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string(70) "Next Generation of Visual Thinkers is Drawing the Future of Journalism"
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string(54) "http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=149966"
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string(18656) "Walk through one of Karl Gude's information graphics classes at Michigan State and you'll likely find students who want to be writers, not visual journalists.
Karl Gude, who teaches infographics at Michigan State University top, was interviewed by George Rorick, a pioneer in the visual journalism world.
Yet their graphics work is making it into the local paper. They're drawing self-portraits, learning to use color and typography, diving into visual reporting for breaking news and working with software programs like Illustrator, Photoshop and 3D rendering programs. They're analyzing data, trying their hand at GIS mapping and more.
And for some, Gude's classes are igniting a passion for visual journalism that will take them into the ranks of graphics reporter or artist. At the very least, they'll be well equipped with an appreciation for what visuals can do for storytelling.
College journalism programs around the country are beginning to press the importance of visual and multimedia thinking.
Gude spent more than a decade at Newsweek, first as an artist, then as graphics director. Now, he's back at school, in his second year of teaching at Michigan State.
"I see information graphics as a convergence - a combination of four things. One of them is content, said Gude, "strong information. Another one is art and design. You have to be pretty good at that stuff. Another is technology. And finally, critical thinking. That's what journalism is all about," he said.
Retired Poynter faculty member George Rorick talked with Gude about what he's teaching, how a program that attracts mostly writing students is developing into new visual directions and how those skills can help journalism.
I listened in. Here's the edited interview.
George Rorick: Who are your students, Karl? Are most of them writers? Visual journalists? Are they interested in graphics? Multimedia?
Karl Gude: I've been teaching for two years now at Michigan State in the School of Journalism. One of the things I have been most excited about, and also a little bit frustrated about, is that the majority of the students in the journalism program tend to want to be writers and editors.
These people generally have word talent and word skills, but very little visual skills.
Basically, I'm spending half the semester just getting these writing kids up to speed on basic design and illustration concepts that are necessary for them to be able to visualize data.
Only then are we really starting to get into visualizing content. Thankfully, they've taken classes before me on research and content gathering. So they know how to do an interview and pick up the phone and look on the Internet.
Created in Gude's class by graduate student Gordon Shetler, this graphic was published in the Lansing State Journal.
So, you basically have two groups visual and non-visual, right? But you also have some graphics people who are naturally there because they are interested in drawing and design, right?
Gude: Not so much. The students who come into journalism ... by the time they're juniors - they've basically, maybe taken one design class from one of the other instructors - News Design, like for page layout, not infographics. And they start to say, "Gee, this is fun." But they entered the program in the beginning because they wanted to be writers.
There really is not a lot of recruitment into our program, yet, for kids in high school that do design. They tend to want to go to the art school down the road, the Kresge Art Center.
We have some excellent design instructors here in our college. There's Cheryl Pell, there's Darcy Green. They teach wonderful design courses. Any students who've taken their courses and then come into my class, they're always the best in the class. But even still, they're not students who wanted to be designers since they were in high school.
You do have the occasional student who everyone talks about having a "natural talent" for this design stuff. We've had some amazing designers come out of our school, only because that skill was recognized. It may not have been their original interest for coming into the program.
At the University, we're starting to collaborate with the art college. The students over at the Art Center can now start to take classes over in our college - the College of Communication Arts and Sciences. We can also send our students over there, to take design courses. It's just beginning to happen.
By Fall of 2009, I should be getting juniors -- students who have gone through the entire design program at the Art Center. I can't wait to get those kids!
What kind of response are you getting from your students? If they've come into the program to become better writers, how do they react? Do they have to take your course to graduate?
Gude: No, they don't. I'm happy to say that my courses have become extremely popular. They fill up so fast. Students are recognizing that this is an exciting thing to do.
Why do you think they like it?
Gude: Well, people are born visual. If you ask a bunch of kindergartners "How many of you in this class are artists?" Every kid's hand is going to go up, every one of them. If you ask a bunch of 12-year-olds (if they are) artists, not many hands are going to go up. They've been shamed into being told that they're not very good at drawing or visualizing. They become shy about it.
But, in my classes, already, most of them are not considered visual people. They don't know how to draw. But they're in there to see what all of the buzz is about. We have a lot of fun and that word is getting around.
One class project involves visual reporting and the creation of a graphic about an on-campus "robbery.
What sort of projects are you doing?
Gude: To teach mapping, we have a campus-wide treasure hunt. They have to hide something and then do diagrams on how to find it - without words. And then, everybody switches maps and it's a big race to go find the treasure.
To teach breaking news graphics, for four semesters now, I've convinced the person who's in the campus coffee shop to pretend that the store was robbed over the weekend, and that they were the one who was there.
So, I go up and I say, "I've just discovered that Sparty's (the name of the shop) was robbed over the weekend! And, oh, my god! The person who was on duty then is there now - and is willing to talk with us for 10 minutes. So we can go down and interview that person about exactly what happened."
Then, we do a big graphic on what they say. I don't even know what they're going to say.
What are the results? What kind of graphics have you been getting out of these classes?
Gude: The good news is that there have been graphics that have been pretty good. And, surprisingly, it's not always from the better designers. One graphic is being published this very day in the Lansing State Journal, which is our local paper. The very first semester I taught, I talked to the managing editor - it's a nice, good paper.
I know. I used to work there. For 10 years!
Gude: Of course you did! That's right! I totally forgot you were a total Lansing guy, George!
So, one assignment is to find something that is of local interest to the Lansing area, that the Journal might want to publish. They're wonderful over there. They agreed to consider all of the pages and graphics that we do, for publication.
I think it's interesting that you said that some of your best graphics were being done by "non-visual" people. Tell me more about that.
Gude: The one being published today is on turf, you know, like the football field. (It was done by a) grad student who is more on the science side of journalism. He had never made a graphic before. I was pretty blown away by what he did.
A lot of people who can draw well think, "all I have to do is draw this well and it's going to be fantastic." But, it has to be based on content and good information.
Gude: Well, the basics that I teach are that, if they can trace an image, or use photography, then it's just a question of organizing the graphic.
You just can't have a ton of content and know how to design and use technology without having the ability to analyze the data and interpret it visually for the reader. Or to edit it down. That takes some serious critical thinking. That's what journalism is all about.
All design really is is making order out of chaos. So, if you have all of these elements, like photos and text and maps and drawings and charts - it all has to be packaged.
You know, you use a grid; you have this logical flow of information from top to bottom. You can teach these mechanical things - the use of color, typographic hierarchies - but some people just get it. And some people don't get it.
Students in the infographics class created self-portraits for their MySpace pages. Left is David Ingold, right is Summi Ghambir.
I like to hear about the way you're distributing the work - getting it into the newspaper. What other sorts of projects do they do?
Gude: My first semester, I had them draw fish, to learn how to use the drawing software. I stole Terence Oliver's idea from Ohio University. The fish came out really nice, but I could tell the students' hearts weren't really in it.
One project for learning to use drawing software involved drawing a fish.
Next semester, I said, "OK, you're drawing a self-portrait for your MySpace page!"
Wow.
Gude: And I said "It's a portrait of you, so you're going to want this to rock and roll."
One of these "non-visual" people said they spent four hours, just drawing the mouth. It's a hell of a mouth, I gotta tell you.
Let's talk more about technology.
Gude: You need to be able to use a lot of technologies to tell your story. Maybe you want to use slides online. Maybe you want to edit a video. Maybe you need to do some GIS data mapping to locate something. Maybe it needs to be slightly 3D, for some reason. Or use Flash or Dreamweaver.
News organizations are expecting to see more and more ability with technology from these students.
All of these technologies coming together, people are calling it convergence. So, the reporter who normally would go out on an interview with a pad of paper and a pen can no longer just sit there with a paper and a pen. They've also got to know how to take a little video camera along, prop it up on a little stand and videotape that guy being interviewed. Because their Web site's going to expect to be able to upload that for the Web. Maybe they'll even have to know how to edit that video.
Our students are learning how to edit video and all sorts of stuff.
What is the outlook that students have for the future of the business? Are they optimistic? Pessimistic?
Gude: That's a really good question, George. As adults, we're all sort of terrified for the future of journalism. There's so much soul-searching by people already in the industry.
I'm teaching at a camp for high school journalism students this week. They're taught by professionals and academics. There are 500-plus students at the university this week, all of them wanting to be journalists. I am really encouraged by that kind of turnout.
These kids -- their understanding that newspapers are going away someday - the idea that a newspaper with 18-hour-old news is going to be source for news -- that's not going to be very real for very long.
What we're trying to create are these critical thinkers with all of these skills so that they can go into whatever direction journalism decides to take them. You know, flexibility ... light on their feet.
They're excited about it?
Gude: I think they are. I think that most of them think that there are still enough jobs out there. They can either get a job on the Web side of things, or on the paper side of things. A lot of students will stay here in Michigan. They'll work at weekly newspapers. They will work at small papers or mid-sized papers. There are some who want to work at The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.
I've never seen a single student have doubts about it. Not as a junior or a senior. Sophomores might think about other paths - advertising. I tell them, if you want to study advertising, great. But there is a lot of competition for advertising. Every school cranks out a lot of advertising students.
There's competition for a journalist in writing jobs, too. How many writers do you think are knocking on the door of The New York Times? A lot. How many infographics people are knocking on the door at The New York Times? Not many.
I wish I was 20 years old again, really. I think there is tremendous opportunity out there for visual journalists, for people who can combine the writing, visual, reporting and technology skills.
Gude: There's not only a future in visual journalism. One of the things that I've realized is that the skills that people are learning in my class - how to make information graphics, or how to visualize data in a variety of ways - statistical, geographical, diagrammatical - these are skills that can be applied to other industries, too.
That's not surprising for a man whose career as a visual journalist has taken him to the newsrooms of The Detroit News, The New York Times and most recently at National GeographicMagazine.
The difference between the news graphics he created in those venerable newsrooms and what he's creating now, back again at the Times, is a matter of opinion his own opinion. As their first-ever visual Op-Ed columnist, Blow ferrets out interesting data as the starting point and ultimate support for editorial opinion.
Visual Op-Ed columnist for the New York Times Charles Blow, top, was interviewed by George Rorick, a pioneer in the visual journalism world.
His column appears in the Times every other Saturday.
"When I find a compelling topic one that I have something to say about and there's some interesting visual hook, then that is a column possibility," Blow said in a telephone interview with another visual journalist, retired Poynter faculty George Rorick.
I had the pleasure of eavesdropping on their conversation about the column, an interesting meeting of the minds between two great visual thinkers. In addition to the column, Blow recently launched a new blog called By the Numbers, a forum on the Times' site to showcase many different forms of visual expression. Here is the edited interview.
George Rorick: What you're doing is so unusual. Can you describe your position?
Charles Blow: We call it a visual columnist. I'm not exactly sure if that's the proper description. But, what I'm doing is using visual evidence to support arguments in persuasive essay. I use charts and maps and diagrams to support my positions.
What inspired you to do this? What are you hoping to accomplish with this?
Blow: The Times had used Op charts which were charts that appeared on the Op Ed page for quite some time. There are still some produced now, by contributors. From the first time I saw it, I thought it was a great idea that you could loosen up the rigors and the confines of data from the news pages, where you have to be completely objective and answer every possible question in the data. To have a looser interpretation of the data and be able to say, "This data has holes, and that's OK. Here are what the holes are, but there is still value in it, in some ways."
There is a lot of freedom that being able to be subjective allows. I thought that would be fantastic to see how far we could go using data and charts to kind of support editorial decisions and opinion.
I find it a fascinating kind of exercise because there's a certain part of data that is completely objective the numbers are what they are, if they're true or false. There's a kind of cut and dried sensibility there. And it's an interesting balance in trying to mix that and marry it and not dilute or corrupt the data, but at the same time, use it as a support mechanism. I like trying to strike that balance.
Is there any one article that has really caught fire? That you've gotten a lot of feedback on?
Blow: Well, my most recent article got somewhere above 500 e-mails. And they still trickle in.
It's always very interesting. Very different from my previous days here (at the Times) in the graphics department in the newsroom, and also at National Geographic where you rarely receive any mail. There, if you got two or three e-mails a week, that was quite a bit, and that was for the entire department.
When I publish now, the day I publish if I wait until noon that day to check my e-mail, there are a hundred, 200, sometimes 300 e-mails. This time, there were 500 by the time I came to work on Monday.
It's overwhelming, actually, to know that people are so passionate about the subjects that you cover. And they have a lot of very interesting things to say. Obviously, not everybody agrees with you. But that's not the point. The point is that readers are engaging in the work and giving you feedback on how they receive it.
What was this column about?
Blow: In that particular case, it was a column called Racism and the Race. It explored the role of racism and how it could be playing in how the poll numbers are reading and how it could work out to be an advantage for John McCain in November.
I was bracing for some kind of a backlash on that piece. But, most of the people who responded were readers who identified themselves as white and who were basically confessing that they also knew people who refused to vote for Obama simply because he is black and those people would not say it in public.
It was compelling to read those e-mails. But also the idea that people kind of latch on to you as a personality. And that they somehow feel connected to your work and your column, not just as part of The New York Times.
That was interesting that people were feeling comfortable and wanted to share their experiences.
A column that I read that I really like, just FYI, is the one titled Why is Mom in Rehab?
Blow: In fact, I thought that I would get more mail from that story. And that was the one that had the least amount of response from readers.
It's interesting that you bring it up, because it was the most visually ambitious and data rich of all of the pieces.
And what I found is that doesn't necessarily work with my readers. In fact, the more simple the charting, the more they kind of respond to the piece.
They want provocative, interesting points made in a strong way, and simply. And so, I've kind of become less visually ambitious in the column, as a result of this job. I think I'm becoming less visual all around. Because I know, from my experiences so far, that's not what my readers are responding to.
They want you to make a strong point and give them that in a visual nugget that they can digest right away and kind of ruminate on why I find it interesting.
That makes sense, too. A lot of graphics are overdone. If you can make it so that you can get right to the point, that's so important. I think what you're doing will help visual journalists in the long run to get a better feeling for what they need to do.
Who do you answer to in your position? Are you very independent?
Blow: Very, very, very independent. Almost frighteningly so. No one's asking what I'm going to write. I assume that there is veto power if something is completely out of bounds, but beyond that, there is very little oversight. You're pretty much a sovereign nation as an Op Ed columnist. That obviously has its benefits, but it also means that you have a lot of responsibility to come up with something that's solid and meaningful to the readers.
How do you come up with your topics? Are you in the newsroom on a daily basis?
Blow: No, not at all. I'm on the thirteenth floor. The newsroom is on the second, third and fourth floors. I rarely go down, unless I want to talk to someone about data, like maybe to the polling people, they're in the newsroom. I use a lot of polls in my column, so I'm at their desk quite a bit, but not on a daily basis. I'm very much detached from the news cycle and that process.
I think where you were going with the question is that No. I'm not overhearing the buzz of the newsroom and soaking up what might be newsy.
Right.
Blow: And, in fact, I miss some of that. But the way that I come up with topics is that, I'm reading all of the time. The television is on in my office, all of the time on news stations.
And I'm trying plug into the cultural zeitgeist and what's relevant in the moment. And develop ideas based on that always running through the prism of what is my opinion about these things that are happening? And how do I make that something that readers might care about?
So, I'm having ideas all of the time. The question becomes, is there some visual hook to support that argument? That cancels out quite a few ideas.
When I find a compelling topic one that I have something to say about and there's some interesting visual hook, then that is a column possibility.
When you have a story that's really compelling, but there's no visual merit, what do you do with it?
Blow: I just pass it. There are nine other columnists at the Times. And to a large degree, we're writing about some of the same subjects. And I feel like, someone will touch it, if I don't offer my opinion about that.
But, as I develop an audience, my readers really look to me to bring something extra, not just the opinion. They look for the visual hook. They want to be shown something in a different way. And I think I owe it to them not to just fall back into a default position. ... The way my job is described and set up is to offer that extra visual hook.
You mentioned your audience. Who are they?
Blow: It's hard to know. Most of the e-mails don't come with the titles or descriptions of who the people are. But the kinds of comments that they offer are very much on the thesis of the essay. Rarely do I get any e-mail about the visual components.
They never seem to discuss the merits of the visual. They may discuss the content of the visual, and say, "This is an interesting point, glad somebody made it," or "I really don't agree with your point here. You should look at something else." But in this context, they don't separate the visual from column in the way that my experience was both at the Times, before, and at National Geographic. There, the visual seemed to be sort of separate thing from the authorship of the piece. Obviously, it was a separate thing from the authorship of the piece. The author wrote about something and there was an accompanying visual.
In this case, they know that it's all me. And so they don't separate it out as a different talking point.
Are you working with a staff, or do you create everything on your own?
Blow: It's mostly me, but I do have a fantastic assistant. Her name is Hilary Howard. She helps with fact checking and chasing down numbers and facts and what have you.
Do you miss being in a newsroom?
Blow: A little, but not much. I do like the idea that there are tons of newsy ideas swirling around. And you can overhear things that can spark something in you and make you chase another story, or another graphic possibility.
But you prefer to read and think and come up with your own ideas?
Blow: Well, I've developed that muscle, being in this job.
And also, there's a kind of struggle that happens in the newsroom with visual people that a lot of people have struggled with, and many people have done a good job to change writers' and editors' opinions of the role of visuals in the newsroom, but that is a continuing fight. And, quite frankly, I enjoy not having to have to fight it anymore.
In this role, it's not even a conversation.
From my experience, that would have to be a tremendous relief!
Blow: Yes.
You sound like you feel very good about what you're doing now.
Blow: I love it. I think it's the best job I've ever had in my life.
Is there anything else you'd like to tell people about in this interview?
Blow: My blog just started. I will have this blog on the Opinion part of the Web site. It's called By the Numbers.
What I'm doing is trying to provide a forum for discussion of all things statistical that can and are being (shared) through visual expressions. But also to provide something of a community for people to submit things. And it's not just for people who do charts, maps and diagrams but people who do short films, futurists, people who solve problems through architecture and product design anyone with an interesting visual idea or concept. We're going to try to highlight it in this space.
You want people to send visual examples to you. Is that right?
Blow: Exactly.
"
["author"]=>
string(10) "Sara Quinn"
["pubDate"]=>
string(29) "Thu, 28 Aug 2008 14:24:22 GMT"
}
[2]=>
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["title"]=>
string(44) "Varied Visual Perspectives of the Denver DNC"
["link"]=>
string(54) "http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=149516"
["description"]=>
string(2093) "A city that hosts an event as big as a political convention deserves a bit of levity. As many as 50,000 people are estimated to be wandering the streets of Denver, counting politicians, delegates, media-types and the merely curious. Jeepers.
The Rocky Mountain News posted DNC trivia on its site and this 360 degree panoramic view of the convention floor by photojournalist Tracy Trumbull. It might leave you dizzy, but a little happy, too.
The Denver Post published this playful graphic outline of the road to the convention. DNCtimeline
Jeff Goertzen, graphics director at the Post said the way the text was crafted "pretty much oozed with style and illustrative opportunities." The graphic was written and researched by Barry Osborne and Kevin Dale. Illustrator Andrew Lucas sketched out ideas for the most interesting or whimsical events on the timeline.
"The difficult part for Andrew was to come up with a style that was not too goofy, but more of a likeness of each of the figures. We wanted it to be fun, but not silly," said Goertzen."
["author"]=>
string(10) "Sara Quinn"
["pubDate"]=>
string(29) "Wed, 27 Aug 2008 22:38:20 GMT"
}
[3]=>
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["title"]=>
string(68) "Salt Lake Tribune's 'SOS' Saves Readers from Jumpy Newspapers"
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string(54) "http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=148826"
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string(9691) "
Though it may take awhile before everyone in the newsroom speaks the same language, the act of giving a name to a form helps us come to agreement on what works, what we're comfortable creating and what we know how to execute. One such new form at The Salt Lake Tribune is called the SOS, or "story on a story."
The SOS is a way of tightly editing the information that appears on a section front -- basically eliminating the ever-cumbersome jump, so that there is always a complete and containable thought on the cover.
The "story on a story" format on the Salt Lake Tribune's section fronts is a containable element that sets up a full story inside the paper. In this example, readers get a quick sense of the history and possible future of the cost of oil.
I talked with Josh Awtry, AME for Niche Publications, Online and Presentation at the Salt Lake Tribune, about the SOS and how it works.
"The way that I couch it to reporters is, youre going to get three inches of type out there, one way or another," said Awtry. "This lets you control exactly what you want to say with those three inches -- and it still lets you have your narrative."
Sara Quinn: How is the SOS format different than what you'd done in the past?
Josh Awtry: This has been a big cultural change in our newsroom. In the past, if it didn't have a headline, subhead, byline and narrative, it didn't count. We had a very templated approach to 1A -- we had four story starts out there that jumped.
Convincing people that this three inches of type -- the SOS -- was different from their 3.4 inches of type was a hurdle. I'm pretty happy to say it's a hurdle that we've mostly overcome. ... Over the past few months here, it's been a huge sea change.
When we go to our new redesign later this year, the better part of the front page will be made up of these containable elements.
How did you introduce the SOS?
Awtry: We started by going really simple. Basically, we amped up the stand-alone photo formula. First, it was making the corollary to "Hey, it's just like a stand-alone photo - here's your photo, here's two-and-a-half inches of type, teasing to the story."
What would you say the benefit of this story form is to the reader?
Awtry: We know that people follow jumps if the story is interesting enough. My whole caveat is, why gamble on that? Why gamble on whether or not they're going to make that jump? Let's give people a lot of choices. Let's answer readers' questions directly. Let's give them a complete thought.
So, in the end, the benefit is that it caters to both types of readers. It caters to the readers who want to spend 10 seconds and then move on with their lives. Likewise, a reader can go into page A9 and there's your wonderful, anecdotal lead ... about half of which would have made it onto the cover before it jumped mid-sentence. That's for your core reader and we're not giving anybody any less in that sense.
That's a good articulation of the way people read. Does the SOS have a different look? What do readers see that sets it apart?
Awtry: We developed a unique typography for anything that held to the front. But it was still very much relegated to the "tease" category at that point, and not the real informational category.
To start out, the reporters and editors were writing these story summaries. And then, we wanted to get a little more advanced with it -- to create a hold to the front lead-in with three questions and three answers, that kind of approach.
What are some of the challenges you faced in getting people to accept and embrace this new format?
Awtry: In the end, I just started to do it, which is not an approach that I endorse or recommend. But, where were at this point ... it was the place we needed to start. People needed to see what it should look like, where to start.
I was very loath to give somebody an SOS template, because, the next thing you know -- every SOS would look the same. And, a year from now, that one form would become part of the language. Then, if you want to change it, it takes another act of Congress.
How do you determine which stories get this treatment?
Awtry: Let's say the business editor has this great story and he wants to blow it out on the business cover. And someone on the senior management staff says "That story really belongs on 1A." But in reality, it would probably be on the bottom of 1A.
For me, this is a way to couch it and say, "Look everybody wins. You can have your cake and eat it too. Because on 1A, we can do an SOS, but it won't preclude being able to blow out the story with all of the photos and graphics and the approaches you want to take on the business cover."
Would you say it takes a lot of constant, daily communication to do it well?
Awtry: I don't want to overstate this and make it come off like we are reinventing the wheel, because papers have been doing this for a long time. But, for us, the big change has been the history of it.
At a lot of papers, it's like ... get to the point, get to the point. Quit with the throat clearing anecdotal lead and just give me the nut graph, because it's not going to make the jump. People can deride me for trying to kill long form journalism, but this is being done to support it.
I think the personality-laden, anecdotal leads, filled with emotion and energy shouldn't be spiked, just because they're going to jump mid-thought.
That's a great way to put it. You're not killing long form narrative, what you're doing is putting an end to an old production style that led to things missing the point and not jumping where you wanted them to.
A recent centerpiece in the Tribune took the form of a centerpiece.
Awtry: The trick in doing this, I think, is training the reporters to see that it's not a tease to the story, in a traditional sense. It's the nut graph. It's the best information.
How does the SOS translate to the Web?
Awtry: That's why it has been so easy to sell this. What do you get on the Web? You get the headline and then a short tease. Then you click on it and you get the full story. It doesn't make you jump mid-thought.
But we usually rework the things we do for the Web. I'm looking at one right now where the headline says "Should we worry?" Then, what you see on the (printed) page is a dollar bill with George Washington's head ducking out of the way. I mean, you see the package, the context when it's in print. Online, you don't get the benefit of that.
We've got a really savvy online desk. They'll make the most of it. Sometimes, they'll keep the flavor of the thing, while making it work in a searchable way.
Are the SOS forms primarily on your front page, or do you use them on other section fronts, as well?
Awtry: For now, it's on the front page. We do it very routinely on the front page. Talk to me again in about three months and it will be on every section front.
"
["author"]=>
string(10) "Sara Quinn"
["pubDate"]=>
string(29) "Mon, 18 Aug 2008 05:45:15 GMT"
}
[4]=>
array(5) {
["title"]=>
string(63) "Stepping Into Gallery Life, Visual Journalists Find Inspiration"
["link"]=>
string(54) "http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=148205"
["description"]=>
string(12511) "What's a visual journalist to do when inspiration runs a little crispy and the old news business keeps churning out news bites for Jim Romenesko?
Shake it off and look for inspiration elsewhere -- maybe open a gallery and put on a show. That's what design consultant Ron Reason has done at his new contemporary art space, within(Reason), in Chicago. Starting Friday, the personal work of illustrator/designer Andrew Skwish will be shown there. Reason's original photography will also be on display.
Skwish and Reason have more creative energy than a newsroom artist hopped up on Red Bull. They photograph and paint any surface they can find - old LPs, printed publications, Polaroid photos and even a guitar. Any situation they run across in their travels might become fodder for a photographic series to be posted online. So I wanted to know what keeps them making their personal art and how that work differs from creative work for publication.
Ron Reason thinks of his gallery space as a larger than life news story, waiting to be designed. One of Andrew Skwish's illustrations has been turned into a mural so that gallery visitors can pose for photographs and "interact" with the art. "As his former art director," said Reason, "I can now tell Skwish: don't ever complain that I never run your art big enough!"
Sara Quinn: Hey, Ron. What made you take the leap to sign a lease on the gallery space?
Ron Reason: I decided late last year to explore the idea of office space for my redesign business. I had been mostly working out of the house and was itching for the stimulation of a real office, and interaction with people.
It was a coincidence that the space I liked the most was in a neighborhood, Pilsen, known as an emerging arts center for Chicago, and an office building that hosts a popular "2nd Fridays" gallery open house event. Essentially, anyone in the building can open their doors for gallery night. It was almost an accident that it happened this way, really.
Did you second-guess yourself, or just jump right in?
I sort of jumped right in but followed my gut also. I signed the lease, and the next day went on a two-month trip to Africa. Six weeks were [spent] working with two clients there; about two weeks were personal travel and photography.
This trip put a lot of creative ideas into my head about how to use my new office space and how to explore some personal interests in art and also philanthropy, At least three of my gallery shows this year will see proceeds going to charity.
When and why did you first start to create personal work, Skwish?
Artist Andrew Skwish paints on just about any surface. This piece, titled "Guitart" will be on display at a gallery show in Chicago starting Friday.
Andrew Skwish: I started doing what would be called my own work quite a few years ago, just as I had gotten out of college. I had studied business and was working as a paste up boy at a small newspaper to earn a little cash and was trying to impress a young woman. So I started doing little pieces and giving them as gifts. Then I started doing more and more, still trying to impress her. Eventually I wore her down, eventually she left me for a higher calling, but I found that I didn't need her to continue to create little pieces.
When and where are you most creative? Is it different for one type of work than another?
Reason: For die-hard work - whether newspaper stuff, or my own art and promotions for the gallery shows - I am most creative starting around 3 p.m. Here's why: I think my brain is hotwired from the first 6 or 7 years of my career, when I was on the night shift with the copy desk!
I'm convinced I still work best around dinnertime when the adrenaline and genetic memory of working for an 11 p.m. newspaper deadline kicks in.
For just ruminating about things - ideas for art or concepts for shows - I like to keep my brain humming during odd times, when I'm in a hotel or on a plane for my clients, or in the shower or at the gym during down time.
Skwish: After midnight. I will often try to get going sooner but it never works out that way. I think I need to believe that the rest of the word is asleep in order to get anything done. Once the clock strikes 12 I get going and work well through the night. It is pretty much that way for everything I do. I like to lounge away the day and work through the hours of darkness.
Which visual world is more challenging and which more rewarding and why?
An acrylic painted on an antique church shelf, "Victorian Sensations" is Andrew Skwish's favorite piece in the show.
Skwish: Both have their challenges and rewards. I have been working in the news industry for so long that the rewards don't have quite the same impact as they may have when I was 20 or so. Not that they aren't still there but there is a bit of "been there, done that" syndrome.
But I must say when an interesting, well-written story comes through (and what interested me 20 years ago is different from what interests me today) it makes me really want to try to get people to notice the story and read it. So if I can get that to happen, that is pretty rewarding.
That effort is often to reach the masses, while in my personal work I'm really not trying to reach anyone in particular. If only one person notices something in the work that makes them want to possess it or even to just spend time with it, then that is awfully satisfying. Even if that doesn't happen, the times when it is 2 a.m. and I am painting and I can hear my little boy breathing on the baby monitor, then that moment cannot be surpassed. Seriously.
Reason: The newspaper world is challenging, well, because of economic times, though I'm happy to say I'm busy enough for now. I've just completed the bulk of a project in Kenya and will gear up for continued work in Nigeria which is pretty darn exciting. I blog about that.
The art world is also extremely challenging financially. Let's just say, thank goodness for the day job -- but it's a part-time thing so I'm not too worried about it. Right now I'm having fun and telling stories and taking chances, which are all good things for people to try to do in anxious times.
In surprising new ways, it's rewarding to put together a show conceptually, work with new artists and people I've known a while from the industry like Andrew, and connect with people in real time and real space.
The gallery to me is like a 4-dimensional newspaper story - all four walls but also the ceiling and interior space can be used, as well as light, video, sound. It's daunting but lots of fun.
It's also been cool to connect the two worlds. In June I showed and sold photographs I took during my off-hours while on assignment in Kenya, which raised nearly $1,600 for arts programs and an after-school club for kids, as well as a new library there.
Attendants at the Emirates counter at Dubai International Airport wish Ron Reason's mother happy 70th birthday. This is one of a series of photographs Ron posted on his blog while working in Africa.
What one piece of work is your favorite - of your own and of each other's?
Skwish: I'm not sure if this one was part of any of Ron's shows, but I really loved his birthday wishes to his mom from his travels. I looked forward to seeing them and thought they were a nice and genuine way to express his affection in a time when he couldn't be home.
Of my work I have a fondness for one that is a yellow-haired lady (aka "Victorian Sensation"). It is a very simple piece and most people I've spoken to don't think too much of it, but maybe because of that, the unwanted child of the litter, I like it more. Plus it was while painting this one that the 2 a.m. moment occurred.
Reason's favorite is a photo he took of Reuters photographer Noor Khamis 'collecting string' for future stories about life in the Kibera area of Nairobi.
Reason: There's a photo I showed in my June exhibit, "Hope In a Hard Place," of Reuters photographer Noor Khamis 'collecting string' for future stories about life in the Kibera area of Nairobi.
I was inside a dark shack and noticed a local resident engaging Noor in a heated discussion about Kenyan politics. Of course Noor was shooting away but talking a good game, too. It was horrible lighting in some ways but forgiving in others. I just loved the moment it caught, and it also represents the gift of the amazing insider's tour of the area that I was given by Noor, made possible by my proximity to the area via my client, The Standard newspaper, for whom I was completing a redesign.
Of Skwish's work, for sure it's a piece that I call the 'Guitart!' It's a guitar that he painted for me a few years ago, front and back, with one of his elongated whimsical characters and lyrics from a French pop song. It's usually in my house and guests remark on it all the time - which is what good art or journalism should do, right? - but it will be part of our exhibit on Aug. 8. "
["author"]=>
string(10) "Sara Quinn"
["pubDate"]=>
string(28) "Fri, 8 Aug 2008 14:14:41 GMT"
}
[5]=>
array(5) {
["title"]=>
string(65) "A Year Later, "13 Seconds in August" Commemorates Bridge Collapse"
["link"]=>
string(54) "http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=147779"
["description"]=>
string(12970) "
Images in the introduction of "13 Seconds in August" are paired with audio of emergency calls during the Minneapolis bridge collapse.
Reading through the Minneapos Star Tribune's "13 Seconds in August" interactive project is like being a rescue worker or a reporter on the scene of last year's bridge collapse.
You can scroll through an aerial photograph of the bridge taken just hours after the accident, travel from car to car to learn what happened to each person unlucky enough to have been on the bridge that day.
With the one-year anniversary on Friday, readers still spend hours at a stretch with the site, trying to comprehend the whole event. Staffers have never stopped updating the site with the status of victims' recoveries. To date, the occupants of 78 of the 84 cars on the bridge have been identified.
Two things stand out: the massive job of tracking down details and the many different storytelling tools used in the interactive site. There are interviews with victims, transcripts of 911 recordings, photo galleries and the voices of many of the victims themselves in audio and video.
In this edited Q&A, lead designer Dave Braunger talks about design and management of the project and graphic artist and researcher Jane Friedmann talks about her never-ending task of updating the information as more is learned about the victims.
Sara Quinn: At what point did you decide to collect all of the information in an interactive site?
Braunger: The staff worked frantically to be able to turn as many pieces of information as we had into a working project.
Originally, the graphic wasn't a straight vertical photo for the paper version; it was more of a three-quarter shot of the bridge, not an aerial photograph. The print staff was trying to fill it in for a double truck. They were trying to get a really quick idea of profiles and fatalities and things like that.
Rhonda Prast and Jane and I sat down and just thought, "There's a good chance of getting everything. There's no reason why we have to stop with that for the online graphic. We don't have the same limitations as print for horizontal and vertical space. We can do anything we want to do online."
How were you able to track down all of the people on the bridge?
Friedmann: It wasn't easy. There were no official sources for that. It was an ongoing investigation, and then there were the privacy issues.
I just started going through the photos we had stored electronically. Some were taken by Star Tribune photographers and others were from the wire. I just looked for license plates. Then, we referenced those license plates for vehicle owners and called people.
I also looked on the Internet to try to find any references to the bridge. Like, "Oh, this is my mom and dad's car on the bridge." Anytime someone talked about who was near them on the bridge, I would get some clues. Like, "It was a man in a car by himself." Or "There were two women, both in their twenties. One had blonde hair."
It was a puzzle. And I just had to put all of the pieces together.
How did site change from initial sketches to the way it looks today?
Braunger: Originally, my idea of the layout was much more complex and visually complicated. After a while I started stripping the design visuals away and liked how the media really carried the stories.
As the design became more simplified, the power of the project really took over.
At one point, I had all of these plans that were very complicated. I wanted the overhead view to be mimicked with a side diagram, so you'd be able to see the entire span of the bridge. But I kept working on that and, at some point it just got yanked.
I thought, you know, the more crap I throw at this, the less impactful it is.
Simple typography, a simple box. Let the power of this straight vertical, aerial photo carry the design. A lot of people hadn't seen it before. It wasn't until you saw that photo that you really understood it.
Readers can access videos a written interviews with the victims. The site has been constantly updated with the status of survivors.
What is it about the interactivity that makes it work?
Braunger: The site is pure objectivity. There's no leading the viewer to anything. Everyone on the bridge has an equal amount of representation. And, that's both good and bad. There are some great stories in there that people really wanted to highlight.
But it just really worked out best to have this kind of flat, kind of scientific way of displaying all of it. Everyone is given equal coverage, equal opportunity to tell their story.
We didn't highlight which ones had video or not. Readers just went from story to story. It wasn't really about the media that we had, it was about the information that we had.
How would you describe the reader's experience?
Friedmann: I think the reader gets a sense of the community that unwillingly developed among complete strangers. The survivors had this immediate bond and interacted with each other while they were on the bridge. I think that interaction helps readers get a little bit better sense of what it was like to have been there.
Braunger: You get so addicted to seeing these videos, you have to watch them from beginning to end. It grabs you and readers will spend two hours looking at this stuff. It's not something that you can easily bookmark and come back to.
One victim is talking about where they were on the bridge, and they're referring to another car and then you see the other car and you think, let's see what these people have to say. It's this whole puzzle of seeing how all of these events are intertwined.
What sort of feedback have you gotten from readers?
Braunger: To actually keep a time capsule of where everyone was, what was going on -- people really responded to that. To hear, minute-by-minute, what happened to these people on the bridge, that's what we hear about most from readers.
Friedmann: It's been very positive. The most gratifying feedback has been from the survivors themselves. It's been somewhat of a cathartic process for them to go through survivors' stories. A lot of them say it's been really hard for them to hear these stories, but it made them feel less alone. They felt like there were others who could understand what they'd gone through.
The husband of one victim wrote to say that he had never seen anywhere else a photograph of his wife's car. He then finally understood how she had drowned.
We also had a lengthy thank you from a health care provider, one of the supervisors of emergency response. He said, so often he and his colleagues are not so forthcoming to media and wished the media would just go away. But now he understands how valuable it is to the community to have us there to help tell the story. He and his colleagues were also really appreciative of seeing the project.
Many of the profiles include photo galleries.
As this information was reported and gathered, how did you manage the workflow?
Braunger: The nature of this project is that the reporters are getting little bits of information over time. It would have been maddening for one person to have to add all of these little pieces as they came in.
So, it wasn't waiting for a designer to throw this stuff in. We had multiple people with access ... they can add content and remove it, edit it and copy edit it. Otherwise, the design becomes such a bottleneck.
It really is an archive. The project was designed as a Flash front end with a back end that is driven by XML files.
The project is actually split into two XML files that drive all of the information. One XML file is specifically for the videos. The second has all of the text and photo and gallery info as well as links to the videos.
Some people might say that you were able to do this just because you had a large staff. What do you think about that? Braunger: Right. Everyone looks at the news organization that's bigger and says, well we don't have the resources to do that. We say the same things around here sometimes.
But it's a matter of finding out how to do it with what you've got. You might have to scale something back, but there usually is a way. It just takes a lot of putting your nose to the grindstone.
I work with two very talented designers. Our Online Design Editor Jamie Hutt and my co-designer Jaime Chismar had great suggestions and ideas that are peppered throughout the project. We work very well together.
We were essentially given one hell of a puzzle. I mean the pieces that we got were great. Great reporting, great video, great audio, phenomenal photography. It really makes a designer's job pretty easy.
Each of these stories is very emotional. What was it like in the newsroom?
Friedmann: It was a real challenge for me to make that phone call and ask that person if they had been on the bridge.
When I did get hold of people, I wanted to make sure that they knew that I respected their privacy. If they weren't willing or able to talk with me, that was all right.
Braunger: Rhonda Prast, who was one of the reporters gathering the data, would refer to the victims on a first name basis. People in the newsroom knew the cast of characters, and they felt like they were just kind of climbing into their lives.
Rhonda would sometimes talk about these people by first name, or just by last name. And I would say, listen, I need a number. I just need to know which car you're talking about. Frankly, all of these stories are heartfelt. And there's 101 of them, so, I really couldn't deal with that until later.
The beginning intro to the project was the last thing that we did. And that really kind of sends chills up my spine. They did such a good job of bringing that together. That audio transcript is just spooky. That's as real as it can get.
Do you think that you will ever track down every person?
Friedmann: I don't know. I believe there will always be several that we don't ever find. "
["author"]=>
string(10) "Sara Quinn"
["pubDate"]=>
string(29) "Thu, 31 Jul 2008 20:59:13 GMT"
}
[6]=>
array(5) {
["title"]=>
string(52) "Contests, Pop Culture Draw Readers to Print & Online"
["link"]=>
string(54) "http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=147341"
["description"]=>
string(10626) "
Holy Web traffic, Batman! How can we get readers to go from print to online and back again? While we wait for the shipment of magic bullets, let's look at one strategy by The Florida Times-Union. The news staff there regularly whips up engaging print and interactive projects by tapping into their own love of pop culture.
A Web video gives a behind-the-scenes view of how the Times-Union created a photograph for coverage of a new Batman film.
They ramped up for the new Batman movie with a behind-the-scenes video about people getting into character and coverage from the midnight premiere. And "American Idol" fans already have what they need to prep for the auditions in Jacksonville in August.
In this Q&A, Denise Reagan, AME for Visuals, talks about what it took to create a scavenger hunt contest timed to the opening of another blockbuster movie.
Sara Quinn: Tell me about the film contest. How did it come about?
Denise Reagan: It was a seven-day citywide scavenger hunt that combined print and online. The contest was timed to the release of "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull."
This was the third time The Florida Times-Union and Jacksonville.com had done a scavenger hunt related to the release of a movie. The first two were smaller in scale. A desire to do more reader-interactive ventures led us to come up with a contest for this new film.
Clues sent readers to the Web site, where they found interactive features and videos that parodied scenes from the film.
Here's how it worked for "Indiana Jones": 1. A treasure map ran each day on Page 2 of our Life section and on Jacksonville.com/treasurequest. 2. Readers went to the area shown with an X on the map. 3. Readers used the accompanying limerick to find the day's clue. 4. Readers typed in the clue on Jacksonville.com by 8 p.m. each day to enter a random drawing for the day's prize. 5. For the grand prize, readers typed in all seven correct clues to enter the random drawing. 6. Daily winners were announced on the front page of the Times-Union each day. The grand prize winner was announced on the front of the Life section.
Sets of four movie passes were given as daily prizes in addition to a different prize each day: an Official Indiana Jones whip, a set of seven Indiana Jones paperback books, framed Indiana Jones posters and a set of all three Indiana Jones DVDs. The grand prize was a Honda scooter, a Sony PSP Portable Gaming System and the LEGO "Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures" game.
How did these ideas get started?
Denise Reagan is AME for Visuals at The Florida Times-Union.
Reagan: The first one was for "The Da Vinci Code." It was a rather small-scale contest with little promotion, but it still generated some interest.
Next, we came up with a contest for the Memorial Day release of "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End." We simplified the rules, allowed people to play for just a day or the whole week, added better prizes, ramped up the Web site and promoted the heck out of it on A-1 starting a week in advance.
Hundreds of people were playing each day and the response we received from people telling how much their kids were looking forward to getting the paper each day for the next clue was exciting. When we learned that "Indiana Jones" was scheduled for Memorial Day this year, we knew we would repeat the contest.
Who is the primary audience?
Reagan: Readers, especially those with families, looking for something to do starting on Memorial Day weekend.
How did readers find out about it?
Reagan: We started promoting it in the paper at the bottom of A-1 the Sunday before it started. Each day we ran a limerick that hinted at the nature of the contest and included a refer to the Web site where we ran seven video parodies of the famous line "Snakes, why'd it have to be snakes?" Those were the highest-viewed videos that week.
The contest began on a Friday in the entertainment section. We promoted it at the top of A-1 and it was the cover of the Weekend section.
Each day, the contest was promoted on A-1 and on the Jacksonville.com homepage. We also used Facebook and Digg to gather audience.
Who in the newsroom was involved in the creation of this?
Reagan: This was a group project and an important step in the convergence of the print and online staffs. Several print journalists got to use their newly learned multimedia skills.
Several members of the staff brainstormed and visited locations for the map. Assistant features editor Tom Szaroleta finalized the map locations, wrote the clues as limericks, wrote the quizzes, starred in the "parody videos" and oversaw the whole project.
Joe Black and Craig Sims built the site. Features designer Gary Mills shot and edited the video parodies with the help of video producer Kelly Jordan and multimedia specialist Jason Pratt.
Kyzandrha Z. Pratt built the treasure maps for both print and online and created the Flash component (and had a cameo in one video). Graphic artist Patrick Garvin created illustrations for the word game.
My job was basically to bug everyone about every detail along the way.
How did interactivity help to make this work?
Reagan: The whole game requires readers to be interactive, not just online but around their city. Each clue requires you to go to that place in the city to answer the question.
Readers used the newspaper or the Web to find their clues (on the Web the map is also interactive with audio of the clue), and then they go to the Web site to enter their clues. While they're there, they can play an Indiana Jones version of hangman, test their Indiana Jones trivia knowledge, watch videos or upload look-alike photos of themselves as Indiana Jones characters.
Daily and grand prize winners were announced in the print edition.
What sort of feedback did you receive from your audience and from others in the newsroom?
Reagan: Overwhelmingly good. Tom Szaroleta received many calls during the week from readers trying to get the answers.
The site had more than 22,600 visitors over the week. Hundreds of people tried to solve the puzzle each day with an average of 45 people with the correct answer each day. The videos averaged about 850 views each. The word game had more than 7,000 hits.
The winners were uniformly elated with the contest. I delivered several prizes and talked to them about their experiences. They told me how much fun it was to find the clues each day. Several of them reported seeing many others trying to solve the daily puzzle.
What were the important talents involved in producing this project?
Reagan: We had been doing some training in the last few months that paid off on this project. We sent a designer and a graphic artist to a Society for News Design Flash training workshop. Both of them used their new knowledge in the production of the videos and the interactive maps.
We recorded and edited audio and video. We built the site to automate the random selection of winners each day.
We gathered extensive knowledge of the Indiana Jones movies to come up with the list of locations, the trivia quizzes, etc. And Tom practiced incredible limerick-writing ability.
"
["author"]=>
string(10) "Sara Quinn"
["pubDate"]=>
string(29) "Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:46:05 GMT"
}
[7]=>
array(5) {
["title"]=>
string(51) "Documenting Darfur: A Photojournalist's Perspective"
["link"]=>
string(54) "http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=146831"
["description"]=>
string(14205) "A powerful photograph can be even more emotional when we hear the story of how it was made.
If it was taken in Darfur, where each of thousands of refugees has a story of tragedy to tell, the emotion grows exponentially.
In this edited interview, Chikwendiu talks about photographs taken during his first trip to Darfur, in 2004.
Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post
While some gather food, others shield themselves from the blazing sun at the Ouri Cassoni refugee camp just outside Baha'i, Chad.
Sara Quinn: How did you end up going to Darfur?
Jahi Chikwendiu: I may have shown some interest to our editors, Michel duCille and people like that.
The story started blowing up in terms of media coverage. We had an excellent correspondent based in Nairobi, Emily Wax, who started working on the story a lot. So I ended up plugging in with Emily and started finding out more about the story, what she was doing on the story, where it was headed. So that, when they were ready to send a photographer, I was already plugged into the story, so I was, like, the most logical choice to send.
I don't know if I conveyed this to the editors, but the issue was so close to me. I likened it to what happened to the Native Americans in the United States, I wanted to look into this modern genocide - this is genocide that's happening in our day.
I went twice. The first time, was a matter of following the route of the writer. She went to the border of Chad and Sudan. We decided to take the roundabout route, going to the border where a lot of refugees were spilling over from Sudan to Chad, working refugee camps along the border there. And then, hooking up with rebel factions - SLA, the Sudanese Liberation Army. And then going across the border into Sudan, into Darfur with them and telling the story through their perspectives.
That's what I did the first time, went through Chad and crossed the border illegally.
Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post
Mostly women and children gather for food hand-outs at Derech Camp for internally displaced Sudanese on the outskirts of the South Darfur town of Nyala, Sudan.
How many people do you estimate were in the first camp you saw?
Chikwendiu: The camp was so expansive that I never saw the whole camp. If I stood in the middle of it I could look in every direction and, as far as the eye could see, there were tents. I never made my own estimation of how many people were there ... These were like cities. You could see them start to function like cities or towns, where there would be a doctor's office and there would be little stores popping up. There would be little restaurants popping up inside these camps. I guess they had to function like that. The camps were huge.
Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post
A sandstorm sweeps by the temporary housing used by displaced Sudanese people, just across the border from Darfur.
When you first saw this huge dust storm on the landscape, how far away was it? What were you thinking at the time?
Chikwendiu: This is my first day in the camp. The camp, like I said, was huge ... I'm on the edge of the camp -- of course, I'm always looking for a different perspective to look at things. So I'm standing on this water truck that had pulled up to the edge of the camp. And I'm shooting the camp. I started noticing people's attention go to an area behind the camp ... I didn't even know what it was.
... So maybe within a few minutes I figured I'd better get off of this truck. I take off running, and within seconds, wham! I just get hit by this wall of wind, and the sand is moving so hard that it's kind of slicing against you.
I just remember looking for shelter. I saw these guys walking and I saw them jump in a tent. So I just jumped in the tent with them. They seemed OK with my being there, because we started giving each other the thumbs up.
I was just sitting there waiting for ... hoping, praying that I wouldn't be impaled by something flying. So then, I got myself together. I had a few handkerchiefs that I wrapped around my camera and my face. I fashioned a camera hood out of my handkerchiefs. I started walking around, looking through my camera. Not even taking pictures. Because it was the only way that I could see. The sand was just slicing at my eyes. So, for a while after that, my vision was blurry where the sand had just scarred my eye lenses.
Then, I thought, OK, I need to function. I need to be documenting what's going on. I started to walk around, looking for situations under the hood. Just taking snaps.
Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post
Women flee the force of a massive sandstorm at the Ouri Cassoni refugee camp just outside Baha'i, Chad, in the NE part of the country.
Then I took shelter in a bigger tent, where there were a lot of women gathered. I think it was a feeding center tent where there were maybe 20, 30 women, maybe more. We're all crouched down and ... I'm taking pictures of people huddled. And then, this tent just blows away and everybody scatters.
Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post
An elder Sudanese refugee gathers herself after a huge sandstorm subsides at the Ouri Cassoni refugee camp just outside Baha'i, Chad.
What did you see in the aftermath of the storm?
Chikwendiu: It was completely calm! If everything wasn't the orange tint of the sand, you wouldn't have known that a sandstorm just blew through.
I was just looking around at people and how, you know, sand was just caked on their faces and in their clothes.
Then, I saw this lady who -- clearly from her face and her hands, she's an older lady -- who had these glasses on where sand was just caked in the glasses. All except for this one little spot where she took her finger and kind of made a clearing for her to see.
So, that's when I snapped this face, within a few minutes after the storm was gone.
With so many stories of tragedy in the camps, how did you ultimately decide where to focus?
Chikwendiu: Every case was extreme, so I looked for extremities within the extreme. Women would have babies with them in the clinics. I would look for a young mother there, and then I would ask about her family. That's when the stories became even more tragic than just some of the people in the general population.
Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post
A Sudanese mother allows her child to suckle her milkless breasts at the Ouri Cassoni refugee camp just outside Baha'i, Chad. Because of the trauma suffered when her village was attacked, she no longer can provide milk for her young child.
Can you tell me about your meeting with the young woman whose face was covered by the veil?
Chikwendiu: She was really young. She was in her early twenties. I asked her to describe her story ... She's holding this baby under her veil. And through the veil, I can see the silhouette of her nursing the baby. So, I took a lot of photos before I approached her. But I'm sure she saw me taking pictures, she just went about her business.
Then, when I finally approached her, she started to talk about her and her baby and nursing. That's when she tells me that she's nursing but she has no milk. And she thinks that she doesn't have any milk because of the trauma she experienced. Having her whole village bombed in the middle of the night. And having so many people killed in front of her face and having to scatter from her village.
So, here's this mother. She's nursing with no milk. So, her breasts then become, instead of feeding tools, they become just pacifiers.
Why are you a photojournalist who wants and needs to be in places like this?
Chikwendiu: For some reason, since I was young, I had this strong sense of right and wrong -- even though I didn't always live by it. I've done my wrong. But I had a strong sense of justice and injustice.
Being African American, too. I remember being in the eighth-grade, running out of the class - crying, bawling - when I saw the history of Africans in the U.S.
I remember the teacher. It was one of my favorite teachers, one of my favorite teachers still ... I remember her following me out of class and comforting me. She told me, "This is the truth. This is what happened. You can't run from it." So from then on, I started not running from it, but being one of the people who show other people the truth. Because only from the truth can we get to a better place.
There are a lot of good things about the world, but there are some bad things going on that aren't necessary. It has been, I felt like, a mission that's bigger than me, to tell these stories. And even though people know about them, they don't know about them enough. They have to see them. "
["author"]=>
string(10) "Sara Quinn"
["pubDate"]=>
string(29) "Thu, 17 Jul 2008 13:36:07 GMT"
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["title"]=>
string(51) "Multimedia Database Collects Interactive Narratives"
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string(54) "http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=146471"
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string(12339) "
Relaunched this week, the new, improved and spit-shined Interactive Narratives 2.0 is a showcase for what's possible in multimedia storytelling.
The site offers lots of new features, including an invitation for journalists to self-submit multimedia projects and to join a conversation about the work. Andrew DeVigal, multimedia editor at The New York Times, created the site in 2003 and partnered with the Online News Association to get this version off the ground.
"It's an opportunity to see the wide range of brilliant work that's produced out there," said DeVigal, "not just in the big news organizations, but also in the small and medium-sized organizations -- as well as by the independent journalists who are doing some phenomenal work."
In just a few days, the site has logged 80 new registered users. Forty multimedia projects have been submitted, and over 1,100 multimedia entries are in the database. In this edited interview, DeVigal shares what inspired the project and how journalists can best make use of it.
Sara Quinn: Where did the idea come from for the first incarnation of Interactive Narratives?
Andrew DeVigal: It stemmed from my doing a lot of presentations and developing teaching materials, both at Poynter and at conferences. I found myself referring to the same Web sites - or at least bookmarking the same Web sites or multimedia packages over and over. And in those days, I prepared all of my presentations in Macromedia Director. Crazy, I know. I wanted a browser-based presentation platform.
Ultimately, I wanted to create a database that stored all of these links in one place. Once I started collecting them I realized that other people might have the same use for them. So, I ended up working with Ervic Aquino of Stormline Media to make the database available for the world.
How did you select projects for your site?
DeVigal: Back in those days if it blew me away in terms of storytelling, I would rank that high on the list. If it impressed me in terms of its design and presentation, I would also rank it. And the third reason was if there was something innovative about it. Those were the criteria I used.
What's different about version 2.0?
DeVigal: The main thing is that I will no longer be the keeper of the database. I'm basically going to trust the community to be its own sort of watchdog of rich, deep packages of storytelling. I've relinquished the keys to the rest of the community so that they can submit, rank and comment on it.
It still falls under sort of the same criteria with the site ability to sort.
I'm also trusting that the community will rank them by giving them some sort of star value and comments. There will be a social networking aspect to identifying those storytelling packages that rise to a high caliber.
You can also sort the database now, by storytelling design and innovation. So if you really wanted to just sort through the highly ranked or the starred versions of anything, you can do that.
If someone wants to comment on a package, what are the options?
DeVigal: First, you have to register and then log in. That's one of the things that we do require. You can observe the community if you don't log in, but if you want to participate - to rate an entry or comment -- you actually have to register first.
Part of the registration that we ask for is to give your real name. We'll have some tolerance there. But if you are unidentified, we'll reserve the right to block you, or whatever. I think it creates a better community once you become responsible for your own comments and ratings. And the quality of entries and submissions need to remain high to keep Interactive Narratives relevant to the community.
Who can submit work to the site?
DeVigal: Once you become a member, you can submit your own entries. What I hope is that people will put in work that they have done themselves, or that has been done by their own organization.
You can also rate the entry based on storytelling, design and innovation. You can make comments. You can put the name of the organization and credits on the summary.
One of the important things I want to mention is that you can submit tags. It's organized based on tags. I'm hoping to leave this up to the community to regulate the tagging order.
On some entries, we've also allowed podcasting. You can actually associate an audio file for the podcast. The idea there is to actually hear the voices behind the producers. This time, instead of creating a blog of podcasts, the podcasts will be associated with the actual entries.
Is there anything else like this online? Anything that showcases content like this?
DeVigal: I think there are some really good bloggers out there that keep people up to date with what's happening. Interactive Narratives can't replace that, but rather I hope that it'll be a part of that conversation. It's one of the reasons you can also designate a Trackback (or URL) for each comment. So that you can extend your comments on your own blogs.
I also want to see Interactive Narratives become a way for people to look at all of the conversation that's happening and to digest all of that into a site that talks about the different types of media. I want it to become a companion to the conversation that's happening in blogs.
This is one of the reasons that I called it Interactive Narratives -- it's not just about photojournalism, video journalism or interactive graphics. It's not about the medium itself but rather all aspects of what multimedia can deliver. It's about how we interact with the journalism -- a way to look at narratives as a way to engage with the characters of the stories and sometimes, the journalists themselves.
How does this relate to blogs?
DeVigal: I also created a NetVibes Universe for Interactive Narratives. This is where I sort of congregate a lot of the blogs that I look into. It's a way to look at a lot of the conversation and what's being said.
If you visit the Universe, you'll notice that in that space, the conversation is divided up by media types on the top tabs. So, in that space, you can navigate to the tab that most resonates with your area of expertise: video, photo, graphics, Academia and so on.
In them, you'll find the blogs that look at Web 2.0 or Web journalism, video journalism, photojournalism, interactive graphics, blogs dedicated to Academia and also publications that have their own blogs. It's a resource that kind of just aggregates it all together at once.
Who is your partner on Interactive Narratives 2.0? Who's doing the muscle work?
DeVigal: ONA -- The Online News Association was generous enough to put in a few bills to at least try to get it where it is today. It's really a partnership in the sense that they're an organization that's really thinking about how the industry can evolve. It's been great to be a part of that. That's why the co-branding is happening.
In terms of the back-end development, I'm still working closely with my previous technical whiz and friend Ervic Aquino of Stormline Media. Also, my brother Angelo DeVigal (yes, you guessed it, my brother and business partner) was the chief designer and finally, but not least, Jason Speck was the visual technologist who crafted the CSS and interaction design. Jason also created the very handy bookmarklet that you can drag to your browser from the submit page. With it, you can simply hit a single button to submit an entry to Interactive Narratives.
That's the team. But, again, the hope and the goal is that this site becomes relatively self-sufficient. I'm also going to designate a few super-users -- people who are very involved in the industry to help maintain the quality. There's going to be some oversight on the entries and comments, again, to keep the relevance to the community high.
So, who is your primary audience for the site?
DeVigal: Well, I'm hoping it's going to be journalists.
A year ago, or two years ago, I would have said multimedia journalists. But I think the description of multimedia is going to be pretty natural for any journalist that's coming into the field now. They have to be pretty capable of telling their stories in multiple ways.
This is for journalists interested in how to tell stories in various forms of narrative, such as photojournalism, video, audio, interactive graphics. Hopefully, they'll find benefit in showcasing great multimedia work that's happening in the industry. As well as finding inspiration from the amazing work that's being produced out there from large, medium and small organizations as well as the independents.
"
["author"]=>
string(10) "Sara Quinn"
["pubDate"]=>
string(28) "Wed, 9 Jul 2008 16:11:15 GMT"
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[9]=>
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["title"]=>
string(45) "Writing Headlines for Print: Poetry in Notion"
["link"]=>
string(54) "http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=146201"
["description"]=>
string(3634) "A great headline for the Web? It's direct, to-the-point and easily found by search engines because it has lots of specific words, names and local references that news aggregators will find.
If the story is about the dangers of salmonella in tomatoes in California, by golly, the headline probably needs to have "California," "bacteria" and "tomatoes" in it. Maybe "salmonella," too.
Specificity is the key to writing headlines online because the words have to work on their own in the searchable, digital environment.
ABOUT ACES
The American Copy Editors Society has eight regional chapters and six student chapters, in addition to the national group. Their next conference will be in Minneapolis at the end of April 2009.
And writing headlines for print? Has that art been lost in the race to the Web? Hardly. Thousands of headlines are written for print each day in U.S. newspapers alone -- the best ones capturing a reader's imagination and attention in just a few words. The print environment is more poetic.
Here's a bit of praise for the ongoing craft of writing for print, where the subtlety and nuance of a headline has a long and happy marriage to the context of the surrounding page.
In this video interview, Chris Wienandt, president of the American Copy Editors Society (ACES), talks about a few of his favorite headlines and how you can create poetry with just a few words.
His basic advice? "Dont worry about the head count," Wienandt said. "Always ask yourself, 'What is this story really about?' Find the nut graph and begin to craft it in headline-ese. Then focus on making it more and more succinct."
"Think of powerful verbs, powerful nouns, powerful adjectives that will make the headline a memorable one in the brief moment that the reader will see it."
Note: If you're receiving this via e-mail newsletter and have trouble viewing the video, please use the video player on the Poynter Online article. "
["author"]=>
string(10) "Sara Quinn"
["pubDate"]=>
string(28) "Thu, 3 Jul 2008 21:50:47 GMT"
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["title"]=>
string(70) "Next Generation of Visual Thinkers is Drawing the Future of Journalism"
["link"]=>
string(54) "http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=149966"
["description"]=>
string(18656) "Walk through one of Karl Gude's information graphics classes at Michigan State and you'll likely find students who want to be writers, not visual journalists.
Karl Gude, who teaches infographics at Michigan State University top, was interviewed by George Rorick, a pioneer in the visual journalism world.
Yet their graphics work is making it into the local paper. They're drawing self-portraits, learning to use color and typography, diving into visual reporting for breaking news and working with software programs like Illustrator, Photoshop and 3D rendering programs. They're analyzing data, trying their hand at GIS mapping and more.
And for some, Gude's classes are igniting a passion for visual journalism that will take them into the ranks of graphics reporter or artist. At the very least, they'll be well equipped with an appreciation for what visuals can do for storytelling.
College journalism programs around the country are beginning to press the importance of visual and multimedia thinking.
Gude spent more than a decade at Newsweek, first as an artist, then as graphics director. Now, he's back at school, in his second year of teaching at Michigan State.
"I see information graphics as a convergence - a combination of four things. One of them is content, said Gude, "strong information. Another one is art and design. You have to be pretty good at that stuff. Another is technology. And finally, critical thinking. That's what journalism is all about," he said.
Retired Poynter faculty member George Rorick talked with Gude about what he's teaching, how a program that attracts mostly writing students is developing into new visual directions and how those skills can help journalism.
I listened in. Here's the edited interview.
George Rorick: Who are your students, Karl? Are most of them writers? Visual journalists? Are they interested in graphics? Multimedia?
Karl Gude: I've been teaching for two years now at Michigan State in the School of Journalism. One of the things I have been most excited about, and also a little bit frustrated about, is that the majority of the students in the journalism program tend to want to be writers and editors.
These people generally have word talent and word skills, but very little visual skills.
Basically, I'm spending half the semester just getting these writing kids up to speed on basic design and illustration concepts that are necessary for them to be able to visualize data.
Only then are we really starting to get into visualizing content. Thankfully, they've taken classes before me on research and content gathering. So they know how to do an interview and pick up the phone and look on the Internet.
Created in Gude's class by graduate student Gordon Shetler, this graphic was published in the Lansing State Journal.
So, you basically have two groups visual and non-visual, right? But you also have some graphics people who are naturally there because they are interested in drawing and design, right?
Gude: Not so much. The students who come into journalism ... by the time they're juniors - they've basically, maybe taken one design class from one of the other instructors - News Design, like for page layout, not infographics. And they start to say, "Gee, this is fun." But they entered the program in the beginning because they wanted to be writers.
There really is not a lot of recruitment into our program, yet, for kids in high school that do design. They tend to want to go to the art school down the road, the Kresge Art Center.
We have some excellent design instructors here in our college. There's Cheryl Pell, there's Darcy Green. They teach wonderful design courses. Any students who've taken their courses and then come into my class, they're always the best in the class. But even still, they're not students who wanted to be designers since they were in high school.
You do have the occasional student who everyone talks about having a "natural talent" for this design stuff. We've had some amazing designers come out of our school, only because that skill was recognized. It may not have been their original interest for coming into the program.
At the University, we're starting to collaborate with the art college. The students over at the Art Center can now start to take classes over in our college - the College of Communication Arts and Sciences. We can also send our students over there, to take design courses. It's just beginning to happen.
By Fall of 2009, I should be getting juniors -- students who have gone through the entire design program at the Art Center. I can't wait to get those kids!
What kind of response are you getting from your students? If they've come into the program to become better writers, how do they react? Do they have to take your course to graduate?
Gude: No, they don't. I'm happy to say that my courses have become extremely popular. They fill up so fast. Students are recognizing that this is an exciting thing to do.
Why do you think they like it?
Gude: Well, people are born visual. If you ask a bunch of kindergartners "How many of you in this class are artists?" Every kid's hand is going to go up, every one of them. If you ask a bunch of 12-year-olds (if they are) artists, not many hands are going to go up. They've been shamed into being told that they're not very good at drawing or visualizing. They become shy about it.
But, in my classes, already, most of them are not considered visual people. They don't know how to draw. But they're in there to see what all of the buzz is about. We have a lot of fun and that word is getting around.
One class project involves visual reporting and the creation of a graphic about an on-campus "robbery.
What sort of projects are you doing?
Gude: To teach mapping, we have a campus-wide treasure hunt. They have to hide something and then do diagrams on how to find it - without words. And then, everybody switches maps and it's a big race to go find the treasure.
To teach breaking news graphics, for four semesters now, I've convinced the person who's in the campus coffee shop to pretend that the store was robbed over the weekend, and that they were the one who was there.
So, I go up and I say, "I've just discovered that Sparty's (the name of the shop) was robbed over the weekend! And, oh, my god! The person who was on duty then is there now - and is willing to talk with us for 10 minutes. So we can go down and interview that person about exactly what happened."
Then, we do a big graphic on what they say. I don't even know what they're going to say.
What are the results? What kind of graphics have you been getting out of these classes?
Gude: The good news is that there have been graphics that have been pretty good. And, surprisingly, it's not always from the better designers. One graphic is being published this very day in the Lansing State Journal, which is our local paper. The very first semester I taught, I talked to the managing editor - it's a nice, good paper.
I know. I used to work there. For 10 years!
Gude: Of course you did! That's right! I totally forgot you were a total Lansing guy, George!
So, one assignment is to find something that is of local interest to the Lansing area, that the Journal might want to publish. They're wonderful over there. They agreed to consider all of the pages and graphics that we do, for publication.
I think it's interesting that you said that some of your best graphics were being done by "non-visual" people. Tell me more about that.
Gude: The one being published today is on turf, you know, like the football field. (It was done by a) grad student who is more on the science side of journalism. He had never made a graphic before. I was pretty blown away by what he did.
A lot of people who can draw well think, "all I have to do is draw this well and it's going to be fantastic." But, it has to be based on content and good information.
Gude: Well, the basics that I teach are that, if they can trace an image, or use photography, then it's just a question of organizing the graphic.
You just can't have a ton of content and know how to design and use technology without having the ability to analyze the data and interpret it visually for the reader. Or to edit it down. That takes some serious critical thinking. That's what journalism is all about.
All design really is is making order out of chaos. So, if you have all of these elements, like photos and text and maps and drawings and charts - it all has to be packaged.
You know, you use a grid; you have this logical flow of information from top to bottom. You can teach these mechanical things - the use of color, typographic hierarchies - but some people just get it. And some people don't get it.
Students in the infographics class created self-portraits for their MySpace pages. Left is David Ingold, right is Summi Ghambir.
I like to hear about the way you're distributing the work - getting it into the newspaper. What other sorts of projects do they do?
Gude: My first semester, I had them draw fish, to learn how to use the drawing software. I stole Terence Oliver's idea from Ohio University. The fish came out really nice, but I could tell the students' hearts weren't really in it.
One project for learning to use drawing software involved drawing a fish.
Next semester, I said, "OK, you're drawing a self-portrait for your MySpace page!"
Wow.
Gude: And I said "It's a portrait of you, so you're going to want this to rock and roll."
One of these "non-visual" people said they spent four hours, just drawing the mouth. It's a hell of a mouth, I gotta tell you.
Let's talk more about technology.
Gude: You need to be able to use a lot of technologies to tell your story. Maybe you want to use slides online. Maybe you want to edit a video. Maybe you need to do some GIS data mapping to locate something. Maybe it needs to be slightly 3D, for some reason. Or use Flash or Dreamweaver.
News organizations are expecting to see more and more ability with technology from these students.
All of these technologies coming together, people are calling it convergence. So, the reporter who normally would go out on an interview with a pad of paper and a pen can no longer just sit there with a paper and a pen. They've also got to know how to take a little video camera along, prop it up on a little stand and videotape that guy being interviewed. Because their Web site's going to expect to be able to upload that for the Web. Maybe they'll even have to know how to edit that video.
Our students are learning how to edit video and all sorts of stuff.
What is the outlook that students have for the future of the business? Are they optimistic? Pessimistic?
Gude: That's a really good question, George. As adults, we're all sort of terrified for the future of journalism. There's so much soul-searching by people already in the industry.
I'm teaching at a camp for high school journalism students this week. They're taught by professionals and academics. There are 500-plus students at the university this week, all of them wanting to be journalists. I am really encouraged by that kind of turnout.
These kids -- their understanding that newspapers are going away someday - the idea that a newspaper with 18-hour-old news is going to be source for news -- that's not going to be very real for very long.
What we're trying to create are these critical thinkers with all of these skills so that they can go into whatever direction journalism decides to take them. You know, flexibility ... light on their feet.
They're excited about it?
Gude: I think they are. I think that most of them think that there are still enough jobs out there. They can either get a job on the Web side of things, or on the paper side of things. A lot of students will stay here in Michigan. They'll work at weekly newspapers. They will work at small papers or mid-sized papers. There are some who want to work at The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.
I've never seen a single student have doubts about it. Not as a junior or a senior. Sophomores might think about other paths - advertising. I tell them, if you want to study advertising, great. But there is a lot of competition for advertising. Every school cranks out a lot of advertising students.
There's competition for a journalist in writing jobs, too. How many writers do you think are knocking on the door of The New York Times? A lot. How many infographics people are knocking on the door at The New York Times? Not many.
I wish I was 20 years old again, really. I think there is tremendous opportunity out there for visual journalists, for people who can combine the writing, visual, reporting and technology skills.
Gude: There's not only a future in visual journalism. One of the things that I've realized is that the skills that people are learning in my class - how to make information graphics, or how to visualize data in a variety of ways - statistical, geographical, diagrammatical - these are skills that can be applied to other industries, too.
That's not surprising for a man whose career as a visual journalist has taken him to the newsrooms of The Detroit News, The New York Times and most recently at National GeographicMagazine.
The difference between the news graphics he created in those venerable newsrooms and what he's creating now, back again at the Times, is a matter of opinion his own opinion. As their first-ever visual Op-Ed columnist, Blow ferrets out interesting data as the starting point and ultimate support for editorial opinion.
Visual Op-Ed columnist for the New York Times Charles Blow, top, was interviewed by George Rorick, a pioneer in the visual journalism world.
His column appears in the Times every other Saturday.
"When I find a compelling topic one that I have something to say about and there's some interesting visual hook, then that is a column possibility," Blow said in a telephone interview with another visual journalist, retired Poynter faculty George Rorick.
I had the pleasure of eavesdropping on their conversation about the column, an interesting meeting of the minds between two great visual thinkers. In addition to the column, Blow recently launched a new blog called By the Numbers, a forum on the Times' site to showcase many different forms of visual expression. Here is the edited interview.
George Rorick: What you're doing is so unusual. Can you describe your position?
Charles Blow: We call it a visual columnist. I'm not exactly sure if that's the proper description. But, what I'm doing is using visual evidence to support arguments in persuasive essay. I use charts and maps and diagrams to support my positions.
What inspired you to do this? What are you hoping to accomplish with this?
Blow: The Times had used Op charts which were charts that appeared on the Op Ed page for quite some time. There are still some produced now, by contributors. From the first time I saw it, I thought it was a great idea that you could loosen up the rigors and the confines of data from the news pages, where you have to be completely objective and answer every possible question in the data. To have a looser interpretation of the data and be able to say, "This data has holes, and that's OK. Here are what the holes are, but there is still value in it, in some ways."
There is a lot of freedom that being able to be subjective allows. I thought that would be fantastic to see how far we could go using data and charts to kind of support editorial decisions and opinion.
I find it a fascinating kind of exercise because there's a certain part of data that is completely objective the numbers are what they are, if they're true or false. There's a kind of cut and dried sensibility there. And it's an interesting balance in trying to mix that and marry it and not dilute or corrupt the data, but at the same time, use it as a support mechanism. I like trying to strike that balance.
Is there any one article that has really caught fire? That you've gotten a lot of feedback on?
Blow: Well, my most recent article got somewhere above 500 e-mails. And they still trickle in.
It's always very interesting. Very different from my previous days here (at the Times) in the graphics department in the newsroom, and also at National Geographic where you rarely receive any mail. There, if you got two or three e-mails a week, that was quite a bit, and that was for the entire department.
When I publish now, the day I publish if I wait until noon that day to check my e-mail, there are a hundred, 200, sometimes 300 e-mails. This time, there were 500 by the time I came to work on Monday.
It's overwhelming, actually, to know that people are so passionate about the subjects that you cover. And they have a lot of very interesting things to say. Obviously, not everybody agrees with you. But that's not the point. The point is that readers are engaging in the work and giving you feedback on how they receive it.
What was this column about?
Blow: In that particular case, it was a column called Racism and the Race. It explored the role of racism and how it could be playing in how the poll numbers are reading and how it could work out to be an advantage for John McCain in November.
I was bracing for some kind of a backlash on that piece. But, most of the people who responded were readers who identified themselves as white and who were basically confessing that they also knew people who refused to vote for Obama simply because he is black and those people would not say it in public.
It was compelling to read those e-mails. But also the idea that people kind of latch on to you as a personality. And that they somehow feel connected to your work and your column, not just as part of The New York Times.
That was interesting that people were feeling comfortable and wanted to share their experiences.
A column that I read that I really like, just FYI, is the one titled Why is Mom in Rehab?
Blow: In fact, I thought that I would get more mail from that story. And that was the one that had the least amount of response from readers.
It's interesting that you bring it up, because it was the most visually ambitious and data rich of all of the pieces.
And what I found is that doesn't necessarily work with my readers. In fact, the more simple the charting, the more they kind of respond to the piece.
They want provocative, interesting points made in a strong way, and simply. And so, I've kind of become less visually ambitious in the column, as a result of this job. I think I'm becoming less visual all around. Because I know, from my experiences so far, that's not what my readers are responding to.
They want you to make a strong point and give them that in a visual nugget that they can digest right away and kind of ruminate on why I find it interesting.
That makes sense, too. A lot of graphics are overdone. If you can make it so that you can get right to the point, that's so important. I think what you're doing will help visual journalists in the long run to get a better feeling for what they need to do.
Who do you answer to in your position? Are you very independent?
Blow: Very, very, very independent. Almost frighteningly so. No one's asking what I'm going to write. I assume that there is veto power if something is completely out of bounds, but beyond that, there is very little oversight. You're pretty much a sovereign nation as an Op Ed columnist. That obviously has its benefits, but it also means that you have a lot of responsibility to come up with something that's solid and meaningful to the readers.
How do you come up with your topics? Are you in the newsroom on a daily basis?
Blow: No, not at all. I'm on the thirteenth floor. The newsroom is on the second, third and fourth floors. I rarely go down, unless I want to talk to someone about data, like maybe to the polling people, they're in the newsroom. I use a lot of polls in my column, so I'm at their desk quite a bit, but not on a daily basis. I'm very much detached from the news cycle and that process.
I think where you were going with the question is that No. I'm not overhearing the buzz of the newsroom and soaking up what might be newsy.
Right.
Blow: And, in fact, I miss some of that. But the way that I come up with topics is that, I'm reading all of the time. The television is on in my office, all of the time on news stations.
And I'm trying plug into the cultural zeitgeist and what's relevant in the moment. And develop ideas based on that always running through the prism of what is my opinion about these things that are happening? And how do I make that something that readers might care about?
So, I'm having ideas all of the time. The question becomes, is there some visual hook to support that argument? That cancels out quite a few ideas.
When I find a compelling topic one that I have something to say about and there's some interesting visual hook, then that is a column possibility.
When you have a story that's really compelling, but there's no visual merit, what do you do with it?
Blow: I just pass it. There are nine other columnists at the Times. And to a large degree, we're writing about some of the same subjects. And I feel like, someone will touch it, if I don't offer my opinion about that.
But, as I develop an audience, my readers really look to me to bring something extra, not just the opinion. They look for the visual hook. They want to be shown something in a different way. And I think I owe it to them not to just fall back into a default position. ... The way my job is described and set up is to offer that extra visual hook.
You mentioned your audience. Who are they?
Blow: It's hard to know. Most of the e-mails don't come with the titles or descriptions of who the people are. But the kinds of comments that they offer are very much on the thesis of the essay. Rarely do I get any e-mail about the visual components.
They never seem to discuss the merits of the visual. They may discuss the content of the visual, and say, "This is an interesting point, glad somebody made it," or "I really don't agree with your point here. You should look at something else." But in this context, they don't separate the visual from column in the way that my experience was both at the Times, before, and at National Geographic. There, the visual seemed to be sort of separate thing from the authorship of the piece. Obviously, it was a separate thing from the authorship of the piece. The author wrote about something and there was an accompanying visual.
In this case, they know that it's all me. And so they don't separate it out as a different talking point.
Are you working with a staff, or do you create everything on your own?
Blow: It's mostly me, but I do have a fantastic assistant. Her name is Hilary Howard. She helps with fact checking and chasing down numbers and facts and what have you.
Do you miss being in a newsroom?
Blow: A little, but not much. I do like the idea that there are tons of newsy ideas swirling around. And you can overhear things that can spark something in you and make you chase another story, or another graphic possibility.
But you prefer to read and think and come up with your own ideas?
Blow: Well, I've developed that muscle, being in this job.
And also, there's a kind of struggle that happens in the newsroom with visual people that a lot of people have struggled with, and many people have done a good job to change writers' and editors' opinions of the role of visuals in the newsroom, but that is a continuing fight. And, quite frankly, I enjoy not having to have to fight it anymore.
In this role, it's not even a conversation.
From my experience, that would have to be a tremendous relief!
Blow: Yes.
You sound like you feel very good about what you're doing now.
Blow: I love it. I think it's the best job I've ever had in my life.
Is there anything else you'd like to tell people about in this interview?
Blow: My blog just started. I will have this blog on the Opinion part of the Web site. It's called By the Numbers.
What I'm doing is trying to provide a forum for discussion of all things statistical that can and are being (shared) through visual expressions. But also to provide something of a community for people to submit things. And it's not just for people who do charts, maps and diagrams but people who do short films, futurists, people who solve problems through architecture and product design anyone with an interesting visual idea or concept. We're going to try to highlight it in this space.
You want people to send visual examples to you. Is that right?
Blow: Exactly.
"
["author"]=>
string(10) "Sara Quinn"
["pubDate"]=>
string(29) "Thu, 28 Aug 2008 14:24:22 GMT"
}
[2]=>
array(5) {
["title"]=>
string(44) "Varied Visual Perspectives of the Denver DNC"
["link"]=>
string(54) "http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=149516"
["description"]=>
string(2093) "A city that hosts an event as big as a political convention deserves a bit of levity. As many as 50,000 people are estimated to be wandering the streets of Denver, counting politicians, delegates, media-types and the merely curious. Jeepers.
The Rocky Mountain News posted DNC trivia on its site and this 360 degree panoramic view of the convention floor by photojournalist Tracy Trumbull. It might leave you dizzy, but a little happy, too.
The Denver Post published this playful graphic outline of the road to the convention. DNCtimeline
Jeff Goertzen, graphics director at the Post said the way the text was crafted "pretty much oozed with style and illustrative opportunities." The graphic was written and researched by Barry Osborne and Kevin Dale. Illustrator Andrew Lucas sketched out ideas for the most interesting or whimsical events on the timeline.
"The difficult part for Andrew was to come up with a style that was not too goofy, but more of a likeness of each of the figures. We wanted it to be fun, but not silly," said Goertzen."
["author"]=>
string(10) "Sara Quinn"
["pubDate"]=>
string(29) "Wed, 27 Aug 2008 22:38:20 GMT"
}
[3]=>
array(5) {
["title"]=>
string(68) "Salt Lake Tribune's 'SOS' Saves Readers from Jumpy Newspapers"
["link"]=>
string(54) "http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=148826"
["description"]=>
string(9691) "
Though it may take awhile before everyone in the newsroom speaks the same language, the act of giving a name to a form helps us come to agreement on what works, what we're comfortable creating and what we know how to execute. One such new form at The Salt Lake Tribune is called the SOS, or "story on a story."
The SOS is a way of tightly editing the information that appears on a section front -- basically eliminating the ever-cumbersome jump, so that there is always a complete and containable thought on the cover.
The "story on a story" format on the Salt Lake Tribune's section fronts is a containable element that sets up a full story inside the paper. In this example, readers get a quick sense of the history and possible future of the cost of oil.
I talked with Josh Awtry, AME for Niche Publications, Online and Presentation at the Salt Lake Tribune, about the SOS and how it works.
"The way that I couch it to reporters is, youre going to get three inches of type out there, one way or another," said Awtry. "This lets you control exactly what you want to say with those three inches -- and it still lets you have your narrative."
Sara Quinn: How is the SOS format different than what you'd done in the past?
Josh Awtry: This has been a big cultural change in our newsroom. In the past, if it didn't have a headline, subhead, byline and narrative, it didn't count. We had a very templated approach to 1A -- we had four story starts out there that jumped.
Convincing people that this three inches of type -- the SOS -- was different from their 3.4 inches of type was a hurdle. I'm pretty happy to say it's a hurdle that we've mostly overcome. ... Over the past few months here, it's been a huge sea change.
When we go to our new redesign later this year, the better part of the front page will be made up of these containable elements.
How did you introduce the SOS?
Awtry: We started by going really simple. Basically, we amped up the stand-alone photo formula. First, it was making the corollary to "Hey, it's just like a stand-alone photo - here's your photo, here's two-and-a-half inches of type, teasing to the story."
What would you say the benefit of this story form is to the reader?
Awtry: We know that people follow jumps if the story is interesting enough. My whole caveat is, why gamble on that? Why gamble on whether or not they're going to make that jump? Let's give people a lot of choices. Let's answer readers' questions directly. Let's give them a complete thought.
So, in the end, the benefit is that it caters to both types of readers. It caters to the readers who want to spend 10 seconds and then move on with their lives. Likewise, a reader can go into page A9 and there's your wonderful, anecdotal lead ... about half of which would have made it onto the cover before it jumped mid-sentence. That's for your core reader and we're not giving anybody any less in that sense.
That's a good articulation of the way people read. Does the SOS have a different look? What do readers see that sets it apart?
Awtry: We developed a unique typography for anything that held to the front. But it was still very much relegated to the "tease" category at that point, and not the real informational category.
To start out, the reporters and editors were writing these story summaries. And then, we wanted to get a little more advanced with it -- to create a hold to the front lead-in with three questions and three answers, that kind of approach.
What are some of the challenges you faced in getting people to accept and embrace this new format?
Awtry: In the end, I just started to do it, which is not an approach that I endorse or recommend. But, where were at this point ... it was the place we needed to start. People needed to see what it should look like, where to start.
I was very loath to give somebody an SOS template, because, the next thing you know -- every SOS would look the same. And, a year from now, that one form would become part of the language. Then, if you want to change it, it takes another act of Congress.
How do you determine which stories get this treatment?
Awtry: Let's say the business editor has this great story and he wants to blow it out on the business cover. And someone on the senior management staff says "That story really belongs on 1A." But in reality, it would probably be on the bottom of 1A.
For me, this is a way to couch it and say, "Look everybody wins. You can have your cake and eat it too. Because on 1A, we can do an SOS, but it won't preclude being able to blow out the story with all of the photos and graphics and the approaches you want to take on the business cover."
Would you say it takes a lot of constant, daily communication to do it well?
Awtry: I don't want to overstate this and make it come off like we are reinventing the wheel, because papers have been doing this for a long time. But, for us, the big change has been the history of it.
At a lot of papers, it's like ... get to the point, get to the point. Quit with the throat clearing anecdotal lead and just give me the nut graph, because it's not going to make the jump. People can deride me for trying to kill long form journalism, but this is being done to support it.
I think the personality-laden, anecdotal leads, filled with emotion and energy shouldn't be spiked, just because they're going to jump mid-thought.
That's a great way to put it. You're not killing long form narrative, what you're doing is putting an end to an old production style that led to things missing the point and not jumping where you wanted them to.
A recent centerpiece in the Tribune took the form of a centerpiece.
Awtry: The trick in doing this, I think, is training the reporters to see that it's not a tease to the story, in a traditional sense. It's the nut graph. It's the best information.
How does the SOS translate to the Web?
Awtry: That's why it has been so easy to sell this. What do you get on the Web? You get the headline and then a short tease. Then you click on it and you get the full story. It doesn't make you jump mid-thought.
But we usually rework the things we do for the Web. I'm looking at one right now where the headline says "Should we worry?" Then, what you see on the (printed) page is a dollar bill with George Washington's head ducking out of the way. I mean, you see the package, the context when it's in print. Online, you don't get the benefit of that.
We've got a really savvy online desk. They'll make the most of it. Sometimes, they'll keep the flavor of the thing, while making it work in a searchable way.
Are the SOS forms primarily on your front page, or do you use them on other section fronts, as well?
Awtry: For now, it's on the front page. We do it very routinely on the front page. Talk to me again in about three months and it will be on every section front.
"
["author"]=>
string(10) "Sara Quinn"
["pubDate"]=>
string(29) "Mon, 18 Aug 2008 05:45:15 GMT"
}
[4]=>
array(5) {
["title"]=>
string(63) "Stepping Into Gallery Life, Visual Journalists Find Inspiration"
["link"]=>
string(54) "http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=148205"
["description"]=>
string(12511) "What's a visual journalist to do when inspiration runs a little crispy and the old news business keeps churning out news bites for Jim Romenesko?
Shake it off and look for inspiration elsewhere -- maybe open a gallery and put on a show. That's what design consultant Ron Reason has done at his new contemporary art space, within(Reason), in Chicago. Starting Friday, the personal work of illustrator/designer Andrew Skwish will be shown there. Reason's original photography will also be on display.
Skwish and Reason have more creative energy than a newsroom artist hopped up on Red Bull. They photograph and paint any surface they can find - old LPs, printed publications, Polaroid photos and even a guitar. Any situation they run across in their travels might become fodder for a photographic series to be posted online. So I wanted to know what keeps them making their personal art and how that work differs from creative work for publication.
Ron Reason thinks of his gallery space as a larger than life news story, waiting to be designed. One of Andrew Skwish's illustrations has been turned into a mural so that gallery visitors can pose for photographs and "interact" with the art. "As his former art director," said Reason, "I can now tell Skwish: don't ever complain that I never run your art big enough!"
Sara Quinn: Hey, Ron. What made you take the leap to sign a lease on the gallery space?
Ron Reason: I decided late last year to explore the idea of office space for my redesign business. I had been mostly working out of the house and was itching for the stimulation of a real office, and interaction with people.
It was a coincidence that the space I liked the most was in a neighborhood, Pilsen, known as an emerging arts center for Chicago, and an office building that hosts a popular "2nd Fridays" gallery open house event. Essentially, anyone in the building can open their doors for gallery night. It was almost an accident that it happened this way, really.
Did you second-guess yourself, or just jump right in?
I sort of jumped right in but followed my gut also. I signed the lease, and the next day went on a two-month trip to Africa. Six weeks were [spent] working with two clients there; about two weeks were personal travel and photography.
This trip put a lot of creative ideas into my head about how to use my new office space and how to explore some personal interests in art and also philanthropy, At least three of my gallery shows this year will see proceeds going to charity.
When and why did you first start to create personal work, Skwish?
Artist Andrew Skwish paints on just about any surface. This piece, titled "Guitart" will be on display at a gallery show in Chicago starting Friday.
Andrew Skwish: I started doing what would be called my own work quite a few years ago, just as I had gotten out of college. I had studied business and was working as a paste up boy at a small newspaper to earn a little cash and was trying to impress a young woman. So I started doing little pieces and giving them as gifts. Then I started doing more and more, still trying to impress her. Eventually I wore her down, eventually she left me for a higher calling, but I found that I didn't need her to continue to create little pieces.
When and where are you most creative? Is it different for one type of work than another?
Reason: For die-hard work - whether newspaper stuff, or my own art and promotions for the gallery shows - I am most creative starting around 3 p.m. Here's why: I think my brain is hotwired from the first 6 or 7 years of my career, when I was on the night shift with the copy desk!
I'm convinced I still work best around dinnertime when the adrenaline and genetic memory of working for an 11 p.m. newspaper deadline kicks in.
For just ruminating about things - ideas for art or concepts for shows - I like to keep my brain humming during odd times, when I'm in a hotel or on a plane for my clients, or in the shower or at the gym during down time.
Skwish: After midnight. I will often try to get going sooner but it never works out that way. I think I need to believe that the rest of the word is asleep in order to get anything done. Once the clock strikes 12 I get going and work well through the night. It is pretty much that way for everything I do. I like to lounge away the day and work through the hours of darkness.
Which visual world is more challenging and which more rewarding and why?
An acrylic painted on an antique church shelf, "Victorian Sensations" is Andrew Skwish's favorite piece in the show.
Skwish: Both have their challenges and rewards. I have been working in the news industry for so long that the rewards don't have quite the same impact as they may have when I was 20 or so. Not that they aren't still there but there is a bit of "been there, done that" syndrome.
But I must say when an interesting, well-written story comes through (and what interested me 20 years ago is different from what interests me today) it makes me really want to try to get people to notice the story and read it. So if I can get that to happen, that is pretty rewarding.
That effort is often to reach the masses, while in my personal work I'm really not trying to reach anyone in particular. If only one person notices something in the work that makes them want to possess it or even to just spend time with it, then that is awfully satisfying. Even if that doesn't happen, the times when it is 2 a.m. and I am painting and I can hear my little boy breathing on the baby monitor, then that moment cannot be surpassed. Seriously.
Reason: The newspaper world is challenging, well, because of economic times, though I'm happy to say I'm busy enough for now. I've just completed the bulk of a project in Kenya and will gear up for continued work in Nigeria which is pretty darn exciting. I blog about that.
The art world is also extremely challenging financially. Let's just say, thank goodness for the day job -- but it's a part-time thing so I'm not too worried about it. Right now I'm having fun and telling stories and taking chances, which are all good things for people to try to do in anxious times.
In surprising new ways, it's rewarding to put together a show conceptually, work with new artists and people I've known a while from the industry like Andrew, and connect with people in real time and real space.
The gallery to me is like a 4-dimensional newspaper story - all four walls but also the ceiling and interior space can be used, as well as light, video, sound. It's daunting but lots of fun.
It's also been cool to connect the two worlds. In June I showed and sold photographs I took during my off-hours while on assignment in Kenya, which raised nearly $1,600 for arts programs and an after-school club for kids, as well as a new library there.
Attendants at the Emirates counter at Dubai International Airport wish Ron Reason's mother happy 70th birthday. This is one of a series of photographs Ron posted on his blog while working in Africa.
What one piece of work is your favorite - of your own and of each other's?
Skwish: I'm not sure if this one was part of any of Ron's shows, but I really loved his birthday wishes to his mom from his travels. I looked forward to seeing them and thought they were a nice and genuine way to express his affection in a time when he couldn't be home.
Of my work I have a fondness for one that is a yellow-haired lady (aka "Victorian Sensation"). It is a very simple piece and most people I've spoken to don't think too much of it, but maybe because of that, the unwanted child of the litter, I like it more. Plus it was while painting this one that the 2 a.m. moment occurred.
Reason's favorite is a photo he took of Reuters photographer Noor Khamis 'collecting string' for future stories about life in the Kibera area of Nairobi.
Reason: There's a photo I showed in my June exhibit, "Hope In a Hard Place," of Reuters photographer Noor Khamis 'collecting string' for future stories about life in the Kibera area of Nairobi.
I was inside a dark shack and noticed a local resident engaging Noor in a heated discussion about Kenyan politics. Of course Noor was shooting away but talking a good game, too. It was horrible lighting in some ways but forgiving in others. I just loved the moment it caught, and it also represents the gift of the amazing insider's tour of the area that I was given by Noor, made possible by my proximity to the area via my client, The Standard newspaper, for whom I was completing a redesign.
Of Skwish's work, for sure it's a piece that I call the 'Guitart!' It's a guitar that he painted for me a few years ago, front and back, with one of his elongated whimsical characters and lyrics from a French pop song. It's usually in my house and guests remark on it all the time - which is what good art or journalism should do, right? - but it will be part of our exhibit on Aug. 8. "
["author"]=>
string(10) "Sara Quinn"
["pubDate"]=>
string(28) "Fri, 8 Aug 2008 14:14:41 GMT"
}
[5]=>
array(5) {
["title"]=>
string(65) "A Year Later, "13 Seconds in August" Commemorates Bridge Collapse"
["link"]=>
string(54) "http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=147779"
["description"]=>
string(12970) "
Images in the introduction of "13 Seconds in August" are paired with audio of emergency calls during the Minneapolis bridge collapse.
Reading through the Minneapos Star Tribune's "13 Seconds in August" interactive project is like being a rescue worker or a reporter on the scene of last year's bridge collapse.
You can scroll through an aerial photograph of the bridge taken just hours after the accident, travel from car to car to learn what happened to each person unlucky enough to have been on the bridge that day.
With the one-year anniversary on Friday, readers still spend hours at a stretch with the site, trying to comprehend the whole event. Staffers have never stopped updating the site with the status of victims' recoveries. To date, the occupants of 78 of the 84 cars on the bridge have been identified.
Two things stand out: the massive job of tracking down details and the many different storytelling tools used in the interactive site. There are interviews with victims, transcripts of 911 recordings, photo galleries and the voices of many of the victims themselves in audio and video.
In this edited Q&A, lead designer Dave Braunger talks about design and management of the project and graphic artist and researcher Jane Friedmann talks about her never-ending task of updating the information as more is learned about the victims.
Sara Quinn: At what point did you decide to collect all of the information in an interactive site?
Braunger: The staff worked frantically to be able to turn as many pieces of information as we had into a working project.
Originally, the graphic wasn't a straight vertical photo for the paper version; it was more of a three-quarter shot of the bridge, not an aerial photograph. The print staff was trying to fill it in for a double truck. They were trying to get a really quick idea of profiles and fatalities and things like that.
Rhonda Prast and Jane and I sat down and just thought, "There's a good chance of getting everything. There's no reason why we have to stop with that for the online graphic. We don't have the same limitations as print for horizontal and vertical space. We can do anything we want to do online."
How were you able to track down all of the people on the bridge?
Friedmann: It wasn't easy. There were no official sources for that. It was an ongoing investigation, and then there were the privacy issues.
I just started going through the photos we had stored electronically. Some were taken by Star Tribune photographers and others were from the wire. I just looked for license plates. Then, we referenced those license plates for vehicle owners and called people.
I also looked on the Internet to try to find any references to the bridge. Like, "Oh, this is my mom and dad's car on the bridge." Anytime someone talked about who was near them on the bridge, I would get some clues. Like, "It was a man in a car by himself." Or "There were two women, both in their twenties. One had blonde hair."
It was a puzzle. And I just had to put all of the pieces together.
How did site change from initial sketches to the way it looks today?
Braunger: Originally, my idea of the layout was much more complex and visually complicated. After a while I started stripping the design visuals away and liked how the media really carried the stories.
As the design became more simplified, the power of the project really took over.
At one point, I had all of these plans that were very complicated. I wanted the overhead view to be mimicked with a side diagram, so you'd be able to see the entire span of the bridge. But I kept working on that and, at some point it just got yanked.
I thought, you know, the more crap I throw at this, the less impactful it is.
Simple typography, a simple box. Let the power of this straight vertical, aerial photo carry the design. A lot of people hadn't seen it before. It wasn't until you saw that photo that you really understood it.
Readers can access videos a written interviews with the victims. The site has been constantly updated with the status of survivors.
What is it about the interactivity that makes it work?
Braunger: The site is pure objectivity. There's no leading the viewer to anything. Everyone on the bridge has an equal amount of representation. And, that's both good and bad. There are some great stories in there that people really wanted to highlight.
But it just really worked out best to have this kind of flat, kind of scientific way of displaying all of it. Everyone is given equal coverage, equal opportunity to tell their story.
We didn't highlight which ones had video or not. Readers just went from story to story. It wasn't really about the media that we had, it was about the information that we had.
How would you describe the reader's experience?
Friedmann: I think the reader gets a sense of the community that unwillingly developed among complete strangers. The survivors had this immediate bond and interacted with each other while they were on the bridge. I think that interaction helps readers get a little bit better sense of what it was like to have been there.
Braunger: You get so addicted to seeing these videos, you have to watch them from beginning to end. It grabs you and readers will spend two hours looking at this stuff. It's not something that you can easily bookmark and come back to.
One victim is talking about where they were on the bridge, and they're referring to another car and then you see the other car and you think, let's see what these people have to say. It's this whole puzzle of seeing how all of these events are intertwined.
What sort of feedback have you gotten from readers?
Braunger: To actually keep a time capsule of where everyone was, what was going on -- people really responded to that. To hear, minute-by-minute, what happened to these people on the bridge, that's what we hear about most from readers.
Friedmann: It's been very positive. The most gratifying feedback has been from the survivors themselves. It's been somewhat of a cathartic process for them to go through survivors' stories. A lot of them say it's been really hard for them to hear these stories, but it made them feel less alone. They felt like there were others who could understand what they'd gone through.
The husband of one victim wrote to say that he had never seen anywhere else a photograph of his wife's car. He then finally understood how she had drowned.
We also had a lengthy thank you from a health care provider, one of the supervisors of emergency response. He said, so often he and his colleagues are not so forthcoming to media and wished the media would just go away. But now he understands how valuable it is to the community to have us there to help tell the story. He and his colleagues were also really appreciative of seeing the project.
Many of the profiles include photo galleries.
As this information was reported and gathered, how did you manage the workflow?
Braunger: The nature of this project is that the reporters are getting little bits of information over time. It would have been maddening for one person to have to add all of these little pieces as they came in.
So, it wasn't waiting for a designer to throw this stuff in. We had multiple people with access ... they can add content and remove it, edit it and copy edit it. Otherwise, the design becomes such a bottleneck.
It really is an archive. The project was designed as a Flash front end with a back end that is driven by XML files.
The project is actually split into two XML files that drive all of the information. One XML file is specifically for the videos. The second has all of the text and photo and gallery info as well as links to the videos.
Some people might say that you were able to do this just because you had a large staff. What do you think about that? Braunger: Right. Everyone looks at the news organization that's bigger and says, well we don't have the resources to do that. We say the same things around here sometimes.
But it's a matter of finding out how to do it with what you've got. You might have to scale something back, but there usually is a way. It just takes a lot of putting your nose to the grindstone.
I work with two very talented designers. Our Online Design Editor Jamie Hutt and my co-designer Jaime Chismar had great suggestions and ideas that are peppered throughout the project. We work very well together.
We were essentially given one hell of a puzzle. I mean the pieces that we got were great. Great reporting, great video, great audio, phenomenal photography. It really makes a designer's job pretty easy.
Each of these stories is very emotional. What was it like in the newsroom?
Friedmann: It was a real challenge for me to make that phone call and ask that person if they had been on the bridge.
When I did get hold of people, I wanted to make sure that they knew that I respected their privacy. If they weren't willing or able to talk with me, that was all right.
Braunger: Rhonda Prast, who was one of the reporters gathering the data, would refer to the victims on a first name basis. People in the newsroom knew the cast of characters, and they felt like they were just kind of climbing into their lives.
Rhonda would sometimes talk about these people by first name, or just by last name. And I would say, listen, I need a number. I just need to know which car you're talking about. Frankly, all of these stories are heartfelt. And there's 101 of them, so, I really couldn't deal with that until later.
The beginning intro to the project was the last thing that we did. And that really kind of sends chills up my spine. They did such a good job of bringing that together. That audio transcript is just spooky. That's as real as it can get.
Do you think that you will ever track down every person?
Friedmann: I don't know. I believe there will always be several that we don't ever find. "
["author"]=>
string(10) "Sara Quinn"
["pubDate"]=>
string(29) "Thu, 31 Jul 2008 20:59:13 GMT"
}
[6]=>
array(5) {
["title"]=>
string(52) "Contests, Pop Culture Draw Readers to Print & Online"
["link"]=>
string(54) "http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=147341"
["description"]=>
string(10626) "
Holy Web traffic, Batman! How can we get readers to go from print to online and back again? While we wait for the shipment of magic bullets, let's look at one strategy by The Florida Times-Union. The news staff there regularly whips up engaging print and interactive projects by tapping into their own love of pop culture.
A Web video gives a behind-the-scenes view of how the Times-Union created a photograph for coverage of a new Batman film.
They ramped up for the new Batman movie with a behind-the-scenes video about people getting into character and coverage from the midnight premiere. And "American Idol" fans already have what they need to prep for the auditions in Jacksonville in August.
In this Q&A, Denise Reagan, AME for Visuals, talks about what it took to create a scavenger hunt contest timed to the opening of another blockbuster movie.
Sara Quinn: Tell me about the film contest. How did it come about?
Denise Reagan: It was a seven-day citywide scavenger hunt that combined print and online. The contest was timed to the release of "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull."
This was the third time The Florida Times-Union and Jacksonville.com had done a scavenger hunt related to the release of a movie. The first two were smaller in scale. A desire to do more reader-interactive ventures led us to come up with a contest for this new film.
Clues sent readers to the Web site, where they found interactive features and videos that parodied scenes from the film.
Here's how it worked for "Indiana Jones": 1. A treasure map ran each day on Page 2 of our Life section and on Jacksonville.com/treasurequest. 2. Readers went to the area shown with an X on the map. 3. Readers used the accompanying limerick to find the day's clue. 4. Readers typed in the clue on Jacksonville.com by 8 p.m. each day to enter a random drawing for the day's prize. 5. For the grand prize, readers typed in all seven correct clues to enter the random drawing. 6. Daily winners were announced on the front page of the Times-Union each day. The grand prize winner was announced on the front of the Life section.
Sets of four movie passes were given as daily prizes in addition to a different prize each day: an Official Indiana Jones whip, a set of seven Indiana Jones paperback books, framed Indiana Jones posters and a set of all three Indiana Jones DVDs. The grand prize was a Honda scooter, a Sony PSP Portable Gaming System and the LEGO "Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures" game.
How did these ideas get started?
Denise Reagan is AME for Visuals at The Florida Times-Union.
Reagan: The first one was for "The Da Vinci Code." It was a rather small-scale contest with little promotion, but it still generated some interest.
Next, we came up with a contest for the Memorial Day release of "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End." We simplified the rules, allowed people to play for just a day or the whole week, added better prizes, ramped up the Web site and promoted the heck out of it on A-1 starting a week in advance.
Hundreds of people were playing each day and the response we received from people telling how much their kids were looking forward to getting the paper each day for the next clue was exciting. When we learned that "Indiana Jones" was scheduled for Memorial Day this year, we knew we would repeat the contest.
Who is the primary audience?
Reagan: Readers, especially those with families, looking for something to do starting on Memorial Day weekend.
How did readers find out about it?
Reagan: We started promoting it in the paper at the bottom of A-1 the Sunday before it started. Each day we ran a limerick that hinted at the nature of the contest and included a refer to the Web site where we ran seven video parodies of the famous line "Snakes, why'd it have to be snakes?" Those were the highest-viewed videos that week.
The contest began on a Friday in the entertainment section. We promoted it at the top of A-1 and it was the cover of the Weekend section.
Each day, the contest was promoted on A-1 and on the Jacksonville.com homepage. We also used Facebook and Digg to gather audience.
Who in the newsroom was involved in the creation of this?
Reagan: This was a group project and an important step in the convergence of the print and online staffs. Several print journalists got to use their newly learned multimedia skills.
Several members of the staff brainstormed and visited locations for the map. Assistant features editor Tom Szaroleta finalized the map locations, wrote the clues as limericks, wrote the quizzes, starred in the "parody videos" and oversaw the whole project.
Joe Black and Craig Sims built the site. Features designer Gary Mills shot and edited the video parodies with the help of video producer Kelly Jordan and multimedia specialist Jason Pratt.
Kyzandrha Z. Pratt built the treasure maps for both print and online and created the Flash component (and had a cameo in one video). Graphic artist Patrick Garvin created illustrations for the word game.
My job was basically to bug everyone about every detail along the way.
How did interactivity help to make this work?
Reagan: The whole game requires readers to be interactive, not just online but around their city. Each clue requires you to go to that place in the city to answer the question.
Readers used the newspaper or the Web to find their clues (on the Web the map is also interactive with audio of the clue), and then they go to the Web site to enter their clues. While they're there, they can play an Indiana Jones version of hangman, test their Indiana Jones trivia knowledge, watch videos or upload look-alike photos of themselves as Indiana Jones characters.
Daily and grand prize winners were announced in the print edition.
What sort of feedback did you receive from your audience and from others in the newsroom?
Reagan: Overwhelmingly good. Tom Szaroleta received many calls during the week from readers trying to get the answers.
The site had more than 22,600 visitors over the week. Hundreds of people tried to solve the puzzle each day with an average of 45 people with the correct answer each day. The videos averaged about 850 views each. The word game had more than 7,000 hits.
The winners were uniformly elated with the contest. I delivered several prizes and talked to them about their experiences. They told me how much fun it was to find the clues each day. Several of them reported seeing many others trying to solve the daily puzzle.
What were the important talents involved in producing this project?
Reagan: We had been doing some training in the last few months that paid off on this project. We sent a designer and a graphic artist to a Society for News Design Flash training workshop. Both of them used their new knowledge in the production of the videos and the interactive maps.
We recorded and edited audio and video. We built the site to automate the random selection of winners each day.
We gathered extensive knowledge of the Indiana Jones movies to come up with the list of locations, the trivia quizzes, etc. And Tom practiced incredible limerick-writing ability.
"
["author"]=>
string(10) "Sara Quinn"
["pubDate"]=>
string(29) "Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:46:05 GMT"
}
[7]=>
array(5) {
["title"]=>
string(51) "Documenting Darfur: A Photojournalist's Perspective"
["link"]=>
string(54) "http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=146831"
["description"]=>
string(14205) "A powerful photograph can be even more emotional when we hear the story of how it was made.
If it was taken in Darfur, where each of thousands of refugees has a story of tragedy to tell, the emotion grows exponentially.
In this edited interview, Chikwendiu talks about photographs taken during his first trip to Darfur, in 2004.
Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post
While some gather food, others shield themselves from the blazing sun at the Ouri Cassoni refugee camp just outside Baha'i, Chad.
Sara Quinn: How did you end up going to Darfur?
Jahi Chikwendiu: I may have shown some interest to our editors, Michel duCille and people like that.
The story started blowing up in terms of media coverage. We had an excellent correspondent based in Nairobi, Emily Wax, who started working on the story a lot. So I ended up plugging in with Emily and started finding out more about the story, what she was doing on the story, where it was headed. So that, when they were ready to send a photographer, I was already plugged into the story, so I was, like, the most logical choice to send.
I don't know if I conveyed this to the editors, but the issue was so close to me. I likened it to what happened to the Native Americans in the United States, I wanted to look into this modern genocide - this is genocide that's happening in our day.
I went twice. The first time, was a matter of following the route of the writer. She went to the border of Chad and Sudan. We decided to take the roundabout route, going to the border where a lot of refugees were spilling over from Sudan to Chad, working refugee camps along the border there. And then, hooking up with rebel factions - SLA, the Sudanese Liberation Army. And then going across the border into Sudan, into Darfur with them and telling the story through their perspectives.
That's what I did the first time, went through Chad and crossed the border illegally.
Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post
Mostly women and children gather for food hand-outs at Derech Camp for internally displaced Sudanese on the outskirts of the South Darfur town of Nyala, Sudan.
How many people do you estimate were in the first camp you saw?
Chikwendiu: The camp was so expansive that I never saw the whole camp. If I stood in the middle of it I could look in every direction and, as far as the eye could see, there were tents. I never made my own estimation of how many people were there ... These were like cities. You could see them start to function like cities or towns, where there would be a doctor's office and there would be little stores popping up. There would be little restaurants popping up inside these camps. I guess they had to function like that. The camps were huge.
Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post
A sandstorm sweeps by the temporary housing used by displaced Sudanese people, just across the border from Darfur.
When you first saw this huge dust storm on the landscape, how far away was it? What were you thinking at the time?
Chikwendiu: This is my first day in the camp. The camp, like I said, was huge ... I'm on the edge of the camp -- of course, I'm always looking for a different perspective to look at things. So I'm standing on this water truck that had pulled up to the edge of the camp. And I'm shooting the camp. I started noticing people's attention go to an area behind the camp ... I didn't even know what it was.
... So maybe within a few minutes I figured I'd better get off of this truck. I take off running, and within seconds, wham! I just get hit by this wall of wind, and the sand is moving so hard that it's kind of slicing against you.
I just remember looking for shelter. I saw these guys walking and I saw them jump in a tent. So I just jumped in the tent with them. They seemed OK with my being there, because we started giving each other the thumbs up.
I was just sitting there waiting for ... hoping, praying that I wouldn't be impaled by something flying. So then, I got myself together. I had a few handkerchiefs that I wrapped around my camera and my face. I fashioned a camera hood out of my handkerchiefs. I started walking around, looking through my camera. Not even taking pictures. Because it was the only way that I could see. The sand was just slicing at my eyes. So, for a while after that, my vision was blurry where the sand had just scarred my eye lenses.
Then, I thought, OK, I need to function. I need to be documenting what's going on. I started to walk around, looking for situations under the hood. Just taking snaps.
Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post
Women flee the force of a massive sandstorm at the Ouri Cassoni refugee camp just outside Baha'i, Chad, in the NE part of the country.
Then I took shelter in a bigger tent, where there were a lot of women gathered. I think it was a feeding center tent where there were maybe 20, 30 women, maybe more. We're all crouched down and ... I'm taking pictures of people huddled. And then, this tent just blows away and everybody scatters.
Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post
An elder Sudanese refugee gathers herself after a huge sandstorm subsides at the Ouri Cassoni refugee camp just outside Baha'i, Chad.
What did you see in the aftermath of the storm?
Chikwendiu: It was completely calm! If everything wasn't the orange tint of the sand, you wouldn't have known that a sandstorm just blew through.
I was just looking around at people and how, you know, sand was just caked on their faces and in their clothes.
Then, I saw this lady who -- clearly from her face and her hands, she's an older lady -- who had these glasses on where sand was just caked in the glasses. All except for this one little spot where she took her finger and kind of made a clearing for her to see.
So, that's when I snapped this face, within a few minutes after the storm was gone.
With so many stories of tragedy in the camps, how did you ultimately decide where to focus?
Chikwendiu: Every case was extreme, so I looked for extremities within the extreme. Women would have babies with them in the clinics. I would look for a young mother there, and then I would ask about her family. That's when the stories became even more tragic than just some of the people in the general population.
Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post
A Sudanese mother allows her child to suckle her milkless breasts at the Ouri Cassoni refugee camp just outside Baha'i, Chad. Because of the trauma suffered when her village was attacked, she no longer can provide milk for her young child.
Can you tell me about your meeting with the young woman whose face was covered by the veil?
Chikwendiu: She was really young. She was in her early twenties. I asked her to describe her story ... She's holding this baby under her veil. And through the veil, I can see the silhouette of her nursing the baby. So, I took a lot of photos before I approached her. But I'm sure she saw me taking pictures, she just went about her business.
Then, when I finally approached her, she started to talk about her and her baby and nursing. That's when she tells me that she's nursing but she has no milk. And she thinks that she doesn't have any milk because of the trauma she experienced. Having her whole village bombed in the middle of the night. And having so many people killed in front of her face and having to scatter from her village.
So, here's this mother. She's nursing with no milk. So, her breasts then become, instead of feeding tools, they become just pacifiers.
Why are you a photojournalist who wants and needs to be in places like this?
Chikwendiu: For some reason, since I was young, I had this strong sense of right and wrong -- even though I didn't always live by it. I've done my wrong. But I had a strong sense of justice and injustice.
Being African American, too. I remember being in the eighth-grade, running out of the class - crying, bawling - when I saw the history of Africans in the U.S.
I remember the teacher. It was one of my favorite teachers, one of my favorite teachers still ... I remember her following me out of class and comforting me. She told me, "This is the truth. This is what happened. You can't run from it." So from then on, I started not running from it, but being one of the people who show other people the truth. Because only from the truth can we get to a better place.
There are a lot of good things about the world, but there are some bad things going on that aren't necessary. It has been, I felt like, a mission that's bigger than me, to tell these stories. And even though people know about them, they don't know about them enough. They have to see them. "
["author"]=>
string(10) "Sara Quinn"
["pubDate"]=>
string(29) "Thu, 17 Jul 2008 13:36:07 GMT"
}
[8]=>
array(5) {
["title"]=>
string(51) "Multimedia Database Collects Interactive Narratives"
["link"]=>
string(54) "http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=146471"
["description"]=>
string(12339) "
Relaunched this week, the new, improved and spit-shined Interactive Narratives 2.0 is a showcase for what's possible in multimedia storytelling.
The site offers lots of new features, including an invitation for journalists to self-submit multimedia projects and to join a conversation about the work. Andrew DeVigal, multimedia editor at The New York Times, created the site in 2003 and partnered with the Online News Association to get this version off the ground.
"It's an opportunity to see the wide range of brilliant work that's produced out there," said DeVigal, "not just in the big news organizations, but also in the small and medium-sized organizations -- as well as by the independent journalists who are doing some phenomenal work."
In just a few days, the site has logged 80 new registered users. Forty multimedia projects have been submitted, and over 1,100 multimedia entries are in the database. In this edited interview, DeVigal shares what inspired the project and how journalists can best make use of it.
Sara Quinn: Where did the idea come from for the first incarnation of Interactive Narratives?
Andrew DeVigal: It stemmed from my doing a lot of presentations and developing teaching materials, both at Poynter and at conferences. I found myself referring to the same Web sites - or at least bookmarking the same Web sites or multimedia packages over and over. And in those days, I prepared all of my presentations in Macromedia Director. Crazy, I know. I wanted a browser-based presentation platform.
Ultimately, I wanted to create a database that stored all of these links in one place. Once I started collecting them I realized that other people might have the same use for them. So, I ended up working with Ervic Aquino of Stormline Media to make the database available for the world.
How did you select projects for your site?
DeVigal: Back in those days if it blew me away in terms of storytelling, I would rank that high on the list. If it impressed me in terms of its design and presentation, I would also rank it. And the third reason was if there was something innovative about it. Those were the criteria I used.
What's different about version 2.0?
DeVigal: The main thing is that I will no longer be the keeper of the database. I'm basically going to trust the community to be its own sort of watchdog of rich, deep packages of storytelling. I've relinquished the keys to the rest of the community so that they can submit, rank and comment on it.
It still falls under sort of the same criteria with the site ability to sort.
I'm also trusting that the community will rank them by giving them some sort of star value and comments. There will be a social networking aspect to identifying those storytelling packages that rise to a high caliber.
You can also sort the database now, by storytelling design and innovation. So if you really wanted to just sort through the highly ranked or the starred versions of anything, you can do that.
If someone wants to comment on a package, what are the options?
DeVigal: First, you have to register and then log in. That's one of the things that we do require. You can observe the community if you don't log in, but if you want to participate - to rate an entry or comment -- you actually have to register first.
Part of the registration that we ask for is to give your real name. We'll have some tolerance there. But if you are unidentified, we'll reserve the right to block you, or whatever. I think it creates a better community once you become responsible for your own comments and ratings. And the quality of entries and submissions need to remain high to keep Interactive Narratives relevant to the community.
Who can submit work to the site?
DeVigal: Once you become a member, you can submit your own entries. What I hope is that people will put in work that they have done themselves, or that has been done by their own organization.
You can also rate the entry based on storytelling, design and innovation. You can make comments. You can put the name of the organization and credits on the summary.
One of the important things I want to mention is that you can submit tags. It's organized based on tags. I'm hoping to leave this up to the community to regulate the tagging order.
On some entries, we've also allowed podcasting. You can actually associate an audio file for the podcast. The idea there is to actually hear the voices behind the producers. This time, instead of creating a blog of podcasts, the podcasts will be associated with the actual entries.
Is there anything else like this online? Anything that showcases content like this?
DeVigal: I think there are some really good bloggers out there that keep people up to date with what's happening. Interactive Narratives can't replace that, but rather I hope that it'll be a part of that conversation. It's one of the reasons you can also designate a Trackback (or URL) for each comment. So that you can extend your comments on your own blogs.
I also want to see Interactive Narratives become a way for people to look at all of the conversation that's happening and to digest all of that into a site that talks about the different types of media. I want it to become a companion to the conversation that's happening in blogs.
This is one of the reasons that I called it Interactive Narratives -- it's not just about photojournalism, video journalism or interactive graphics. It's not about the medium itself but rather all aspects of what multimedia can deliver. It's about how we interact with the journalism -- a way to look at narratives as a way to engage with the characters of the stories and sometimes, the journalists themselves.
How does this relate to blogs?
DeVigal: I also created a NetVibes Universe for Interactive Narratives. This is where I sort of congregate a lot of the blogs that I look into. It's a way to look at a lot of the conversation and what's being said.
If you visit the Universe, you'll notice that in that space, the conversation is divided up by media types on the top tabs. So, in that space, you can navigate to the tab that most resonates with your area of expertise: video, photo, graphics, Academia and so on.
In them, you'll find the blogs that look at Web 2.0 or Web journalism, video journalism, photojournalism, interactive graphics, blogs dedicated to Academia and also publications that have their own blogs. It's a resource that kind of just aggregates it all together at once.
Who is your partner on Interactive Narratives 2.0? Who's doing the muscle work?
DeVigal: ONA -- The Online News Association was generous enough to put in a few bills to at least try to get it where it is today. It's really a partnership in the sense that they're an organization that's really thinking about how the industry can evolve. It's been great to be a part of that. That's why the co-branding is happening.
In terms of the back-end development, I'm still working closely with my previous technical whiz and friend Ervic Aquino of Stormline Media. Also, my brother Angelo DeVigal (yes, you guessed it, my brother and business partner) was the chief designer and finally, but not least, Jason Speck was the visual technologist who crafted the CSS and interaction design. Jason also created the very handy bookmarklet that you can drag to your browser from the submit page. With it, you can simply hit a single button to submit an entry to Interactive Narratives.
That's the team. But, again, the hope and the goal is that this site becomes relatively self-sufficient. I'm also going to designate a few super-users -- people who are very involved in the industry to help maintain the quality. There's going to be some oversight on the entries and comments, again, to keep the relevance to the community high.
So, who is your primary audience for the site?
DeVigal: Well, I'm hoping it's going to be journalists.
A year ago, or two years ago, I would have said multimedia journalists. But I think the description of multimedia is going to be pretty natural for any journalist that's coming into the field now. They have to be pretty capable of telling their stories in multiple ways.
This is for journalists interested in how to tell stories in various forms of narrative, such as photojournalism, video, audio, interactive graphics. Hopefully, they'll find benefit in showcasing great multimedia work that's happening in the industry. As well as finding inspiration from the amazing work that's being produced out there from large, medium and small organizations as well as the independents.
"
["author"]=>
string(10) "Sara Quinn"
["pubDate"]=>
string(28) "Wed, 9 Jul 2008 16:11:15 GMT"
}
[9]=>
array(5) {
["title"]=>
string(45) "Writing Headlines for Print: Poetry in Notion"
["link"]=>
string(54) "http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=146201"
["description"]=>
string(3634) "A great headline for the Web? It's direct, to-the-point and easily found by search engines because it has lots of specific words, names and local references that news aggregators will find.
If the story is about the dangers of salmonella in tomatoes in California, by golly, the headline probably needs to have "California," "bacteria" and "tomatoes" in it. Maybe "salmonella," too.
Specificity is the key to writing headlines online because the words have to work on their own in the searchable, digital environment.
ABOUT ACES
The American Copy Editors Society has eight regional chapters and six student chapters, in addition to the national group. Their next conference will be in Minneapolis at the end of April 2009.
And writing headlines for print? Has that art been lost in the race to the Web? Hardly. Thousands of headlines are written for print each day in U.S. newspapers alone -- the best ones capturing a reader's imagination and attention in just a few words. The print environment is more poetic.
Here's a bit of praise for the ongoing craft of writing for print, where the subtlety and nuance of a headline has a long and happy marriage to the context of the surrounding page.
In this video interview, Chris Wienandt, president of the American Copy Editors Society (ACES), talks about a few of his favorite headlines and how you can create poetry with just a few words.
His basic advice? "Dont worry about the head count," Wienandt said. "Always ask yourself, 'What is this story really about?' Find the nut graph and begin to craft it in headline-ese. Then focus on making it more and more succinct."
"Think of powerful verbs, powerful nouns, powerful adjectives that will make the headline a memorable one in the brief moment that the reader will see it."
Note: If you're receiving this via e-mail newsletter and have trouble viewing the video, please use the video player on the Poynter Online article. "
["author"]=>
string(10) "Sara Quinn"
["pubDate"]=>
string(28) "Thu, 3 Jul 2008 21:50:47 GMT"
}
}
Array
(
[0] => Array
(
[title] => Next Generation of Visual Thinkers is Drawing the Future of Journalism
[link] => http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=149966
[description] => Walk through one of Karl Gude's information graphics classes at Michigan State and you'll likely find students who want to be writers, not visual journalists.
Karl Gude, who teaches infographics at Michigan State University top, was interviewed by George Rorick, a pioneer in the visual journalism world.
Yet their graphics work is making it into the local paper. They're drawing self-portraits, learning to use color and typography, diving into visual reporting for breaking news and working with software programs like Illustrator, Photoshop and 3D rendering programs. They're analyzing data, trying their hand at GIS mapping and more.
And for some, Gude's classes are igniting a passion for visual journalism that will take them into the ranks of graphics reporter or artist. At the very least, they'll be well equipped with an appreciation for what visuals can do for storytelling.
College journalism programs around the country are beginning to press the importance of visual and multimedia thinking.
Gude spent more than a decade at Newsweek, first as an artist, then as graphics director. Now, he's back at school, in his second year of teaching at Michigan State.
"I see information graphics as a convergence - a combination of four things. One of them is content, said Gude, "strong information. Another one is art and design. You have to be pretty good at that stuff. Another is technology. And finally, critical thinking. That's what journalism is all about," he said.
Retired Poynter faculty member George Rorick talked with Gude about what he's teaching, how a program that attracts mostly writing students is developing into new visual directions and how those skills can help journalism.
I listened in. Here's the edited interview.
George Rorick: Who are your students, Karl? Are most of them writers? Visual journalists? Are they interested in graphics? Multimedia?
Karl Gude: I've been teaching for two years now at Michigan State in the School of Journalism. One of the things I have been most excited about, and also a little bit frustrated about, is that the majority of the students in the journalism program tend to want to be writers and editors.
These people generally have word talent and word skills, but very little visual skills.
Basically, I'm spending half the semester just getting these writing kids up to speed on basic design and illustration concepts that are necessary for them to be able to visualize data.
Only then are we really starting to get into visualizing content. Thankfully, they've taken classes before me on research and content gathering. So they know how to do an interview and pick up the phone and look on the Internet.
Created in Gude's class by graduate student Gordon Shetler, this graphic was published in the Lansing State Journal.
So, you basically have two groups visual and non-visual, right? But you also have some graphics people who are naturally there because they are interested in drawing and design, right?
Gude: Not so much. The students who come into journalism ... by the time they're juniors - they've basically, maybe taken one design class from one of the other instructors - News Design, like for page layout, not infographics. And they start to say, "Gee, this is fun." But they entered the program in the beginning because they wanted to be writers.
There really is not a lot of recruitment into our program, yet, for kids in high school that do design. They tend to want to go to the art school down the road, the Kresge Art Center.
We have some excellent design instructors here in our college. There's Cheryl Pell, there's Darcy Green. They teach wonderful design courses. Any students who've taken their courses and then come into my class, they're always the best in the class. But even still, they're not students who wanted to be designers since they were in high school.
You do have the occasional student who everyone talks about having a "natural talent" for this design stuff. We've had some amazing designers come out of our school, only because that skill was recognized. It may not have been their original interest for coming into the program.
At the University, we're starting to collaborate with the art college. The students over at the Art Center can now start to take classes over in our college - the College of Communication Arts and Sciences. We can also send our students over there, to take design courses. It's just beginning to happen.
By Fall of 2009, I should be getting juniors -- students who have gone through the entire design program at the Art Center. I can't wait to get those kids!
What kind of response are you getting from your students? If they've come into the program to become better writers, how do they react? Do they have to take your course to graduate?
Gude: No, they don't. I'm happy to say that my courses have become extremely popular. They fill up so fast. Students are recognizing that this is an exciting thing to do.
Why do you think they like it?
Gude: Well, people are born visual. If you ask a bunch of kindergartners "How many of you in this class are artists?" Every kid's hand is going to go up, every one of them. If you ask a bunch of 12-year-olds (if they are) artists, not many hands are going to go up. They've been shamed into being told that they're not very good at drawing or visualizing. They become shy about it.
But, in my classes, already, most of them are not considered visual people. They don't know how to draw. But they're in there to see what all of the buzz is about. We have a lot of fun and that word is getting around.
One class project involves visual reporting and the creation of a graphic about an on-campus "robbery.
What sort of projects are you doing?
Gude: To teach mapping, we have a campus-wide treasure hunt. They have to hide something and then do diagrams on how to find it - without words. And then, everybody switches maps and it's a big race to go find the treasure.
To teach breaking news graphics, for four semesters now, I've convinced the person who's in the campus coffee shop to pretend that the store was robbed over the weekend, and that they were the one who was there.
So, I go up and I say, "I've just discovered that Sparty's (the name of the shop) was robbed over the weekend! And, oh, my god! The person who was on duty then is there now - and is willing to talk with us for 10 minutes. So we can go down and interview that person about exactly what happened."
Then, we do a big graphic on what they say. I don't even know what they're going to say.
What are the results? What kind of graphics have you been getting out of these classes?
Gude: The good news is that there have been graphics that have been pretty good. And, surprisingly, it's not always from the better designers. One graphic is being published this very day in the Lansing State Journal, which is our local paper. The very first semester I taught, I talked to the managing editor - it's a nice, good paper.
I know. I used to work there. For 10 years!
Gude: Of course you did! That's right! I totally forgot you were a total Lansing guy, George!
So, one assignment is to find something that is of local interest to the Lansing area, that the Journal might want to publish. They're wonderful over there. They agreed to consider all of the pages and graphics that we do, for publication.
I think it's interesting that you said that some of your best graphics were being done by "non-visual" people. Tell me more about that.
Gude: The one being published today is on turf, you know, like the football field. (It was done by a) grad student who is more on the science side of journalism. He had never made a graphic before. I was pretty blown away by what he did.
A lot of people who can draw well think, "all I have to do is draw this well and it's going to be fantastic." But, it has to be based on content and good information.
Gude: Well, the basics that I teach are that, if they can trace an image, or use photography, then it's just a question of organizing the graphic.
You just can't have a ton of content and know how to design and use technology without having the ability to analyze the data and interpret it visually for the reader. Or to edit it down. That takes some serious critical thinking. That's what journalism is all about.
All design really is is making order out of chaos. So, if you have all of these elements, like photos and text and maps and drawings and charts - it all has to be packaged.
You know, you use a grid; you have this logical flow of information from top to bottom. You can teach these mechanical things - the use of color, typographic hierarchies - but some people just get it. And some people don't get it.
Students in the infographics class created self-portraits for their MySpace pages. Left is David Ingold, right is Summi Ghambir.
I like to hear about the way you're distributing the work - getting it into the newspaper. What other sorts of projects do they do?
Gude: My first semester, I had them draw fish, to learn how to use the drawing software. I stole Terence Oliver's idea from Ohio University. The fish came out really nice, but I could tell the students' hearts weren't really in it.
One project for learning to use drawing software involved drawing a fish.
Next semester, I said, "OK, you're drawing a self-portrait for your MySpace page!"
Wow.
Gude: And I said "It's a portrait of you, so you're going to want this to rock and roll."
One of these "non-visual" people said they spent four hours, just drawing the mouth. It's a hell of a mouth, I gotta tell you.
Let's talk more about technology.
Gude: You need to be able to use a lot of technologies to tell your story. Maybe you want to use slides online. Maybe you want to edit a video. Maybe you need to do some GIS data mapping to locate something. Maybe it needs to be slightly 3D, for some reason. Or use Flash or Dreamweaver.
News organizations are expecting to see more and more ability with technology from these students.
All of these technologies coming together, people are calling it convergence. So, the reporter who normally would go out on an interview with a pad of paper and a pen can no longer just sit there with a paper and a pen. They've also got to know how to take a little video camera along, prop it up on a little stand and videotape that guy being interviewed. Because their Web site's going to expect to be able to upload that for the Web. Maybe they'll even have to know how to edit that video.
Our students are learning how to edit video and all sorts of stuff.
What is the outlook that students have for the future of the business? Are they optimistic? Pessimistic?
Gude: That's a really good question, George. As adults, we're all sort of terrified for the future of journalism. There's so much soul-searching by people already in the industry.
I'm teaching at a camp for high school journalism students this week. They're taught by professionals and academics. There are 500-plus students at the university this week, all of them wanting to be journalists. I am really encouraged by that kind of turnout.
These kids -- their understanding that newspapers are going away someday - the idea that a newspaper with 18-hour-old news is going to be source for news -- that's not going to be very real for very long.
What we're trying to create are these critical thinkers with all of these skills so that they can go into whatever direction journalism decides to take them. You know, flexibility ... light on their feet.
They're excited about it?
Gude: I think they are. I think that most of them think that there are still enough jobs out there. They can either get a job on the Web side of things, or on the paper side of things. A lot of students will stay here in Michigan. They'll work at weekly newspapers. They will work at small papers or mid-sized papers. There are some who want to work at The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.
I've never seen a single student have doubts about it. Not as a junior or a senior. Sophomores might think about other paths - advertising. I tell them, if you want to study advertising, great. But there is a lot of competition for advertising. Every school cranks out a lot of advertising students.
There's competition for a journalist in writing jobs, too. How many writers do you think are knocking on the door of The New York Times? A lot. How many infographics people are knocking on the door at The New York Times? Not many.
I wish I was 20 years old again, really. I think there is tremendous opportunity out there for visual journalists, for people who can combine the writing, visual, reporting and technology skills.
Gude: There's not only a future in visual journalism. One of the things that I've realized is that the skills that people are learning in my class - how to make information graphics, or how to visualize data in a variety of ways - statistical, geographical, diagrammatical - these are skills that can be applied to other industries, too.
It's a visual world.
[author] => Sara Quinn
[pubDate] => Thu, 4 Sep 2008 22:11:04 GMT
)
[1] => Array
(
[title] => NYT Columnist Uses Visual Evidence to Support Persuasive Arguments
[link] => http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=149462
[description] =>
Charles Blow is good at interpreting data.
That's not surprising for a man whose career as a visual journalist has taken him to the newsrooms of The Detroit News, The New York Times and most recently at National GeographicMagazine.
The difference between the news graphics he created in those venerable newsrooms and what he's creating now, back again at the Times, is a matter of opinion his own opinion. As their first-ever visual Op-Ed columnist, Blow ferrets out interesting data as the starting point and ultimate support for editorial opinion.
Visual Op-Ed columnist for the New York Times Charles Blow, top, was interviewed by George Rorick, a pioneer in the visual journalism world.
His column appears in the Times every other Saturday.
"When I find a compelling topic one that I have something to say about and there's some interesting visual hook, then that is a column possibility," Blow said in a telephone interview with another visual journalist, retired Poynter faculty George Rorick.
I had the pleasure of eavesdropping on their conversation about the column, an interesting meeting of the minds between two great visual thinkers. In addition to the column, Blow recently launched a new blog called By the Numbers, a forum on the Times' site to showcase many different forms of visual expression. Here is the edited interview.
George Rorick: What you're doing is so unusual. Can you describe your position?
Charles Blow: We call it a visual columnist. I'm not exactly sure if that's the proper description. But, what I'm doing is using visual evidence to support arguments in persuasive essay. I use charts and maps and diagrams to support my positions.
What inspired you to do this? What are you hoping to accomplish with this?
Blow: The Times had used Op charts which were charts that appeared on the Op Ed page for quite some time. There are still some produced now, by contributors. From the first time I saw it, I thought it was a great idea that you could loosen up the rigors and the confines of data from the news pages, where you have to be completely objective and answer every possible question in the data. To have a looser interpretation of the data and be able to say, "This data has holes, and that's OK. Here are what the holes are, but there is still value in it, in some ways."
There is a lot of freedom that being able to be subjective allows. I thought that would be fantastic to see how far we could go using data and charts to kind of support editorial decisions and opinion.
I find it a fascinating kind of exercise because there's a certain part of data that is completely objective the numbers are what they are, if they're true or false. There's a kind of cut and dried sensibility there. And it's an interesting balance in trying to mix that and marry it and not dilute or corrupt the data, but at the same time, use it as a support mechanism. I like trying to strike that balance.
Is there any one article that has really caught fire? That you've gotten a lot of feedback on?
Blow: Well, my most recent article got somewhere above 500 e-mails. And they still trickle in.
It's always very interesting. Very different from my previous days here (at the Times) in the graphics department in the newsroom, and also at National Geographic where you rarely receive any mail. There, if you got two or three e-mails a week, that was quite a bit, and that was for the entire department.
When I publish now, the day I publish if I wait until noon that day to check my e-mail, there are a hundred, 200, sometimes 300 e-mails. This time, there were 500 by the time I came to work on Monday.
It's overwhelming, actually, to know that people are so passionate about the subjects that you cover. And they have a lot of very interesting things to say. Obviously, not everybody agrees with you. But that's not the point. The point is that readers are engaging in the work and giving you feedback on how they receive it.
What was this column about?
Blow: In that particular case, it was a column called Racism and the Race. It explored the role of racism and how it could be playing in how the poll numbers are reading and how it could work out to be an advantage for John McCain in November.
I was bracing for some kind of a backlash on that piece. But, most of the people who responded were readers who identified themselves as white and who were basically confessing that they also knew people who refused to vote for Obama simply because he is black and those people would not say it in public.
It was compelling to read those e-mails. But also the idea that people kind of latch on to you as a personality. And that they somehow feel connected to your work and your column, not just as part of The New York Times.
That was interesting that people were feeling comfortable and wanted to share their experiences.
A column that I read that I really like, just FYI, is the one titled Why is Mom in Rehab?
Blow: In fact, I thought that I would get more mail from that story. And that was the one that had the least amount of response from readers.
It's interesting that you bring it up, because it was the most visually ambitious and data rich of all of the pieces.
And what I found is that doesn't necessarily work with my readers. In fact, the more simple the charting, the more they kind of respond to the piece.
They want provocative, interesting points made in a strong way, and simply. And so, I've kind of become less visually ambitious in the column, as a result of this job. I think I'm becoming less visual all around. Because I know, from my experiences so far, that's not what my readers are responding to.
They want you to make a strong point and give them that in a visual nugget that they can digest right away and kind of ruminate on why I find it interesting.
That makes sense, too. A lot of graphics are overdone. If you can make it so that you can get right to the point, that's so important. I think what you're doing will help visual journalists in the long run to get a better feeling for what they need to do.
Who do you answer to in your position? Are you very independent?
Blow: Very, very, very independent. Almost frighteningly so. No one's asking what I'm going to write. I assume that there is veto power if something is completely out of bounds, but beyond that, there is very little oversight. You're pretty much a sovereign nation as an Op Ed columnist. That obviously has its benefits, but it also means that you have a lot of responsibility to come up with something that's solid and meaningful to the readers.
How do you come up with your topics? Are you in the newsroom on a daily basis?
Blow: No, not at all. I'm on the thirteenth floor. The newsroom is on the second, third and fourth floors. I rarely go down, unless I want to talk to someone about data, like maybe to the polling people, they're in the newsroom. I use a lot of polls in my column, so I'm at their desk quite a bit, but not on a daily basis. I'm very much detached from the news cycle and that process.
I think where you were going with the question is that No. I'm not overhearing the buzz of the newsroom and soaking up what might be newsy.
Right.
Blow: And, in fact, I miss some of that. But the way that I come up with topics is that, I'm reading all of the time. The television is on in my office, all of the time on news stations.
And I'm trying plug into the cultural zeitgeist and what's relevant in the moment. And develop ideas based on that always running through the prism of what is my opinion about these things that are happening? And how do I make that something that readers might care about?
So, I'm having ideas all of the time. The question becomes, is there some visual hook to support that argument? That cancels out quite a few ideas.
When I find a compelling topic one that I have something to say about and there's some interesting visual hook, then that is a column possibility.
When you have a story that's really compelling, but there's no visual merit, what do you do with it?
Blow: I just pass it. There are nine other columnists at the Times. And to a large degree, we're writing about some of the same subjects. And I feel like, someone will touch it, if I don't offer my opinion about that.
But, as I develop an audience, my readers really look to me to bring something extra, not just the opinion. They look for the visual hook. They want to be shown something in a different way. And I think I owe it to them not to just fall back into a default position. ... The way my job is described and set up is to offer that extra visual hook.
You mentioned your audience. Who are they?
Blow: It's hard to know. Most of the e-mails don't come with the titles or descriptions of who the people are. But the kinds of comments that they offer are very much on the thesis of the essay. Rarely do I get any e-mail about the visual components.
They never seem to discuss the merits of the visual. They may discuss the content of the visual, and say, "This is an interesting point, glad somebody made it," or "I really don't agree with your point here. You should look at something else." But in this context, they don't separate the visual from column in the way that my experience was both at the Times, before, and at National Geographic. There, the visual seemed to be sort of separate thing from the authorship of the piece. Obviously, it was a separate thing from the authorship of the piece. The author wrote about something and there was an accompanying visual.
In this case, they know that it's all me. And so they don't separate it out as a different talking point.
Are you working with a staff, or do you create everything on your own?
Blow: It's mostly me, but I do have a fantastic assistant. Her name is Hilary Howard. She helps with fact checking and chasing down numbers and facts and what have you.
Do you miss being in a newsroom?
Blow: A little, but not much. I do like the idea that there are tons of newsy ideas swirling around. And you can overhear things that can spark something in you and make you chase another story, or another graphic possibility.
But you prefer to read and think and come up with your own ideas?
Blow: Well, I've developed that muscle, being in this job.
And also, there's a kind of struggle that happens in the newsroom with visual people that a lot of people have struggled with, and many people have done a good job to change writers' and editors' opinions of the role of visuals in the newsroom, but that is a continuing fight. And, quite frankly, I enjoy not having to have to fight it anymore.
In this role, it's not even a conversation.
From my experience, that would have to be a tremendous relief!
Blow: Yes.
You sound like you feel very good about what you're doing now.
Blow: I love it. I think it's the best job I've ever had in my life.
Is there anything else you'd like to tell people about in this interview?
Blow: My blog just started. I will have this blog on the Opinion part of the Web site. It's called By the Numbers.
What I'm doing is trying to provide a forum for discussion of all things statistical that can and are being (shared) through visual expressions. But also to provide something of a community for people to submit things. And it's not just for people who do charts, maps and diagrams but people who do short films, futurists, people who solve problems through architecture and product design anyone with an interesting visual idea or concept. We're going to try to highlight it in this space.
You want people to send visual examples to you. Is that right?
Blow: Exactly.
[author] => Sara Quinn
[pubDate] => Thu, 28 Aug 2008 14:24:22 GMT
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[2] => Array
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[title] => Varied Visual Perspectives of the Denver DNC
[link] => http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=149516
[description] => A city that hosts an event as big as a political convention deserves a bit of levity. As many as 50,000 people are estimated to be wandering the streets of Denver, counting politicians, delegates, media-types and the merely curious. Jeepers.
The Rocky Mountain News posted DNC trivia on its site and this 360 degree panoramic view of the convention floor by photojournalist Tracy Trumbull. It might leave you dizzy, but a little happy, too.
The Denver Post published this playful graphic outline of the road to the convention. DNCtimeline
Jeff Goertzen, graphics director at the Post said the way the text was crafted "pretty much oozed with style and illustrative opportunities." The graphic was written and researched by Barry Osborne and Kevin Dale. Illustrator Andrew Lucas sketched out ideas for the most interesting or whimsical events on the timeline.
"The difficult part for Andrew was to come up with a style that was not too goofy, but more of a likeness of each of the figures. We wanted it to be fun, but not silly," said Goertzen.
[author] => Sara Quinn
[pubDate] => Wed, 27 Aug 2008 22:38:20 GMT
)
[3] => Array
(
[title] => Salt Lake Tribune's 'SOS' Saves Readers from Jumpy Newspapers
[link] => http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=148826
[description] =>
Though it may take awhile before everyone in the newsroom speaks the same language, the act of giving a name to a form helps us come to agreement on what works, what we're comfortable creating and what we know how to execute. One such new form at The Salt Lake Tribune is called the SOS, or "story on a story."
The SOS is a way of tightly editing the information that appears on a section front -- basically eliminating the ever-cumbersome jump, so that there is always a complete and containable thought on the cover.
The "story on a story" format on the Salt Lake Tribune's section fronts is a containable element that sets up a full story inside the paper. In this example, readers get a quick sense of the history and possible future of the cost of oil.
I talked with Josh Awtry, AME for Niche Publications, Online and Presentation at the Salt Lake Tribune, about the SOS and how it works.
"The way that I couch it to reporters is, youre going to get three inches of type out there, one way or another," said Awtry. "This lets you control exactly what you want to say with those three inches -- and it still lets you have your narrative."
Sara Quinn: How is the SOS format different than what you'd done in the past?
Josh Awtry: This has been a big cultural change in our newsroom. In the past, if it didn't have a headline, subhead, byline and narrative, it didn't count. We had a very templated approach to 1A -- we had four story starts out there that jumped.
Convincing people that this three inches of type -- the SOS -- was different from their 3.4 inches of type was a hurdle. I'm pretty happy to say it's a hurdle that we've mostly overcome. ... Over the past few months here, it's been a huge sea change.
When we go to our new redesign later this year, the better part of the front page will be made up of these containable elements.
How did you introduce the SOS?
Awtry: We started by going really simple. Basically, we amped up the stand-alone photo formula. First, it was making the corollary to "Hey, it's just like a stand-alone photo - here's your photo, here's two-and-a-half inches of type, teasing to the story."
What would you say the benefit of this story form is to the reader?
Awtry: We know that people follow jumps if the story is interesting enough. My whole caveat is, why gamble on that? Why gamble on whether or not they're going to make that jump? Let's give people a lot of choices. Let's answer readers' questions directly. Let's give them a complete thought.
So, in the end, the benefit is that it caters to both types of readers. It caters to the readers who want to spend 10 seconds and then move on with their lives. Likewise, a reader can go into page A9 and there's your wonderful, anecdotal lead ... about half of which would have made it onto the cover before it jumped mid-sentence. That's for your core reader and we're not giving anybody any less in that sense.
That's a good articulation of the way people read. Does the SOS have a different look? What do readers see that sets it apart?
Awtry: We developed a unique typography for anything that held to the front. But it was still very much relegated to the "tease" category at that point, and not the real informational category.
To start out, the reporters and editors were writing these story summaries. And then, we wanted to get a little more advanced with it -- to create a hold to the front lead-in with three questions and three answers, that kind of approach.
What are some of the challenges you faced in getting people to accept and embrace this new format?
Awtry: In the end, I just started to do it, which is not an approach that I endorse or recommend. But, where were at this point ... it was the place we needed to start. People needed to see what it should look like, where to start.
I was very loath to give somebody an SOS template, because, the next thing you know -- every SOS would look the same. And, a year from now, that one form would become part of the language. Then, if you want to change it, it takes another act of Congress.
How do you determine which stories get this treatment?
Awtry: Let's say the business editor has this great story and he wants to blow it out on the business cover. And someone on the senior management staff says "That story really belongs on 1A." But in reality, it would probably be on the bottom of 1A.
For me, this is a way to couch it and say, "Look everybody wins. You can have your cake and eat it too. Because on 1A, we can do an SOS, but it won't preclude being able to blow out the story with all of the photos and graphics and the approaches you want to take on the business cover."
Would you say it takes a lot of constant, daily communication to do it well?
Awtry: I don't want to overstate this and make it come off like we are reinventing the wheel, because papers have been doing this for a long time. But, for us, the big change has been the history of it.
At a lot of papers, it's like ... get to the point, get to the point. Quit with the throat clearing anecdotal lead and just give me the nut graph, because it's not going to make the jump. People can deride me for trying to kill long form journalism, but this is being done to support it.
I think the personality-laden, anecdotal leads, filled with emotion and energy shouldn't be spiked, just because they're going to jump mid-thought.
That's a great way to put it. You're not killing long form narrative, what you're doing is putting an end to an old production style that led to things missing the point and not jumping where you wanted them to.
A recent centerpiece in the Tribune took the form of a centerpiece.
Awtry: The trick in doing this, I think, is training the reporters to see that it's not a tease to the story, in a traditional sense. It's the nut graph. It's the best information.
How does the SOS translate to the Web?
Awtry: That's why it has been so easy to sell this. What do you get on the Web? You get the headline and then a short tease. Then you click on it and you get the full story. It doesn't make you jump mid-thought.
But we usually rework the things we do for the Web. I'm looking at one right now where the headline says "Should we worry?" Then, what you see on the (printed) page is a dollar bill with George Washington's head ducking out of the way. I mean, you see the package, the context when it's in print. Online, you don't get the benefit of that.
We've got a really savvy online desk. They'll make the most of it. Sometimes, they'll keep the flavor of the thing, while making it work in a searchable way.
Are the SOS forms primarily on your front page, or do you use them on other section fronts, as well?
Awtry: For now, it's on the front page. We do it very routinely on the front page. Talk to me again in about three months and it will be on every section front.
[author] => Sara Quinn
[pubDate] => Mon, 18 Aug 2008 05:45:15 GMT
)
[4] => Array
(
[title] => Stepping Into Gallery Life, Visual Journalists Find Inspiration
[link] => http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=148205
[description] => What's a visual journalist to do when inspiration runs a little crispy and the old news business keeps churning out news bites for Jim Romenesko?
Shake it off and look for inspiration elsewhere -- maybe open a gallery and put on a show. That's what design consultant Ron Reason has done at his new contemporary art space, within(Reason), in Chicago. Starting Friday, the personal work of illustrator/designer Andrew Skwish will be shown there. Reason's original photography will also be on display.
Skwish and Reason have more creative energy than a newsroom artist hopped up on Red Bull. They photograph and paint any surface they can find - old LPs, printed publications, Polaroid photos and even a guitar. Any situation they run across in their travels might become fodder for a photographic series to be posted online. So I wanted to know what keeps them making their personal art and how that work differs from creative work for publication.
Ron Reason thinks of his gallery space as a larger than life news story, waiting to be designed. One of Andrew Skwish's illustrations has been turned into a mural so that gallery visitors can pose for photographs and "interact" with the art. "As his former art director," said Reason, "I can now tell Skwish: don't ever complain that I never run your art big enough!"
Sara Quinn: Hey, Ron. What made you take the leap to sign a lease on the gallery space?
Ron Reason: I decided late last year to explore the idea of office space for my redesign business. I had been mostly working out of the house and was itching for the stimulation of a real office, and interaction with people.
It was a coincidence that the space I liked the most was in a neighborhood, Pilsen, known as an emerging arts center for Chicago, and an office building that hosts a popular "2nd Fridays" gallery open house event. Essentially, anyone in the building can open their doors for gallery night. It was almost an accident that it happened this way, really.
Did you second-guess yourself, or just jump right in?
I sort of jumped right in but followed my gut also. I signed the lease, and the next day went on a two-month trip to Africa. Six weeks were [spent] working with two clients there; about two weeks were personal travel and photography.
This trip put a lot of creative ideas into my head about how to use my new office space and how to explore some personal interests in art and also philanthropy, At least three of my gallery shows this year will see proceeds going to charity.
When and why did you first start to create personal work, Skwish?
Artist Andrew Skwish paints on just about any surface. This piece, titled "Guitart" will be on display at a gallery show in Chicago starting Friday.
Andrew Skwish: I started doing what would be called my own work quite a few years ago, just as I had gotten out of college. I had studied business and was working as a paste up boy at a small newspaper to earn a little cash and was trying to impress a young woman. So I started doing little pieces and giving them as gifts. Then I started doing more and more, still trying to impress her. Eventually I wore her down, eventually she left me for a higher calling, but I found that I didn't need her to continue to create little pieces.
When and where are you most creative? Is it different for one type of work than another?
Reason: For die-hard work - whether newspaper stuff, or my own art and promotions for the gallery shows - I am most creative starting around 3 p.m. Here's why: I think my brain is hotwired from the first 6 or 7 years of my career, when I was on the night shift with the copy desk!
I'm convinced I still work best around dinnertime when the adrenaline and genetic memory of working for an 11 p.m. newspaper deadline kicks in.
For just ruminating about things - ideas for art or concepts for shows - I like to keep my brain humming during odd times, when I'm in a hotel or on a plane for my clients, or in the shower or at the gym during down time.
Skwish: After midnight. I will often try to get going sooner but it never works out that way. I think I need to believe that the rest of the word is asleep in order to get anything done. Once the clock strikes 12 I get going and work well through the night. It is pretty much that way for everything I do. I like to lounge away the day and work through the hours of darkness.
Which visual world is more challenging and which more rewarding and why?
An acrylic painted on an antique church shelf, "Victorian Sensations" is Andrew Skwish's favorite piece in the show.
Skwish: Both have their challenges and rewards. I have been working in the news industry for so long that the rewards don't have quite the same impact as they may have when I was 20 or so. Not that they aren't still there but there is a bit of "been there, done that" syndrome.
But I must say when an interesting, well-written story comes through (and what interested me 20 years ago is different from what interests me today) it makes me really want to try to get people to notice the story and read it. So if I can get that to happen, that is pretty rewarding.
That effort is often to reach the masses, while in my personal work I'm really not trying to reach anyone in particular. If only one person notices something in the work that makes them want to possess it or even to just spend time with it, then that is awfully satisfying. Even if that doesn't happen, the times when it is 2 a.m. and I am painting and I can hear my little boy breathing on the baby monitor, then that moment cannot be surpassed. Seriously.
Reason: The newspaper world is challenging, well, because of economic times, though I'm happy to say I'm busy enough for now. I've just completed the bulk of a project in Kenya and will gear up for continued work in Nigeria which is pretty darn exciting. I blog about that.
The art world is also extremely challenging financially. Let's just say, thank goodness for the day job -- but it's a part-time thing so I'm not too worried about it. Right now I'm having fun and telling stories and taking chances, which are all good things for people to try to do in anxious times.
In surprising new ways, it's rewarding to put together a show conceptually, work with new artists and people I've known a while from the industry like Andrew, and connect with people in real time and real space.
The gallery to me is like a 4-dimensional newspaper story - all four walls but also the ceiling and interior space can be used, as well as light, video, sound. It's daunting but lots of fun.
It's also been cool to connect the two worlds. In June I showed and sold photographs I took during my off-hours while on assignment in Kenya, which raised nearly $1,600 for arts programs and an after-school club for kids, as well as a new library there.
Attendants at the Emirates counter at Dubai International Airport wish Ron Reason's mother happy 70th birthday. This is one of a series of photographs Ron posted on his blog while working in Africa.
What one piece of work is your favorite - of your own and of each other's?
Skwish: I'm not sure if this one was part of any of Ron's shows, but I really loved his birthday wishes to his mom from his travels. I looked forward to seeing them and thought they were a nice and genuine way to express his affection in a time when he couldn't be home.
Of my work I have a fondness for one that is a yellow-haired lady (aka "Victorian Sensation"). It is a very simple piece and most people I've spoken to don't think too much of it, but maybe because of that, the unwanted child of the litter, I like it more. Plus it was while painting this one that the 2 a.m. moment occurred.
Reason's favorite is a photo he took of Reuters photographer Noor Khamis 'collecting string' for future stories about life in the Kibera area of Nairobi.
Reason: There's a photo I showed in my June exhibit, "Hope In a Hard Place," of Reuters photographer Noor Khamis 'collecting string' for future stories about life in the Kibera area of Nairobi.
I was inside a dark shack and noticed a local resident engaging Noor in a heated discussion about Kenyan politics. Of course Noor was shooting away but talking a good game, too. It was horrible lighting in some ways but forgiving in others. I just loved the moment it caught, and it also represents the gift of the amazing insider's tour of the area that I was given by Noor, made possible by my proximity to the area via my client, The Standard newspaper, for whom I was completing a redesign.
Of Skwish's work, for sure it's a piece that I call the 'Guitart!' It's a guitar that he painted for me a few years ago, front and back, with one of his elongated whimsical characters and lyrics from a French pop song. It's usually in my house and guests remark on it all the time - which is what good art or journalism should do, right? - but it will be part of our exhibit on Aug. 8.
[author] => Sara Quinn
[pubDate] => Fri, 8 Aug 2008 14:14:41 GMT
)
[5] => Array
(
[title] => A Year Later, "13 Seconds in August" Commemorates Bridge Collapse
[link] => http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=147779
[description] =>
Images in the introduction of "13 Seconds in August" are paired with audio of emergency calls during the Minneapolis bridge collapse.
Reading through the Minneapos Star Tribune's "13 Seconds in August" interactive project is like being a rescue worker or a reporter on the scene of last year's bridge collapse.
You can scroll through an aerial photograph of the bridge taken just hours after the accident, travel from car to car to learn what happened to each person unlucky enough to have been on the bridge that day.
With the one-year anniversary on Friday, readers still spend hours at a stretch with the site, trying to comprehend the whole event. Staffers have never stopped updating the site with the status of victims' recoveries. To date, the occupants of 78 of the 84 cars on the bridge have been identified.
Two things stand out: the massive job of tracking down details and the many different storytelling tools used in the interactive site. There are interviews with victims, transcripts of 911 recordings, photo galleries and the voices of many of the victims themselves in audio and video.
In this edited Q&A, lead designer Dave Braunger talks about design and management of the project and graphic artist and researcher Jane Friedmann talks about her never-ending task of updating the information as more is learned about the victims.
Sara Quinn: At what point did you decide to collect all of the information in an interactive site?
Braunger: The staff worked frantically to be able to turn as many pieces of information as we had into a working project.
Originally, the graphic wasn't a straight vertical photo for the paper version; it was more of a three-quarter shot of the bridge, not an aerial photograph. The print staff was trying to fill it in for a double truck. They were trying to get a really quick idea of profiles and fatalities and things like that.
Rhonda Prast and Jane and I sat down and just thought, "There's a good chance of getting everything. There's no reason why we have to stop with that for the online graphic. We don't have the same limitations as print for horizontal and vertical space. We can do anything we want to do online."
How were you able to track down all of the people on the bridge?
Friedmann: It wasn't easy. There were no official sources for that. It was an ongoing investigation, and then there were the privacy issues.
I just started going through the photos we had stored electronically. Some were taken by Star Tribune photographers and others were from the wire. I just looked for license plates. Then, we referenced those license plates for vehicle owners and called people.
I also looked on the Internet to try to find any references to the bridge. Like, "Oh, this is my mom and dad's car on the bridge." Anytime someone talked about who was near them on the bridge, I would get some clues. Like, "It was a man in a car by himself." Or "There were two women, both in their twenties. One had blonde hair."
It was a puzzle. And I just had to put all of the pieces together.
How did site change from initial sketches to the way it looks today?
Braunger: Originally, my idea of the layout was much more complex and visually complicated. After a while I started stripping the design visuals away and liked how the media really carried the stories.
As the design became more simplified, the power of the project really took over.
At one point, I had all of these plans that were very complicated. I wanted the overhead view to be mimicked with a side diagram, so you'd be able to see the entire span of the bridge. But I kept working on that and, at some point it just got yanked.
I thought, you know, the more crap I throw at this, the less impactful it is.
Simple typography, a simple box. Let the power of this straight vertical, aerial photo carry the design. A lot of people hadn't seen it before. It wasn't until you saw that photo that you really understood it.
Readers can access videos a written interviews with the victims. The site has been constantly updated with the status of survivors.
What is it about the interactivity that makes it work?
Braunger: The site is pure objectivity. There's no leading the viewer to anything. Everyone on the bridge has an equal amount of representation. And, that's both good and bad. There are some great stories in there that people really wanted to highlight.
But it just really worked out best to have this kind of flat, kind of scientific way of displaying all of it. Everyone is given equal coverage, equal opportunity to tell their story.
We didn't highlight which ones had video or not. Readers just went from story to story. It wasn't really about the media that we had, it was about the information that we had.
How would you describe the reader's experience?
Friedmann: I think the reader gets a sense of the community that unwillingly developed among complete strangers. The survivors had this immediate bond and interacted with each other while they were on the bridge. I think that interaction helps readers get a little bit better sense of what it was like to have been there.
Braunger: You get so addicted to seeing these videos, you have to watch them from beginning to end. It grabs you and readers will spend two hours looking at this stuff. It's not something that you can easily bookmark and come back to.
One victim is talking about where they were on the bridge, and they're referring to another car and then you see the other car and you think, let's see what these people have to say. It's this whole puzzle of seeing how all of these events are intertwined.
What sort of feedback have you gotten from readers?
Braunger: To actually keep a time capsule of where everyone was, what was going on -- people really responded to that. To hear, minute-by-minute, what happened to these people on the bridge, that's what we hear about most from readers.
Friedmann: It's been very positive. The most gratifying feedback has been from the survivors themselves. It's been somewhat of a cathartic process for them to go through survivors' stories. A lot of them say it's been really hard for them to hear these stories, but it made them feel less alone. They felt like there were others who could understand what they'd gone through.
The husband of one victim wrote to say that he had never seen anywhere else a photograph of his wife's car. He then finally understood how she had drowned.
We also had a lengthy thank you from a health care provider, one of the supervisors of emergency response. He said, so often he and his colleagues are not so forthcoming to media and wished the media would just go away. But now he understands how valuable it is to the community to have us there to help tell the story. He and his colleagues were also really appreciative of seeing the project.
Many of the profiles include photo galleries.
As this information was reported and gathered, how did you manage the workflow?
Braunger: The nature of this project is that the reporters are getting little bits of information over time. It would have been maddening for one person to have to add all of these little pieces as they came in.
So, it wasn't waiting for a designer to throw this stuff in. We had multiple people with access ... they can add content and remove it, edit it and copy edit it. Otherwise, the design becomes such a bottleneck.
It really is an archive. The project was designed as a Flash front end with a back end that is driven by XML files.
The project is actually split into two XML files that drive all of the information. One XML file is specifically for the videos. The second has all of the text and photo and gallery info as well as links to the videos.
Some people might say that you were able to do this just because you had a large staff. What do you think about that? Braunger: Right. Everyone looks at the news organization that's bigger and says, well we don't have the resources to do that. We say the same things around here sometimes.
But it's a matter of finding out how to do it with what you've got. You might have to scale something back, but there usually is a way. It just takes a lot of putting your nose to the grindstone.
I work with two very talented designers. Our Online Design Editor Jamie Hutt and my co-designer Jaime Chismar had great suggestions and ideas that are peppered throughout the project. We work very well together.
We were essentially given one hell of a puzzle. I mean the pieces that we got were great. Great reporting, great video, great audio, phenomenal photography. It really makes a designer's job pretty easy.
Each of these stories is very emotional. What was it like in the newsroom?
Friedmann: It was a real challenge for me to make that phone call and ask that person if they had been on the bridge.
When I did get hold of people, I wanted to make sure that they knew that I respected their privacy. If they weren't willing or able to talk with me, that was all right.
Braunger: Rhonda Prast, who was one of the reporters gathering the data, would refer to the victims on a first name basis. People in the newsroom knew the cast of characters, and they felt like they were just kind of climbing into their lives.
Rhonda would sometimes talk about these people by first name, or just by last name. And I would say, listen, I need a number. I just need to know which car you're talking about. Frankly, all of these stories are heartfelt. And there's 101 of them, so, I really couldn't deal with that until later.
The beginning intro to the project was the last thing that we did. And that really kind of sends chills up my spine. They did such a good job of bringing that together. That audio transcript is just spooky. That's as real as it can get.
Do you think that you will ever track down every person?
Friedmann: I don't know. I believe there will always be several that we don't ever find.
[author] => Sara Quinn
[pubDate] => Thu, 31 Jul 2008 20:59:13 GMT
)
[6] => Array
(
[title] => Contests, Pop Culture Draw Readers to Print & Online
[link] => http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=147341
[description] =>
Holy Web traffic, Batman! How can we get readers to go from print to online and back again? While we wait for the shipment of magic bullets, let's look at one strategy by The Florida Times-Union. The news staff there regularly whips up engaging print and interactive projects by tapping into their own love of pop culture.
A Web video gives a behind-the-scenes view of how the Times-Union created a photograph for coverage of a new Batman film.
They ramped up for the new Batman movie with a behind-the-scenes video about people getting into character and coverage from the midnight premiere. And "American Idol" fans already have what they need to prep for the auditions in Jacksonville in August.
In this Q&A, Denise Reagan, AME for Visuals, talks about what it took to create a scavenger hunt contest timed to the opening of another blockbuster movie.
Sara Quinn: Tell me about the film contest. How did it come about?
Denise Reagan: It was a seven-day citywide scavenger hunt that combined print and online. The contest was timed to the release of "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull."
This was the third time The Florida Times-Union and Jacksonville.com had done a scavenger hunt related to the release of a movie. The first two were smaller in scale. A desire to do more reader-interactive ventures led us to come up with a contest for this new film.
Clues sent readers to the Web site, where they found interactive features and videos that parodied scenes from the film.
Here's how it worked for "Indiana Jones": 1. A treasure map ran each day on Page 2 of our Life section and on Jacksonville.com/treasurequest. 2. Readers went to the area shown with an X on the map. 3. Readers used the accompanying limerick to find the day's clue. 4. Readers typed in the clue on Jacksonville.com by 8 p.m. each day to enter a random drawing for the day's prize. 5. For the grand prize, readers typed in all seven correct clues to enter the random drawing. 6. Daily winners were announced on the front page of the Times-Union each day. The grand prize winner was announced on the front of the Life section.
Sets of four movie passes were given as daily prizes in addition to a different prize each day: an Official Indiana Jones whip, a set of seven Indiana Jones paperback books, framed Indiana Jones posters and a set of all three Indiana Jones DVDs. The grand prize was a Honda scooter, a Sony PSP Portable Gaming System and the LEGO "Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures" game.
How did these ideas get started?
Denise Reagan is AME for Visuals at The Florida Times-Union.
Reagan: The first one was for "The Da Vinci Code." It was a rather small-scale contest with little promotion, but it still generated some interest.
Next, we came up with a contest for the Memorial Day release of "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End." We simplified the rules, allowed people to play for just a day or the whole week, added better prizes, ramped up the Web site and promoted the heck out of it on A-1 starting a week in advance.
Hundreds of people were playing each day and the response we received from people telling how much their kids were looking forward to getting the paper each day for the next clue was exciting. When we learned that "Indiana Jones" was scheduled for Memorial Day this year, we knew we would repeat the contest.
Who is the primary audience?
Reagan: Readers, especially those with families, looking for something to do starting on Memorial Day weekend.
How did readers find out about it?
Reagan: We started promoting it in the paper at the bottom of A-1 the Sunday before it started. Each day we ran a limerick that hinted at the nature of the contest and included a refer to the Web site where we ran seven video parodies of the famous line "Snakes, why'd it have to be snakes?" Those were the highest-viewed videos that week.
The contest began on a Friday in the entertainment section. We promoted it at the top of A-1 and it was the cover of the Weekend section.
Each day, the contest was promoted on A-1 and on the Jacksonville.com homepage. We also used Facebook and Digg to gather audience.
Who in the newsroom was involved in the creation of this?
Reagan: This was a group project and an important step in the convergence of the print and online staffs. Several print journalists got to use their newly learned multimedia skills.
Several members of the staff brainstormed and visited locations for the map. Assistant features editor Tom Szaroleta finalized the map locations, wrote the clues as limericks, wrote the quizzes, starred in the "parody videos" and oversaw the whole project.
Joe Black and Craig Sims built the site. Features designer Gary Mills shot and edited the video parodies with the help of video producer Kelly Jordan and multimedia specialist Jason Pratt.
Kyzandrha Z. Pratt built the treasure maps for both print and online and created the Flash component (and had a cameo in one video). Graphic artist Patrick Garvin created illustrations for the word game.
My job was basically to bug everyone about every detail along the way.
How did interactivity help to make this work?
Reagan: The whole game requires readers to be interactive, not just online but around their city. Each clue requires you to go to that place in the city to answer the question.
Readers used the newspaper or the Web to find their clues (on the Web the map is also interactive with audio of the clue), and then they go to the Web site to enter their clues. While they're there, they can play an Indiana Jones version of hangman, test their Indiana Jones trivia knowledge, watch videos or upload look-alike photos of themselves as Indiana Jones characters.
Daily and grand prize winners were announced in the print edition.
What sort of feedback did you receive from your audience and from others in the newsroom?
Reagan: Overwhelmingly good. Tom Szaroleta received many calls during the week from readers trying to get the answers.
The site had more than 22,600 visitors over the week. Hundreds of people tried to solve the puzzle each day with an average of 45 people with the correct answer each day. The videos averaged about 850 views each. The word game had more than 7,000 hits.
The winners were uniformly elated with the contest. I delivered several prizes and talked to them about their experiences. They told me how much fun it was to find the clues each day. Several of them reported seeing many others trying to solve the daily puzzle.
What were the important talents involved in producing this project?
Reagan: We had been doing some training in the last few months that paid off on this project. We sent a designer and a graphic artist to a Society for News Design Flash training workshop. Both of them used their new knowledge in the production of the videos and the interactive maps.
We recorded and edited audio and video. We built the site to automate the random selection of winners each day.
We gathered extensive knowledge of the Indiana Jones movies to come up with the list of locations, the trivia quizzes, etc. And Tom practiced incredible limerick-writing ability.
[author] => Sara Quinn
[pubDate] => Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:46:05 GMT
)
[7] => Array
(
[title] => Documenting Darfur: A Photojournalist's Perspective
[link] => http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=146831
[description] => A powerful photograph can be even more emotional when we hear the story of how it was made.
If it was taken in Darfur, where each of thousands of refugees has a story of tragedy to tell, the emotion grows exponentially.
In this edited interview, Chikwendiu talks about photographs taken during his first trip to Darfur, in 2004.
Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post
While some gather food, others shield themselves from the blazing sun at the Ouri Cassoni refugee camp just outside Baha'i, Chad.
Sara Quinn: How did you end up going to Darfur?
Jahi Chikwendiu: I may have shown some interest to our editors, Michel duCille and people like that.
The story started blowing up in terms of media coverage. We had an excellent correspondent based in Nairobi, Emily Wax, who started working on the story a lot. So I ended up plugging in with Emily and started finding out more about the story, what she was doing on the story, where it was headed. So that, when they were ready to send a photographer, I was already plugged into the story, so I was, like, the most logical choice to send.
I don't know if I conveyed this to the editors, but the issue was so close to me. I likened it to what happened to the Native Americans in the United States, I wanted to look into this modern genocide - this is genocide that's happening in our day.
I went twice. The first time, was a matter of following the route of the writer. She went to the border of Chad and Sudan. We decided to take the roundabout route, going to the border where a lot of refugees were spilling over from Sudan to Chad, working refugee camps along the border there. And then, hooking up with rebel factions - SLA, the Sudanese Liberation Army. And then going across the border into Sudan, into Darfur with them and telling the story through their perspectives.
That's what I did the first time, went through Chad and crossed the border illegally.
Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post
Mostly women and children gather for food hand-outs at Derech Camp for internally displaced Sudanese on the outskirts of the South Darfur town of Nyala, Sudan.
How many people do you estimate were in the first camp you saw?
Chikwendiu: The camp was so expansive that I never saw the whole camp. If I stood in the middle of it I could look in every direction and, as far as the eye could see, there were tents. I never made my own estimation of how many people were there ... These were like cities. You could see them start to function like cities or towns, where there would be a doctor's office and there would be little stores popping up. There would be little restaurants popping up inside these camps. I guess they had to function like that. The camps were huge.
Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post
A sandstorm sweeps by the temporary housing used by displaced Sudanese people, just across the border from Darfur.
When you first saw this huge dust storm on the landscape, how far away was it? What were you thinking at the time?
Chikwendiu: This is my first day in the camp. The camp, like I said, was huge ... I'm on the edge of the camp -- of course, I'm always looking for a different perspective to look at things. So I'm standing on this water truck that had pulled up to the edge of the camp. And I'm shooting the camp. I started noticing people's attention go to an area behind the camp ... I didn't even know what it was.
... So maybe within a few minutes I figured I'd better get off of this truck. I take off running, and within seconds, wham! I just get hit by this wall of wind, and the sand is moving so hard that it's kind of slicing against you.
I just remember looking for shelter. I saw these guys walking and I saw them jump in a tent. So I just jumped in the tent with them. They seemed OK with my being there, because we started giving each other the thumbs up.
I was just sitting there waiting for ... hoping, praying that I wouldn't be impaled by something flying. So then, I got myself together. I had a few handkerchiefs that I wrapped around my camera and my face. I fashioned a camera hood out of my handkerchiefs. I started walking around, looking through my camera. Not even taking pictures. Because it was the only way that I could see. The sand was just slicing at my eyes. So, for a while after that, my vision was blurry where the sand had just scarred my eye lenses.
Then, I thought, OK, I need to function. I need to be documenting what's going on. I started to walk around, looking for situations under the hood. Just taking snaps.
Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post
Women flee the force of a massive sandstorm at the Ouri Cassoni refugee camp just outside Baha'i, Chad, in the NE part of the country.
Then I took shelter in a bigger tent, where there were a lot of women gathered. I think it was a feeding center tent where there were maybe 20, 30 women, maybe more. We're all crouched down and ... I'm taking pictures of people huddled. And then, this tent just blows away and everybody scatters.
Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post
An elder Sudanese refugee gathers herself after a huge sandstorm subsides at the Ouri Cassoni refugee camp just outside Baha'i, Chad.
What did you see in the aftermath of the storm?
Chikwendiu: It was completely calm! If everything wasn't the orange tint of the sand, you wouldn't have known that a sandstorm just blew through.
I was just looking around at people and how, you know, sand was just caked on their faces and in their clothes.
Then, I saw this lady who -- clearly from her face and her hands, she's an older lady -- who had these glasses on where sand was just caked in the glasses. All except for this one little spot where she took her finger and kind of made a clearing for her to see.
So, that's when I snapped this face, within a few minutes after the storm was gone.
With so many stories of tragedy in the camps, how did you ultimately decide where to focus?
Chikwendiu: Every case was extreme, so I looked for extremities within the extreme. Women would have babies with them in the clinics. I would look for a young mother there, and then I would ask about her family. That's when the stories became even more tragic than just some of the people in the general population.
Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post
A Sudanese mother allows her child to suckle her milkless breasts at the Ouri Cassoni refugee camp just outside Baha'i, Chad. Because of the trauma suffered when her village was attacked, she no longer can provide milk for her young child.
Can you tell me about your meeting with the young woman whose face was covered by the veil?
Chikwendiu: She was really young. She was in her early twenties. I asked her to describe her story ... She's holding this baby under her veil. And through the veil, I can see the silhouette of her nursing the baby. So, I took a lot of photos before I approached her. But I'm sure she saw me taking pictures, she just went about her business.
Then, when I finally approached her, she started to talk about her and her baby and nursing. That's when she tells me that she's nursing but she has no milk. And she thinks that she doesn't have any milk because of the trauma she experienced. Having her whole village bombed in the middle of the night. And having so many people killed in front of her face and having to scatter from her village.
So, here's this mother. She's nursing with no milk. So, her breasts then become, instead of feeding tools, they become just pacifiers.
Why are you a photojournalist who wants and needs to be in places like this?
Chikwendiu: For some reason, since I was young, I had this strong sense of right and wrong -- even though I didn't always live by it. I've done my wrong. But I had a strong sense of justice and injustice.
Being African American, too. I remember being in the eighth-grade, running out of the class - crying, bawling - when I saw the history of Africans in the U.S.
I remember the teacher. It was one of my favorite teachers, one of my favorite teachers still ... I remember her following me out of class and comforting me. She told me, "This is the truth. This is what happened. You can't run from it." So from then on, I started not running from it, but being one of the people who show other people the truth. Because only from the truth can we get to a better place.
There are a lot of good things about the world, but there are some bad things going on that aren't necessary. It has been, I felt like, a mission that's bigger than me, to tell these stories. And even though people know about them, they don't know about them enough. They have to see them.
[author] => Sara Quinn
[pubDate] => Thu, 17 Jul 2008 13:36:07 GMT
)
[8] => Array
(
[title] => Multimedia Database Collects Interactive Narratives
[link] => http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=146471
[description] =>
Relaunched this week, the new, improved and spit-shined Interactive Narratives 2.0 is a showcase for what's possible in multimedia storytelling.
The site offers lots of new features, including an invitation for journalists to self-submit multimedia projects and to join a conversation about the work. Andrew DeVigal, multimedia editor at The New York Times, created the site in 2003 and partnered with the Online News Association to get this version off the ground.
"It's an opportunity to see the wide range of brilliant work that's produced out there," said DeVigal, "not just in the big news organizations, but also in the small and medium-sized organizations -- as well as by the independent journalists who are doing some phenomenal work."
In just a few days, the site has logged 80 new registered users. Forty multimedia projects have been submitted, and over 1,100 multimedia entries are in the database. In this edited interview, DeVigal shares what inspired the project and how journalists can best make use of it.
Sara Quinn: Where did the idea come from for the first incarnation of Interactive Narratives?
Andrew DeVigal: It stemmed from my doing a lot of presentations and developing teaching materials, both at Poynter and at conferences. I found myself referring to the same Web sites - or at least bookmarking the same Web sites or multimedia packages over and over. And in those days, I prepared all of my presentations in Macromedia Director. Crazy, I know. I wanted a browser-based presentation platform.
Ultimately, I wanted to create a database that stored all of these links in one place. Once I started collecting them I realized that other people might have the same use for them. So, I ended up working with Ervic Aquino of Stormline Media to make the database available for the world.
How did you select projects for your site?
DeVigal: Back in those days if it blew me away in terms of storytelling, I would rank that high on the list. If it impressed me in terms of its design and presentation, I would also rank it. And the third reason was if there was something innovative about it. Those were the criteria I used.
What's different about version 2.0?
DeVigal: The main thing is that I will no longer be the keeper of the database. I'm basically going to trust the community to be its own sort of watchdog of rich, deep packages of storytelling. I've relinquished the keys to the rest of the community so that they can submit, rank and comment on it.
It still falls under sort of the same criteria with the site ability to sort.
I'm also trusting that the community will rank them by giving them some sort of star value and comments. There will be a social networking aspect to identifying those storytelling packages that rise to a high caliber.
You can also sort the database now, by storytelling design and innovation. So if you really wanted to just sort through the highly ranked or the starred versions of anything, you can do that.
If someone wants to comment on a package, what are the options?
DeVigal: First, you have to register and then log in. That's one of the things that we do require. You can observe the community if you don't log in, but if you want to participate - to rate an entry or comment -- you actually have to register first.
Part of the registration that we ask for is to give your real name. We'll have some tolerance there. But if you are unidentified, we'll reserve the right to block you, or whatever. I think it creates a better community once you become responsible for your own comments and ratings. And the quality of entries and submissions need to remain high to keep Interactive Narratives relevant to the community.
Who can submit work to the site?
DeVigal: Once you become a member, you can submit your own entries. What I hope is that people will put in work that they have done themselves, or that has been done by their own organization.
You can also rate the entry based on storytelling, design and innovation. You can make comments. You can put the name of the organization and credits on the summary.
One of the important things I want to mention is that you can submit tags. It's organized based on tags. I'm hoping to leave this up to the community to regulate the tagging order.
On some entries, we've also allowed podcasting. You can actually associate an audio file for the podcast. The idea there is to actually hear the voices behind the producers. This time, instead of creating a blog of podcasts, the podcasts will be associated with the actual entries.
Is there anything else like this online? Anything that showcases content like this?
DeVigal: I think there are some really good bloggers out there that keep people up to date with what's happening. Interactive Narratives can't replace that, but rather I hope that it'll be a part of that conversation. It's one of the reasons you can also designate a Trackback (or URL) for each comment. So that you can extend your comments on your own blogs.
I also want to see Interactive Narratives become a way for people to look at all of the conversation that's happening and to digest all of that into a site that talks about the different types of media. I want it to become a companion to the conversation that's happening in blogs.
This is one of the reasons that I called it Interactive Narratives -- it's not just about photojournalism, video journalism or interactive graphics. It's not about the medium itself but rather all aspects of what multimedia can deliver. It's about how we interact with the journalism -- a way to look at narratives as a way to engage with the characters of the stories and sometimes, the journalists themselves.
How does this relate to blogs?
DeVigal: I also created a NetVibes Universe for Interactive Narratives. This is where I sort of congregate a lot of the blogs that I look into. It's a way to look at a lot of the conversation and what's being said.
If you visit the Universe, you'll notice that in that space, the conversation is divided up by media types on the top tabs. So, in that space, you can navigate to the tab that most resonates with your area of expertise: video, photo, graphics, Academia and so on.
In them, you'll find the blogs that look at Web 2.0 or Web journalism, video journalism, photojournalism, interactive graphics, blogs dedicated to Academia and also publications that have their own blogs. It's a resource that kind of just aggregates it all together at once.
Who is your partner on Interactive Narratives 2.0? Who's doing the muscle work?
DeVigal: ONA -- The Online News Association was generous enough to put in a few bills to at least try to get it where it is today. It's really a partnership in the sense that they're an organization that's really thinking about how the industry can evolve. It's been great to be a part of that. That's why the co-branding is happening.
In terms of the back-end development, I'm still working closely with my previous technical whiz and friend Ervic Aquino of Stormline Media. Also, my brother Angelo DeVigal (yes, you guessed it, my brother and business partner) was the chief designer and finally, but not least, Jason Speck was the visual technologist who crafted the CSS and interaction design. Jason also created the very handy bookmarklet that you can drag to your browser from the submit page. With it, you can simply hit a single button to submit an entry to Interactive Narratives.
That's the team. But, again, the hope and the goal is that this site becomes relatively self-sufficient. I'm also going to designate a few super-users -- people who are very involved in the industry to help maintain the quality. There's going to be some oversight on the entries and comments, again, to keep the relevance to the community high.
So, who is your primary audience for the site?
DeVigal: Well, I'm hoping it's going to be journalists.
A year ago, or two years ago, I would have said multimedia journalists. But I think the description of multimedia is going to be pretty natural for any journalist that's coming into the field now. They have to be pretty capable of telling their stories in multiple ways.
This is for journalists interested in how to tell stories in various forms of narrative, such as photojournalism, video, audio, interactive graphics. Hopefully, they'll find benefit in showcasing great multimedia work that's happening in the industry. As well as finding inspiration from the amazing work that's being produced out there from large, medium and small organizations as well as the independents.
[author] => Sara Quinn
[pubDate] => Wed, 9 Jul 2008 16:11:15 GMT
)
[9] => Array
(
[title] => Writing Headlines for Print: Poetry in Notion
[link] => http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=146201
[description] => A great headline for the Web? It's direct, to-the-point and easily found by search engines because it has lots of specific words, names and local references that news aggregators will find.
If the story is about the dangers of salmonella in tomatoes in California, by golly, the headline probably needs to have "California," "bacteria" and "tomatoes" in it. Maybe "salmonella," too.
Specificity is the key to writing headlines online because the words have to work on their own in the searchable, digital environment.
ABOUT ACES
The American Copy Editors Society has eight regional chapters and six student chapters, in addition to the national group. Their next conference will be in Minneapolis at the end of April 2009.
And writing headlines for print? Has that art been lost in the race to the Web? Hardly. Thousands of headlines are written for print each day in U.S. newspapers alone -- the best ones capturing a reader's imagination and attention in just a few words. The print environment is more poetic.
Here's a bit of praise for the ongoing craft of writing for print, where the subtlety and nuance of a headline has a long and happy marriage to the context of the surrounding page.
In this video interview, Chris Wienandt, president of the American Copy Editors Society (ACES), talks about a few of his favorite headlines and how you can create poetry with just a few words.
His basic advice? "Dont worry about the head count," Wienandt said. "Always ask yourself, 'What is this story really about?' Find the nut graph and begin to craft it in headline-ese. Then focus on making it more and more succinct."
"Think of powerful verbs, powerful nouns, powerful adjectives that will make the headline a memorable one in the brief moment that the reader will see it."
Note: If you're receiving this via e-mail newsletter and have trouble viewing the video, please use the video player on the Poynter Online article.
[author] => Sara Quinn
[pubDate] => Thu, 3 Jul 2008 21:50:47 GMT
)
)
int(10)
10poynter.org design desk :: This newsfeed has a problem poynter.org @ the web & the world :: hundreds of fresh newsfeeds on schuirink.net
Download the turf graphic.pdf
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["author"]=>
string(10) "Sara Quinn"
["pubDate"]=>
string(28) "Thu, 4 Sep 2008 22:11:04 GMT"
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[1]=>
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["title"]=>
string(66) "NYT Columnist Uses Visual Evidence to Support Persuasive Arguments"
["link"]=>
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