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.
Showing posts with label investigative reporting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label investigative reporting. Show all posts
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Don't wait until the end of the reporting to think multimedia
When it comes to multimedia, journalists should think out a story in an inverted pyramid. But we don’t, especially in investigative or enterprise stories.
We’re used to digging for the story over days, weeks, and months. Yes, some of have spent years on a story. We’ve got piles of documents, stacks of notebooks, and we’re ready to write. Then the online producer asks, “What else have you got?”
Too many times, multimedia and the web packages become an after thought. Unlike the normal path ofinvestigative stories, when you’re ready to write, it’s often too late to be thinking multimedia.
Mark S. Luckie, whose blog 10,000 Words provides a great resource for multimedia journalists, says investigative reporters need to think in terms of how the web can help them tell there stories.
But we have to think of them as we report the story, not at the end.
As we gather documents and notes on a story, we ought to be thinking in terms of video clips and recording audio during interviews that we could turn into multimedia later. Also, keep feeding your web producer bits that could make an interactive map or timeline.
I’m in the middle of a long-term investigative project. As with these kinds of stories, I’m not certain where it will lead. The other day, one of our interns was helping with research. She had gathered a mountain of papers. Somewhere in all that paperwork, we expect to find the story. I pulled out a video camera and shot a minute of her working with all that paper.
We may never use it, just like we don’t use a lot of the notes we take. But I’ve filed it away in a box where I will keep multimedia for the project, just in case.
Update: ProPublica has a great example of how web tools can exaplain complex information with its map on the unemployment insurance drain.
We’re used to digging for the story over days, weeks, and months. Yes, some of have spent years on a story. We’ve got piles of documents, stacks of notebooks, and we’re ready to write. Then the online producer asks, “What else have you got?”
Too many times, multimedia and the web packages become an after thought. Unlike the normal path ofinvestigative stories, when you’re ready to write, it’s often too late to be thinking multimedia.
Mark S. Luckie, whose blog 10,000 Words provides a great resource for multimedia journalists, says investigative reporters need to think in terms of how the web can help them tell there stories.
“The web serves as an all-encompassing platform for publishing interactive maps, multimedia stories built in Flash or other software, video, audio and other forms of media besides text,” Luckie wrote on The Muckraker Blog for the Center for Investigative Reporting.
But we have to think of them as we report the story, not at the end.
“The responsibility, however, requires the judgment to know which media is appropriate for a particular story. For example, interactive maps are great, but they aren't appropriate for every story,” Luckie writes.
As we gather documents and notes on a story, we ought to be thinking in terms of video clips and recording audio during interviews that we could turn into multimedia later. Also, keep feeding your web producer bits that could make an interactive map or timeline.
I’m in the middle of a long-term investigative project. As with these kinds of stories, I’m not certain where it will lead. The other day, one of our interns was helping with research. She had gathered a mountain of papers. Somewhere in all that paperwork, we expect to find the story. I pulled out a video camera and shot a minute of her working with all that paper.
We may never use it, just like we don’t use a lot of the notes we take. But I’ve filed it away in a box where I will keep multimedia for the project, just in case.
Update: ProPublica has a great example of how web tools can exaplain complex information with its map on the unemployment insurance drain.
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