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.

'Link journalism' means remembering the links

Reading Danny Sullivan’s “How the Mainstream Media Stole Our News Story Without Credit,” my first thought was:

“Dude, I feel you pain: about 30 years of it.”

I can’t count the number of times I’ve busted my butt to turn out an exclusive story, only to see a broadcast outlet swipe my hard-earned facts, with no new reporting, and use it as their own. Without credit.

Then there’s the age-old strategy of The Associated Press – take a story from a member newspaper, write a new lead, and move it across the country.

But I’m not only the victim in all this, I confess to being a conspirator. I think all of us have had an editor at one time or another run up to us waving a story from a competing news organization, saying, “We need this story. Go out and get it.” What they mean is, go out and get a story just like it and don’t tell anyone we got the idea from another organization.

Not one to argue with the person who provides I paycheck, I comply, although I’ve always tried to add depth, context or new reporting.

But Sullivan makes great points in tracking how his story about a woman suing Google over its walking directions.

With link journalism, we need to be more cognizant of crediting sources by linking back.

From when I first worked for a newspaper that decided it needed a web site – in 1998, and we thought that was behind then – grabbing links of research has been a practice. Editors would always ask for “web extras” and reporters would shrug and say, “What’s that.” A list of links found during research worked to give readers context and more information.

Then came upload source documents, as Sullivan did, so people could see where we were getting our information.

Now with delicious and Publish2, it’s easier than ever to save those links. Download the browser tool bars, click and save. Then share the list with your web team and they can run it, or embed it into the story.

Old news, you may say? You know this already, don’t you?

Well, read Sulllivan’s post and you’ll realize that while this may be basic online journalism, too few people are doing it.