unique opportunity in media education to train our students in advanced technology skills and concepts, particularly due to the high concentration of women in our discipline. I have discussed this opportunity before and continue to believe it is not only our responsibility but should be our discipline’s mission to effectively impart communication technology skills to our students in a way that instills an innovative spirit and a sense of agency for influencing the direction of the profession.

Advanced skills in database design and programming are fueling some of the most exciting new journalism projects (see the Pulitzer-price winning Politifact of the St. Petersburg Times or the many Knight-Batten-award-winning projects of The New York Times. But, by and large, those teams are staffed by men. There is no reason why women can’t take part in this new and innovative means of storytelling. We just have to introduce them to the concepts and make them feel that it is a realm that is available to them.

Can you imagine scores of young women exclaiming “I feel like I can do anything!” just because we took the time to introduce them to, not only technology skills, but also to creative outlets and processes that emphasize judgment and perspective on the digital landscape? Can you envision the effect of legions of journalism grads going out in the world with a sense of passion and optimism about the digital future of news and their ability to direct it?

I am reminded of the words of Kathy Sierra, a female technologist and author that I have seen many times at the South By Southwest Interactive Festival. Sierra’s mantra is “creating passionate users.” Her approach has helped to define my teaching philosophy. I hope to quickly help students over what Sierra calls the “suck threshold,” and get them feeling good about using technology in creative ways. I want them to be excited about the things they are making and their ability to share their creations with the world.

Whether students shout it out in your classroom or ponder it quietly, it is important to understand education’s role as confidence and empowerment builder. We can debate whether teaching skills or theory is more important and what level of technology exposure our students need. But if we aren’t empowering them to positively view their contributions and to understand their role as innovators, then we are doing a disservice.

When he applied to take a journalism elective course, he was rejected because he wasn’t an English major. When he applied for a job as food columnist at the school paper, he was also rejected.

But Motlagh persisted, and eventually won a spot on the school paper as travel columnist. His specialty: Travel to fascinating world spots on very low budgets.

Voila. Today Motlagh has five years of free-lance foreign correspondence under his belt and, in many respects, he is the prototype for the journalist of the future: a free-lancing, multimedia correspondent who knows how to market his work and live on a tight budget.

I found Motlagh through my friend Jon Sawyer, who runs the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and who has made Motlagh, 28, one of the workhorse reporters for his up-and-coming nonprofit. Jon confirmed one of Motlagh’s most attractive traits: his “doggedness.”

In the last two years, Motlagh has covered for Pulitzer the massive flooding in south Asia, the Maoist Naxolite rebels of north-central India, the Nepalese Maoist groups, Sri Lanka’s fight with the Tamil Tigers and, more recently, civilian casualties in Afghanistan.

But that rendition of Motlagh’s recent work doesn’t get at the heart of what he does or what makes it work. Here’s what’s telling:

• He’s a multimedia journalist. Motlagh doesn’t just write stories. He shoots still photos. He shoots and edits video. He does audio. He blogs. He narrates slide shows. And because he does all of those things, he says, he has a huge advantage over free-lance foreign correspondents working in a single medium. Having multiple media skills is “still unusual,” he said. “There aren’t a whole lot of people yet who have gotten up to speed. If you are, you can make clients an offer they can’t refuse.”
• He’s an entrepreneur. This isn’t a new part of a free-lancer’s life, but it’s becoming increasingly important as traditional clients fall by the wayside. In the last two years he lost two important outlets in the San Francisco Chronicle and U.S. News & World Report. But landing work at the Pulitzer Center, and increasing billings through his multimedia work, fills the gaps.
• He lives modestly and accepts that there may be periods in his work where he’ll have to do something besides journalism to pay the bills.

This question of compensation is something that bedeviled my class at the USC Annenberg School for Communication last semester. Students were thrilled with Jon Sawyer’s presentation about the Pulitzer Center – some of them were ready to go abroad immediately – but were stumped about how they would live when Pulitzer essentially pays only travel stipends (usually $1,500 to $5,000).

One answer for the foreign free-lancer, Motlagh said, is that you can live abroad much more cheaply than you suspect. “I was paying less than $500 a month for a very, very nice place in Delhi,” he said. “Even had a house-cleaner. You can do what I do and live well. You can buy insurance, get an apartment.”

Motlagh was a few years into his free-lance career before hooking up with the Pulitzer Center. He began with a six-month stint in West Africa, came home to work for UPI for about a year, then made a decision to go abroad full time. Over the next three years he focused his work on south and central Asia, producing mostly newspaper stories and photos.

Then, about two years ago, another example of Motlagh’s never-say-die trait played out. He pitched an idea to the Pulitzer Center. Then another. Both were rejected. Finally, the center said yes, and Motlagh has become one of its chief contributors.

He acknowledges that his multimedia skills are a big reason. One of Pulitzer’s key partnerships has been with Foreign Exchange, the weekly public broadcasting show. Now Motlagh and other Pulitzer free-lancers were being asked to produce short video documentaries that could air on the show. He needed to learn video and shooting, on the fly.

“One of the things I’d tell students is if I can do it, the sky is the limit,” he jokes. “I’m comfortable with it now. I can shoot and edit my own video.”

In addition to giving him free-lance assignments and a productive nudge on the multimedia front, Pulitzer maneuvered to connect Motlagh with other possibilities: He’s done a couple of IWitness webcam interviews for Frontline/World – work for which Pulitzer pays him $1,000 per interview. It also put him in touch with Virginia Quarterly Review editor Ted Genoways, resulting in a 7,500-word article on the Asian ethnic insurgencies. (Another Virginia Quarterly Review piece, on the anniversary of the Mumbai terrorist attacks, is forthcoming.)

Perhaps most rewarding to Motlagh have been the campus lectures he’s done for Pulitzer’s schools outreach program. Pulitzer made his India work the focus of its schools program last year, and created a Web site that includes lesson plans plans and an interactive chat room. The school visits, to Ohio University, Southern Illinois University, Washington University (St. Louis) and several St. Louis high schools, produced a $500 honorarium for each trip, but also gave Motlagh an emotional charge.

“It’s very satisfying,” he said. “You get more mileage for the work you do; you get feedback, dialogue. You get students interested in foreign concerns.”

I asked Motlagh to circle back to the questions of my students, wondering if their interest in foreign reporting can square with financial realties.

“I feel my case is evidence that this is very possible for young journalist to do,” he said. “As grim as it might look, there are opportunities out there… The other thing I’d say is just go if you think this is what you want to do. Sometimes it’s just being there that creates the opportunity.”

At least for Motlagh, being there is what he wants to do. After a brief stateside visit, he’s heading back to Afghanistan.

Almost five years ago now, my wife (Geneva Overholser) and I sat in Jon Sawyer’s living room in Washington, D.C., and listened to him spin out what sounded like an improbable tale. He wanted to set up a nonprofit center on foreign reporting, and he wanted a philanthropist to bankroll it.

I will confess right here. I was supremely skeptical that this could work. And I was wrong as could be. Jon, the longtime Washington bureau chief of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, indeed did persuade Emily Pulitzer to establish the nonprofit center. And today, three-and-a-half years old, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting is producing dozens of exclusive, multimedia reports on issues and regions of the world that otherwise wouldn’t be covered.

Jon is a longtime friend so I won’t feign impartiality here, and will basically let him tell his own story. But it’s worth making a few points up top:

First, the Pulitzer Center is demonstrating that high-quality international reporting can happen on a modest budget. Jon’s entire expense budget is less than $1 million a year, and that pays for the center’s staff in Washington as well as dozens of reporting grants.

Second, the center is one of the leading proponents for the journalist-as-entrepreneur model. Free-lancers commissioned by the center receive only a travel stipend; but the center then works with the journalists to find multiple platforms and venues for their work. (Note: In a later post we’ll focus on a couple of journalists who exemplify this model.)

Third, the Pulitzer center’s projects aren’t just one-off stories, or even a multimedia menu of stories. They are full-blown campaigns, designed to create maximum exposure for the reporting. Notably, Jon is developing the idea that the college lecture hall and the school classroom are critical pieces of a journalist’s ability to get his or her story across.

I asked Jon a few questions about his center. His answers run a little long, but they’re worth your time:

I’ve been surprised at how quickly you’ve made the Pulitzer Center into a major engine of foreign news coverage. How have you pulled this off in such a short time?
Three and a half years isn’t so short (especially since it feels like three and half years with no weekends off!). But I agree, the Center’s scope has grown much faster than I imagined when we began. We’ve gone from fewer than 10 projects the first year to a projected 35 for 2009, and from just a handful of placements in the first year to more than 250 in 2008.

We benefited a great deal from my experience doing this sort of enterprise reporting over many years at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a newspaper with a strong commitment to independent reporting on global issues but no foreign bureaus and a relatively modest travel budget; in my dozen years as DC bureau chief we never had a budget greater than $150,000 for domestic/foreign travel. On the 40-plus foreign projects I did for the PD the travel budget was never more than $20,000, even for trips where I spent six or eight weeks traveling. So I was used to squeezing as much as possible out of limited dollars. I also had field experience in most regions of the world, was familiar with most of the issues presented, and enjoyed relationships I had developed over the years with editors at many print and broadcast outlets.

We’ve also grown faster than anticipated because we’ve been offering unique and high-quality content at a time when the traditional sources for such content have been in free fall. You know the drill – bureaus shuttered, budgets slashed. News organizations that told me three years ago they had no interest in partnering with outside collaborators on international reporting have a very different view today. (This also reflects, I think, the fact that three years in we now have an established reputation for providing quality work – and so we’re able at least to get a hearing most places when we pitch our journalists’ work.)

Lastly, and most important, I was very lucky in the people I hired, and in the quality of journalists who came to us for travel support.

My associate director, Nathalie Applewhite, brought a wealth of experience in video documentaries and international education; Ann Peters, our director of development and outreach, had been a UPI reporter in the U.S., Jerusalem and South Africa and later, after law school, worked on the program side for
Human Rights Watch and the Open Society Institute; Janeen Heath came straight from college but with terrific organizational skills and experience in campus leadership positions that made her well suited to take the lead in our high school and university outreach programs.

How is the Pulitzer Center different from other news organizations (profit and non-profit) in focusing on foreign news?
The biggest distinction is probably our “full-cycle” approach, from the identification of underreported systemic crises and the recruitment of journalists to help in placement of their work across multiple media platforms and a very aggressive program of after-marketing and educational outreach. In essence we view our projects as campaigns – not as one-off stories where the work ceases at the point of publication or broadcast.

The heart of our work is travel support to journalists, getting them out in the field, but we differ from other funding sources in that we seek out journalists who embrace our model and are willing to work closely with Pulitzer to maximize the impact of their work. The commissions we make come with a host of requirements – all the information you see on our “project pages,” multiple print and photo/video blogs from the field, the creation of audio slide shows to complement the work, entries on Wikipedia, at least one article for our partners at Global Post. For many of our journalists, the blogs and audio slideshows they create for us are their first experience with either – and almost without exception they’ve found it rewarding and highly useful in terms of promoting the work.

The relationship with Global Post is typical of our many collaborations, from traditional platforms like the Post, the Times and NewsHour to new outlets like WorldFocus. We’ve built strong relationships with regional or niche papers that had interest/resources in foreign news (Christian Science Monitor, San Francisco Chronicle and Washington Times), putting us in position to help less established writers/producers get outlets and income. We’ve also worked hard on the magazine front, from big outlets like Time and Newsweek (online and print) to specialty mags like Mother Jones, Rolling Stone and The Nation. Because of the many contacts we’ve made, and the track record we’ve established, we’re able to serve our journalists as agent, getting their pitches a hearing. We also do a lot of work on the pitches themselves, getting them in shape to make the strongest case possible.

Among the several dozen projects we fund each year there is implicit competition to be singled out for the after-marketing and educational placements we do for the best of the projects. We plug the chosen journalists into our growing network of schools and universities, giving them this additional opportunity for exposure, contacts and income. We handle all the logistics, the marketing and payments.

The after-marketing and education outreach distinguishes us in another way, in that we are singularly focused on reaching out to audiences not now engaged in traditional news media outlets. In our view we are creating the news audience of the future, exposing young people to quality journalism and encouraging them to join a conversation on critically important global issues – but within the context of vetted, professional journalism.

This is one of the reasons our partnership with YouTube on Project:Report was so important. YouTube came to us as the journalist partner on their first video reporting contest because they wanted to convey their commitment to serious journalism. If you look at the way the contest was structured you’ll see that commitment vividly displayed. Each of the three rounds of the contest was presented with aspirational “model” videos from the work of Pulitzer – on Iraq, Jamaica and Liberia – and each round included a “how-to” video produced by us with our journalists and videographers (e.g., how to do an effective profile, how to find the universal elements in a local story, how to create a collaborative video project). YouTube showed its own commitment to the project via heavy promotion on its site and throughout Google, and by showcasing the ten finalists on YouTube’s homepage (a rare exception to YouTube’s general rule of having popularity dictate placement). The result was nearly 3 million views for videos associated with the contest, and priceless exposure for some exceptional video work. The grand-prize winner, Arturo Perez, is now at work with Pulitzer on a reporting project from Cuba that will be showcased on YouTube, too. We are working with YouTube on doing Project:Report again next year, hopefully with even greater participation by journalism school students and by the broader YouTube community.

What are the one or two projects you’re most proud of?
Of course I’m proud of all our projects (well, almost all!) I tell more about WaterWars and our growing strand of multiple-reporter projects in the section below. Our work in Sudan is very special to me, partly because of our sustained commitment (half a dozen projects and counting) but also because our work on the African Union in Darfur was the Center’s first project, one I did myself and on which we discovered the extraordinary value of using multiple platforms. (The decision to hire a videographer to work with me led to the short documentary for Foreign Exchange, a longer 25-minute doc that aired on LinkTV and that we used to frame a special presentation at the Holocaust Memorial Museum that we simulcast to 35 college locations via Internet2 – and that then became the basis for some two dozen talks I gave at universities, schools and churches across the country … in short a pretty good wake-up call to the idea that the Pulitzer Center was going to be more than a funder of print journalists!)

Our multiple projects in Iraq are worth special note, I think, because they demonstrate (a) the role we can play highlighting under-covered angles even on stories that traditional media IS covering; and (b) the fact that small operations such as the Pulitzer Center can play a significant role even in active conflict zones characterized by security concerns and high cost. We supported Beth Murphy’s documentary on Kirk Johnson, the young AID worker who left the government to mount a campaign to win U.S. visas for Iraqis who were targeted for their work with U.S. army/government. We also made it possible for the Baltimore Sun’s Matt Brown to do a three-part series on the plight of Iraqi refugees stuck in Jordan and Syria.

And lastly, most significantly, we have funded four different projects over the past two-plus year by free-lance journalists David Enders and his wife Alaa Majeed (formerly of McClatchy) and videographers Rick and Jacqui Rowley. They’ve done things most American news organizations didn’t even try – embedding with Mahdi units and Sunni militias and getting cameras in to vast Shiite displaced-persons camps that were off limits to UN, NGOs or other press. We’ve aired multiple pieces on Foreign Exchange, put David on air with Fareed Zakaria to challenge conventional wisdom on the Surge, and made possible dozens of articles and broadcasts across a range of outlets, from the Washington Times to al Jazeera English, Democracy Now, Pacifica, The Nation and Mother Jones. David and Rick would tell you that they couldn’t have done this work without the Pulitzer Center – not so much because of the money (although that of course helped) but because we were willing to serve as sponsoring news organization at times when no one else would, given the security risks entailed and possible liability. They went in with their eyes open as to their own exposure, and having signed liability waiver forms with us. But we went in with our eyes open too, cognizant of the potential risks we bore but viewing it as crucial to produce stories that weren’t otherwise being told.

The other project I want to cite is HOPE, our multimedia examination of the human face of HIV/AIDS in Jamaica. This is the definitive example of our approach to news projects as campaigns, and our willingness to work outside the box in drawing attention to the big systemic issues we address.

HOPE began with a commission from the MAC AIDS Foundation, which gave us a grant to “do journalism” on HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean, the region with the second-highest incidence of HIV in the world but one that had gotten far less media attention than sub-Saharan Africa. There were no restrictions on the work we did, beyond a geographic focus on the Caribbean. The first project we completed was an examination of U.S. policies on HIV/AIDS in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, in collaboration with Foreign Exchange, the Palm Beach Post, and Cox Newspapers. This led to a newspaper series, three television pieces, and an interactive web portal “Heroes of HIV: HIV in the Caribbean.” It also produced results, among them a $200,000 emergency appropriation from U.S. AID to clean up sanitary conditions in a Port au Prince prison we exposed in the reporting.

For the second project we opted on a very different approach, commissioning a report on the human face of HIV/AIDS in Jamaica by Kwame Dawes, a Ghanian-Jamaican poet who teaches at the University of South Carolina. Kwame has written some 20 books of poetry and a highly regarded book on Bob Marley and reggae but before this assignment had never done anything on HIV/AIDS. He was recommended to me by Ted Genoways, editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review. I made the first trip to Jamaica with Kwame and over the course of several months in late 2007 and early 2008 he made four more trips, twice with Nathalie Applewhite and twice with other videographers we hired and also a photographer and web designer we commissioned to work with us. He interviewed some 50 individuals in all, from those infected with HIV to educators, doctors, social workers and gay-rights activists; along the way he wrote some 20 poems about the individuals he had met.

In the spring of 2008 we aired two short docs on Foreign Exchange. Kwame wrote an 8,000-word essay for VQR and I then pitched a shorter version of it The Washington Post, which published it in Outlook that spring. Meanwhile Kwame recommended that we commission original music to accompany the poetry. We agreed to do so, at a cost of $15,000, even though this was beyond the scope of the initial MAC AIDS commission and thus something we had to fund through internal Pulitzer dollars. The music, photography, video and poetry all became the basis for www.livehopelove.com, the multimedia website we launched in early 2008. The website is an extraordinarily beautiful piece of work, one that has been honored by the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and with multiple design awards – most recently as special honoree in one category of the WEBBY awards, finalist honors in two other categories, and winner of the “people’s choice” award for best use of art in a website.

We arranged for Kwame to present the project in an appearance at Busboys and Poets in DC, at the same time pitching coverage of it. NewsHour featured the project last fall, in a lengthy segment that included excerpts from the site as well as interviews with Kwame and me. We were then approached by PRX (Public Radio Exchange), which co-funded production of a one-hour radio documentary drawing on all of the material we had collected in Jamaica as well as the music we had commissioned. That documentary has aired across the country this spring, on some of the biggest NPR stations. In the meantime we were seeking a venue to produce HOPE live, as a music/spoken word ensemble. We learned last month that we had been selected as a feature presentation for the National Black Theater Festival in North Carolina, widely regarded as the most important venue in the country for black theater. The production takes place this August; we hope to make it the occasion for raising the visibility of the HIV/AIDS issue as well as for our innovative approach to journalism. We hope that it will help us raise funds for the Pulitzer Center in general, and for further productions of HOPE, on university campuses and in Jamaica.

In the meantime we are pursuing a follow-on reporting project on HIV/AIDS in Jamaica, this time focusing on stigma and homophobia and how that has contributed to the spread of the disease. We are working in partnership with WorldFocus, on a series of broadcast pieces that we hope to air early summer – in time to help with marketing of the Black Theater Festival event.

My students at USC were excited about the Pulitzer Center, but were perplexed about how a travel stipend fits with the journalist’s need to pay the rent. How would you say the center’s business model is working for the journalists who receive your grants?
The Center is not “the answer” to journalism’s crisis. It is one answer, not just through the help we give to specific journalists but also as a model for other actors in this sphere – a demonstration that relatively small amounts of money, strategically deployed, can jumpstart careers and lead to sustained relationships.

The next generation of journalists is going to be much more entrepreneurial than ours. It’ll have to be. The old model of “company men (and women),” rising through the ranks of stable news organizations and drawing on ample resources to do stellar work, is simply gone – and not likely to return. But for imaginative reporters willing to hustle there are many opportunities, and few so rich as in foreign coverage. Our success in placing stories by quite young journalists in high-end publications/broadcasts is evidence of what can be done.

On the modeling front I also want to stress again the importance of new players stepping up to take responsibility for sustaining this kind of journalism. Start with universities, and journalism schools. To me it’s an outrage that J Schools expect journalists to come on campus and talk for free, at the same time as they bewail the dwindling opportunities for their students. They should be working to fund this work themselves, through initiatives like Campus Consortium — and I hope many more will be signing up in the months ahead.

I believe I’ve heard you say that the Pulitzer Center has quickly become one of the top creators of international news content in the United States. Is that a true statement? Is the work receiving the kind of attention you want?
I’ve said that we are one of the dozen or so top U.S. providers of original enterprise reporting abroad. I believe that is a true statement. If you were to make up a list of organizations sponsoring at least three dozen enterprise reporting projects per year, you’d be hard-pressed to get beyond a handful. But in making this point my larger purpose was to indict those in our business who say international news is too expensive and can no longer be afforded. The Pulitzer Center is doing 35 in-depth projects a year, nearly half of them encompassing television elements too, on a budget of less than $1 million. We are stretched way too thin and we need more money, for adequate staff to manage/promote this work and to funnel more dollars to the journalists themselves. But still: What does our record say about the performance – and the hand-wringing — of traditional news organizations with vastly more resources?

It’s interesting how much focus you put on the educational portion of your mission. It’s almost as if the news presentation and the education part – campus visits, etc. – are two sides of the same coin. Talk about how the educational piece works for you.
Our Global Gateway and Campus Consortium educational outreach programs are absolutely central to our mission, to engage the broadest possible public in global affairs. The original journalism we sponsor is a means to that end but won’t do much good if we don’t use it creatively to engage younger audiences.

We started with a pilot program in St. Louis high schools and middle schools two-plus years ago, bringing our journalists on selected projects into the classroom and creating interactive web portals where they could engage with students online. If you look at Global Gateway on our site you’ll see the series of projects we’ve presented, from the first one we did in spring 2007 on environmental issues in Mozambique (you’ll also see there five short videos on the Global Gateway concept produced by St. Louis public television station KETC). Gateway projects since have included Iraq, child soldiers in Liberia, HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean, WaterWars from east Africa, India’s internal conflicts, and Women/Children/Crisis.

Crucial from the beginning was our partnership with Arthur Lieber and Civitas Associates, a St. Louis educational consulting firm with deep roots in that region’s schools. Arthur helped us make contact with interested teachers and to get through the often-daunting challenge of demonstrating that exposure to our projects met state requirements as to educational “purpose.” We subsequently have worked on teacher lesson plans on several of our Gateways with the Choices program at Brown University’s Watson Institute, a national leader on international-issue curriculum packages with an established network of 5,000 schools.

The in-person visits by journalists have been invaluable in testing out our approach – and a wonderful experience for journalists and students alike – but long term our goal is very much to create an interactive online experience accessible to any school anywhere. Beginning with WaterWars last fall we have significantly enhanced the online experience, using everything from YouTube and Google map platforms (for “your stories” videos responding to each of the reporting topics) to video interviews with journalists and the subjects of their reporting to bring the stories home to students.

We took WaterWars to a dozen-plus schools in Seattle as well as St. Louis, and then to additional schools in Philadelphia, New York, Miami and Nairobi. These schools are now all part of the Gateway “community,” with simple logon/passwords that allow their students to post comments/questions on any of our Gateway portals. The portals themselves remain open to anyone.

Our Campus Consortium is the university counterpart to Global Gateway. We had achieved considerable success at finding university venues for many of our journalists, producing some 100 events over the past three-plus years and often persuading universities to cover all or part of the cost of bringing journalists on campus and giving them an honorarium ($500 to $1,000 per event). Last December we decided to systematize this relationship, seeking commitments by universities/colleges to fund this relationship on an ongoing basis via the Consortium. We set the price at $10,000 per year. In return the university would work with us to bring at least one journalist event on campus each year (in practice this is looking more like one per semeseter). We would designate a Pulitzer liaison on each campus, to work with us on making campus use of all Pulitzer journalism and Gateway portals. And lastly, students at Consortium schools would be eligible to compete for $2,000 travel reporting fellowships with the Pulitzer Center, one per participating campus. In a miserable economic climate we got a wonderful response: full commitments from Ohio University, SIU-Carbondale, UNC-Chapel Hill, Kent State University and the University of Oregon, plus partial commitments from St. John’s/Minnesota and Washington University. We are actively recruiting for additional Consortium members – hopeful that journalism schools in particular will see this as a low-cost means of bringing innovative journalism approaches on campus and supporting the work of stellar journalists.

Where is the Pulitzer Center going next?
As the Pulitzer Center has scaled up, producing several dozen projects a year, we’ve gotten to the point where we can draw on multiple reporting projects to create quite extraordinary web portals that tackle big issues in a variety of ways.
WaterWars is one example, where we’ve followed up the initial reporting from east Africa with our current work on desertification in China, water issues in South Asia, and drought in Kenya. WaterWars is also the model of stronger relationships we’re building with NGOs and other journalists. We teamed with the nonprofit journalism organization Media21 (out of Geneva) to send three Pulitzer journalists (including me) to the World Water Forum this March in Istanbul, and then on follow-on reporting trips to India and Ethiopia. We produced nearly 40 short videos, interviews with experts, other journalists and people on the ground, summarized in blog entries and encapsulated in posts to the WaterWars site. We also created banner ads on this work, serving as hyperlinks back to the reporting and videos, and worked with NGOs like Water Advocates to get them displayed on NGO websites.

This spring we launched a similar cross-cutting web portal on Food Insecurity, drawing on reporting we’ve commissioned in Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, India, Tajikistan, Guatemala and Vietnam (and counting! with Australia and other reports yet to come). Lead partner is NewsHour but we’ve also placed stories in The Washington Post, Slate, Global Post and elsewhere. All displayed together on the FOOD portal, which we plan to make focus of major schools/university outreach this fall. We’re also partnering with Mercy Corps to make this content (and accesss to the “Your Stories” video feature) part of the Mercy Corps “Action Centers” that have been established in New York City and Portland, Oregon.

Later this summer we’ll launch our similar web portal “Heat of the Moment: Human Face of Climate Change,” with at least half a dozen separate Pulitzer reporting projects around the globe. By fall we’ll have portals that showcase the four projects we’re currently funding in Afghanistan, a portal based on work now in the field on education in Pakistan/Afghanistan, and FRAGILE STATES, the comprehensive work we’re doing on failed/failing states with support from Carnegie and the Stanley Foundation.

By then (we hope!) we’ll have redone our website to make the interactive portals a more integral part of the site overall – and to set them up in ways that can be integrated routinely in school curriculum and as a social-networking site for audiences more broadly.

Our biggest challenge is raising the resources (dollars) we need to take advantage of the amazing opportunities we now have. From our point of view we’ve established a model that works – from identifying gaps in coverage to recruiting journalists to do the work and then a means of getting it out to the broadest possible audience. On the reporting side I think our current scale is optimal; 35 projects a year is about the max we can do and maintain a personal connection with each of the projects. The key is staff resources to build our network of schools and universities, through the Gateways and Campus Consortium. Much of this work will eventually be self-sustaining, through Consortium membership fees and the possibility of modest charges to schools for engagement with our journalists on line. Getting to that point is a matter of persuading foundations and individuals to invest in success – to invest in the Pulitzer Center.

However, my 500-foot view from the ivory towers urges caution: it’s not the skills that you get that will save your job, or repurpose you for the future, it’s whether you can learn how to think like a journalist in the Web 2.0, or what some are even calling the Web 3.0 world.

I make this observation after working with newsrooms who have tried to implement broad training initiatives, as well as after interviews with many journalists who have attempted to gain new skills themselves. Here I get to take some license in that the journalists I’ve worked with cannot be named, as they are given anonymity for human subjects research protocol by the university.

But I can say that one of my major discoveries has been that training – learning to take a digital photo, the writing for the Web, the digital audio and video editing, the flash, and the social media, to name a few – is not for everyone, nor should it be the answer for everyone.

I don’t mean to disparage the excellent training that is occurring. Not to toot our own horn, but the Knight Digital Media Center’s Berkeley outfit has become somewhat of a standard bearer in multimedia training for journalists. Poynter’s News U offers courses in online and multimedia training. In November 2008, in addition to its News U offerings, Poynter nobly piloted Standing Up for Journalism workshop to retool and reenergize laid off journalists.

The skills, though, aren’t the answer. As one news executive said, “We need to take staff to Web 2.0 and beyond – to make learning more nimble and flexible.” This executive, after putting staff through training pilots, realized that multimedia literacy and a basic understanding of what it meant to work in a Web environment was what people needed – before they could go about learning the hardware.

What is this multimedia thinking that should be happening in these training sessions? Here are a few suggestions for journalists and their news organizations.

1. Journalists need to understand how the Web and multimedia goals will work within their own organizations. News organizations need to clearly communicate how these Web goals will influence the work production cycle.
2. Journalists at all levels of the news organization should believe that they can contribute to the multimedia vision of their organization. The future of the newsroom is also in your hands, and thinking like this forces journalists to think multi-dimensionally.
3. Journalists are not alone in the newsroom. Even if journalists themselves cannot think about how to make their work relevant to multiplatform content, someone else in the news organization can. Most of your organizations have people on staff that can help you brainstorm, even if you can’t. Multimedia training is also about making new connections across your organization.
4. Silos, departmental rivalries, and departments that don’t communicate with each other cannot exist if multimedia initiatives are to succeed.
5. Journalists no longer control the distribution of the content they produce. This is a very scary thought for many journalists, but the reality is that once something is published (usually on Web sites), it belongs to the audience of readers and becomes part of a conversation about the news.
6. Journalists need to rethink and reposition themselves the leader of this new conversation, which includes everyone from the traditional water cooler chat to bloggers.

Of all of these ways to think about multimedia in news organizations, perhaps the most important point to emphasize is that Web journalism means a journalism of conversation. London School of Economics professor and former broadcast journalist Charlie Beckett has come up with the term “networked journalist” or “networked journalism,” and explains the idea in his new book, Supermedia: Saving Journalism So it Can Save the World.

The idea is to take the best parts of the civic journalism and public journalism movements and sync these up with the possibilities of the Web. Through networked journalism, Beckett urges legacy journalists to think of themselves as participating in somewhat of a pro-am kind of relationship, where mainstream journalists share the process of production with everyday citizens.

Multimedia training doesn’t need to incorporate new skills if journalists can find ways to think about including in their work opportunities for conversation through citizen journalism, crowd-sourcing, interactivity, wikis, blogging, and social network, as Beckett points out, “not as ad-ons, but as an essential part of news production and distribution.”

Journalists don’t have to learn how to take photos, though maybe they should, but they need to think about new ways to connect to an audience that is increasingly connected to them.

The truth is that most skills boot camps don’t turn the majority of the journalists who attend them into professional quality video editors or graphic designers; in fact, many of the projects they turn out in training sessions would not be fit for the Web.

But the value of these training sessions is that they do help journalists learn to see the potential of what these new tools can bring to the work they do – so instead of making multimedia experts, journalists can learn how to think like them. But we ought to reconsider the goals of these training sessions and align them to change thinking to change practice, rather than use them to change practice and hope it will change thinking.