Planning an investigative project for the home page, not just the front page

At 3 a.m. last Sunday, I put the final touches on the multimedia project I’d been working on for months, squeezing it between daily assignments.

“Presumed Guilty,” was live on the web. It’s about Ronnie Rhodes, who’s spent 30 years in prison for a crime he says he didn’t commit, and the disturbing nationwide exposure of wrongful convictions.

For the first time, I had spent more than a year planning how a story would look on the home page of Kansas.com, instead of just the front page of The Wichita Eagle.

Used to be, you’d work on a project for months, and end up with a story in the Sunday paper. That was it.

Rob Curley inspired me to change the way I thought about that process, after visiting him in Las Vegas during the SPJ National Convention.

What Curley told me in Vegas didn’t stay there.

“Every project we plan, we plan for the web,” he said. Then the stories go to print.

That was my goal.

I’d begun blogging the report the previous summer. That would become more valuable than I ever imagined. When the blog needed a post, I dug deeper to create a current entry. Video posts became rough cuts for the final multimedia.

As I collected documents, I threw them up on Document Cloud. As I came across web resources, I posted them to Publish2, so I could easily compile link lists.

The story was done a week before I’d normally turn in a Sunday piece. I spent the last week doing the final cuts of videos.

By then, we’d had more layoffs. This time they hit the copy desk. We left on Friday the stories still awaiting a final edit.

Consequently, the stories hit the desk like every Sunday piece for print – that Saturday night.

So Eba Hamid, our online producer, and I waited until the stories went live at midnight. We got on our home computers, fired up the Gmail chat and worked furiously into the wee hours of the morning.

It was finished -- a piece I’m as proud of as anything I’ve ever done.

Then we waited for reaction. We offered several avenues for community communication.

For months, people commented on the blog posts, and I listened, letting them point me to addtional reporting they wanted, such as Rhodes’ disciplinary reports in prison.

For the final piece, we set up a live chat on Monday with the law professor whose students had helped research the case. Although we’d done those chats about weather and sports, I’d never done one with a crime story. We added a Twitter hashtag in case people wanted to comment there, instead of on the stories. I posted a link on my Facebook profile to provide more opportunities for interaction.

On Sunday, I made sure to check out the comments on the stories, respond and answer questions.

Later that day, Curley tweeted about the package and then posted a comment on my Facebook page:

“This is how it's done folks: great text/real journalism. multimedia/video/photo galleries. reader access to documents used in reporting. audience interaction via twitter and chats. blog entries from throughout reporting process. great background info provided for readers. not afraid to link off newspaper's site.”

“Wow, check this out,” I said to my wife.

The phone rang.

“Maybe that’s Rob Curley,” Gaye said with a laugh.

And it was.

Two news comment policies to enhance the dialogue

This past weekend, my old employer and hometown news source instituted a new policy on comments -- for its staff.

I thought it odd that in 2010, editors would have to encourage reporters to monitor the comments on their stories. We should be doing that already. But working in a newsroom in a city roughly twice the size of my hometown, I'm one of the few reporters who actively comment on their stories. So I guess it's necessary to encourage staff to do this.

Coincidentally, my personal philosophy mirrors the News-Leader's policy:

"Whenever possible, reporters are being encouraged to respond to direct reader questions or inquiries by providing additional facts that are readily available to the reporter. Likewise, reporters are encouraged to respond if a quick comment can clear up misunderstandings or confusion about the story -- and even to confess when the initial report fell short."

Reporters and editors are required to use their real names. Comments from the rest of the community are not. If you look at the comments section of the same item, you will find very few relevant to the original post. Mostly, it's the same old off-topic bickering you might find in any post in sites around the country.

But elevating the conversation is a mission worth pursuing and I salute the News-Leader, and its parent company Gannett, for their efforts.

It also reminded me with a conversation I had with Rob Curley during my recent visit to Las Vegas. Last month, the Las Vegas Sun has stopped anonymous comments on its stories.

As Curley said "being yourself online is the new black." He pointed to Facebook's terms, which require users to provide their real identities. And there's just about nothing bigger than Facebook.

The Sun still has a system for allowing anonymous comments. As Curley pointed out, there are times when people need to shield their identities, such as when they are talking about their employers. But those comments appear on a separate page, instead of below the story. Editors must decide when a comment is "trusted" and relevant to the discussion, before it's moved over to the story.

"We're even building a a feature into the system so that anonymous comments can be recommended to be moved over to the story pages, similar to how readers can now suggest that comments be removed," Curley said in the comments section, replying to readers.

I've always agreed that people sign their letters to the editor and put their names on comments. I have a byline. I put my name, my phone number and email on everything I do. I sometimes get anonymous letters and emails and I stopped taking those seriously long ago. I always figure if they want me to take them seriously, they'll sign them.

I will also add information, or correct erroneous statements about facts in a story, when I see them in the comments section. I hope by doing so, it might steer the conversation back to relevancy.

And as I've noted before, I get a higher level of discussion on both Twitter and Facebook than I usually see elsewhere. And those are two place where people say who they are.

That's why I favor the Sun's policy.

I think those who comment on our web sites will act exactly as we expect them to. If we let them prattle on anonymously, it will draw those who favor that forum. If we participate in the conversation, and require people to say who they really are, we will get -- and deserve -- a higher level of discussion.

Hot links: the journalism sessions I couldn't attend in Vegas

NO PLACE LIKE HOME, KS -- The SPJ Convention has been over for days but people are still talking and blogging about what they learned. And we can catch up on the sessions we missed.

Among them:

• Deb Wenger reports on a talk by CNN International's Etan Horowitz: Used to be, broadcasters tried to put TV on the web. Now they put social media on the air.
• Wenger also adds info on Victor Hernandez’s sessions on all-platform journalists, with a list for gearheads like me.
• Libbi Gordon of the University of Missouri sums up her analysis of the convention: "To the youth and young adult market, using the Internet and social media is second nature. YAYAs will thrive in the online journalism."
• No journalism convention would be complete without talk of layoffs of downsizing, and Tim Eigo, editor of Arizona Attorney magazine, reports on a conspicuously empty Gannett booth at the trade show: "Is that angst in your pocket, or are you just sorry to see me?"
• Marnie Kunz writes: "Matt Villano offered helpful advice on diversifying for freelancers and not keeping your eggs in one basket ... . And it soothed my frazzled soul."
• Amanda Maurer reviews Google 101 for Journalists: the session everyone who missed it wished they'd attended.
• And Vince Duffy of Michigan NPR and the most dapper man in radio, blogs highlights of the convention for the RTNDA, which will team with SPJ for next year's convention in New Orleans.

Did you attend a session or blog about the convention?  Leave details or a link to your post in the comments.

The technology of storytelling

I’m really not one to talk about staying with the basics. As this blog shows, I love new tools. I love the gadgets available to us as journalists.

But one piece of this I haven’t lost is the love of reporting and telling a good story. That transcends technology, whether scrawling pictures on a cave wall or putting together a multimedia package.

Marc Cooper makes the point again that, as this business changes at a whirlwind pace, we need to stop and reflect on how to use all the tools at our disposal to tell the best story.

“New multimedia tools, now reproducing themselves exponentially, provide reporters and editors with sometimes awe-inspiring ways to tell our stories. Learning to master these tools and when to choose them, however, can be as important as which tool a surgeon requests for a certain procedure in the compressed atmosphere of an OR.”

We have a tendency to want to stick with our old comfortable forms. As an old newspaper guy, I still like to craft a good narrative text. I know broadcasters who are more comfortable in front of a camera than behind a keyboard.

But as Cooper points out, some stories are better in some formats than in others. We need to ask ourselves: is this piece better in video? Audio? Do we need to let people see and hear the experience themselves? Or is a descriptive story better?

We also need to be prepared to do it all. That’s why I try to record everything. Get the phone interview on mp3. Carry the video camera with me, and use it.

Then at the end of the process, I can choose which are the best pieces to use and how to use them.

That happened recently with a story about sex crimes against children.

A key element was getting a spreadsheet of addresses to show on a map how these crimes span neighborhoods in our community. But the map by itself had little context.

I used my social networks to help find the girl and her mother quoted in the story. I recorded audio, and even shot video on an interview with the prosecutor. I was prepared.

In the end, a text story and the map seemed to be the best way to go.

Still, none of it matters if we haven’t done solid reporting along the way.

Rolling out the investigative blog

After using twitter to cover live events, such as trials, I’d been thinking about what it would be like to have an investigative report unfold online as it happened.

Those kinds of reports take time, however, and you can go weeks and months with nothing happening. Sometimes, it takes months of pre-reporting in your spare time to find out if a story is even worth pursuing. Banging it out 140 characters at a time wouldn’t necessarily be effective, especially when mixed in with the regular routine of my courthouse beat.

A blog, however, might be the right medium. Think of it as an investigative blog.

That’s what we began last week on “What the Judge Ate for Breakfast,” my courts blog at the Eagle.

The set-up piece describes how the idea came about – a project with some Kansas law students about the effectiveness of a 2001 law requiring DNA testing on old rape and murder cases. But it wasn’t until we started looking into a 29-year-old local murder case that a story began to take shape.

Usually, reporters dwell out of sight, revealing only the end result. Katie Lohrenz, my best collaborator and most supportive colleague, said this was an opportunity to let people really see the actual chase of the story.

There are risks involved, and we talked about them in the newsroom:

Couldn’t someone follow the blog, and then steal our story? Well, that would be kind of difficult, since the time stamp on the first blog post gave us ownership early. Someone else stepping in, without at least linking back, would be so obvious.

What if the story took a sudden turn, or didn’t pan out the way we thought it would? Investigative reporting is all about, well, investigation. So the readers would follow us through those turns.

Katie saw it this way: “There’s a reason Superman was a newspaper reporter. Because it’s a cool job, and people are interested, even if you’re not Superman.”

Definitely not Superman, here, I wanted to cheat. Get a few background posts in the can, and roll them out gradually. John Boogert, our deputy editor of interactive news, and Katie had a different idea. This is online news, they reminded me. No sense letting it get stale. I wrote sent the first one to our online team, expecting it to be published at some future date of their choosing. It published Friday, the same day.

In the meantime, I’m continuing doing other features of the blog, such as the “Common Law” courtroom video series.

“Presumed Guilty” won’t necessarily take over the blog. It will just be another feature, tied together with Word Press categories and tags.

Just as most investigative pieces don’t stop the daily routine of working the beat and producing stories. You do what you can, when you can.

The first post has already started a conversation. Maybe our readers will come up with ideas on how to proceed and it will become a crowd-sourced investigation.

They can watch us work through the mundane of searching through musty newspaper clips, public records, maybe even prison visits with an inmate who has argued his conviction for 30 years. They will see our successes and our failures.

At the end, we’ll have a story. As with all investigations, we don’t know what it will be yet. This much we know: it will tell us how our laws and justice system work for us, or even against us.

Investigative reporting can be kind of like a mystery. I’ve done it for years. But now, I get to write about it as I go.

However it turns out, it’ll be an exciting trip.

No comment, please, thank you, no comment, no...

There was no video or audio, because the judge in juvenile court decided it was better to sentence the 16-year-old girl who killed her father without pictures and sound. I covered the story as I had other court stories for years.

It was one of those stories, that after you were through, your stomach hurt. I should have taken time to ask myself: "Could that story turn into an interactive nightmare?"

Newspapers all over the country have been debating how they use reader comments, including at the New York Times, which edits them.

The tragic story of abuse inside a Wichita family that led to a teenage girl shooting her father to death pointed out why we should think about them.

We were busy working on the next day’s news cycle, when the girl’s lawyer, Laura Shaneyfelt, called and asked if we’d been reading the reader comments on the story. They started out with comments from what looked like regular readers. The story was shocking enough. But as the morning turned to afternoon, personal comments began to emerge. Although we had never named the juvenile girl, her name suddenly popped up.

Then someone blamed the slain father’s mother, by name. It was apparent that a family feud had fired up on-line at Kansas.com.

We shut the comments down. I soon received a call from a woman who said she’d tried to find the comments, after someone told her about them, and couldn’t find them. I told her they’d gotten out of hand and we needed to eliminate them and stop the discussion.

“Thank you,” she said.

Other crime stories have drawn racist remarks on our pages.

We’ve been told that legally if you edit individual comments you can limit your defense should a bad one slip through.

We have issue similar to reporters at other paper I talk to: you can write a story about quilting and someone, somewhere will eventually leave a comment about how quilting promotes illegal immigration. What are you going to do?

Some problems, however, we can head off before they start. We now have the option of clicking a “no comments” box before sending our stories to the desk. I thought that was a box to signify we’d tried to talk to a cantankerous politician. I’ve been assured it removes the opportunity for controversial comments from readers.

We now have a list of stories we should consider in checking that box, including stories that name victims or defendants.

We also check the box on stories “likely to produce ribald comments,” although as I tell our editors, those are my personal favorites.

As we tackle the large learning curves of melding layers of our coverage with audio and video, we should also remember to read the comments on our stories each day.

I’d be interested in hearing what other papers are doing.

To do that, well, leave a comment.