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.

Outside the job: multimedia for fun

My colleague Jaime Green has inspired and encouraged me in my pursuit of multimedia storytelling over the past several years.

Jaime does videos for work at the Eagle, but she also does them for fun, to document her life.

So when she suggested I do a video for the craziness that is Halloween on the street where I live, I took her up on it. Note: We have about 3,000 trick-or-treaters on our street every year. This year, neighbors counted 4,200. The entire block decorates. In Wichita, they call it Halloween Street. The tradition started long before we moved here, and when the house across the street sold to new owners last year, the purchase contract included a requirement that the Halloween decorations stay.

So far, the YouTube video has more views than most of the serious stuff I do for work. People have shared it to their Facebook friends and given great feedback.

What does this have to do with journalism? Well, one, it helps sharpens my skills. The more you do something, the better you get. And I found when I go back to work after something like this, I'm energized. When you can apply the skills you use at work into your personal life, work seems more fun.

Anyone remember when we used to write for fun?

Here's the Halloween video. I had fun doing it. Hope you enjoy it.

The ultimate in mobile: Multimedia with an I-Phone

Andy Bull has set up a course on producing multimedia reports with an I-Phone.

It begins Oct. 15. Andy said it will cover both the tools and apps with the I-Phone as well as creating a platform to showcase your work.

(via Sonya Smith at Mojos Unite!)

Get a good head start on hardware and apps to turn your I-Phone into an essential multimedia tool, courtesy of Multimedia Shooter.

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.

This is also CNN: getting out of the way of innovation

LAS VEGAS -- After blowing up their silos, CNN began hiring All-Platform Journalists, or APJs. They do about everything, but don't call them one-man bands. That'll just rile up Victor Hernandez, who thinks it makes them sound like a carnival act, instead of the innovative, hard-working reporters they really are.

Hernandez talked a lot about being "platform agnostic" at the SPJ National Convention, and it's something we all need to start taking much more seriously -- finding the best way to tell stories, instead of digging ourselves in where we're most comfortable. If video is the best way to tell the story, use it, instead of falling back on text, because there's a news hole somewhere that needs to be filled. If text provides context and explanation, then tell it that way, even though someone still thinks there has to be a video over a talking voice.

Or use both. Text with video.

Journalists are listening. I hear a lot less whining that "I'm a newspaper reporter, so I shouldn't have to learn this video." The multimedia presentations this week were packed. People were eager to learn to work on all platforms.

Hernandez said the skills are developing, but there's still one piece that needs work:



Some examples:



Or look what APJ Sarah Hoye did on a multimedia project on natural gas fracking with CNN Money's Steve Hargreaves. It included this video, which follows more of a documentary style than the typical TV formula:



Of course, inspiration for following a different path remains print icon Jimmy Breslin, who wandered off from press pack covering the funeral of John F. Kennedy to interview the man who dug the president's grave.

So as we left the convention, we carried the question: Are we moving toward the future or living in the past?

At least that's what Mark Briggs wondered, while leaving Las Vegas to the tune of John Mellancamp:

"If you’re not part of the future then get out of the way."

Getting to the source documents

It started out as the easiest "web extra."  That's what our bosses used to call it in the ol' days of the 1990s. What can you put on the news web site that increased the value of the print story?

Links and source documents, of course. Links to relevant material and .pdfs of research documents to show people we just weren't making all this up. The links caught on. People made careers of compiling links.

The docs?  Not so much. Just last year, our web team was saying no one clicked on the .pdfs. And who could blame them?  They're a good way to cut down on the paper on your desk (see previous post), but kind of clunky to share.

That changed recently, when I started using Scribd. It's among the growing document sharing sites popping up. There's Docstoc and DocShare and the old standby, Google Docs. They're communities based around documents, and some like Scribd allow you to embed your documents in the story, as you would a video.

When I signed up for Scribd, it allowed me to connect to my Facebook page. My Facebook friends who were already on Scribd immediately found me, and I ended up with a dozen or so followers before I'd uploaded anything to read.

Frankly, following me on only Scribd may be a bit of a disappointment, unless you're a legal geek.  What I'm posting now are legal documents from stories I'm covering on the courts beat.

But something happened when we started embedding those documents on the page with stories -- people started reading them. I've only been using this for about a month, so traffic isn't great, but it compares to some of our video views.

This is important, because it allows people to connect with our sources. The reporting process becomes more accessible, and that's crucial in a time where public confidence in the news media is at an all-time low.

My next step is contacting, Document Cloud, made especially for journalists. It boasts extra reporting tools, allowing you to make annotations, lists and time lines from dates in the documents. I'm still waiting for approval. Because it's restricted to journalists and researchers, they say they need a note from my editor that I'm really who I say I am.

Kind of like being back at school, and the teacher aksing for a note for my mom.

Tangled up in multimedia blues

I used to have to have only a notebook and pen.

Now, I need a video camera, an audio recorder, Blackberry, and various headphones and battery chargers. My desk is a mess, and I sometimes find myself tripping over wires and tangled up amid the mess that is my desk.

Shuffling papers is one thing. Untangling wires consumes my time.

Anyone have ideas for controlling my tangled life?

Taking a chance: recording audio and video separately

For the past year, I've been trying to find the best way to get decent audio from the courtroom for my video blog.

I thought I'd get a free lesson earlier this year, when the murder trial of a local abortion doctor drew national attention. I asked the audio experts on the production crew for CNN/Court TV their secret. The answer: they wire the courtroom with a dozen microphones. So much for that.

Even local broadcasters complain about the bad acoustics in our courtrooms, so I had been experimenting with various microphones. If you go back and listen to the episodes, you'll hear differences.

Finally, I decided to try a variation on what the real pros do -- recording audio and video separately, then synch them up later.

I'd been thinking about this for a while, but I'd been afraid the work flow would chew up all my time.

Turns out, it's easier than I thought. All you need is a sound, or a cue, to capture both on the camera's mic and the audio recorder. Then you have a mark to synch. That's where the clapboard comes in that we've seen in movies. It's to synch the audio and video.

You can use your hands to clap. But that doesn't work in the courtroom (although I know some judges who might like people to applaud when they enter). Too bad they don't use those gavels anymore.

The first time I tried it, the judge walked in, sat down, grabbed some files and then stapled them together. That was the sound I needed. I put the audio in Audacity, the video in Final Cut Express and started each clip with the click of the stapler.

I put them both in Final Cut as one clip, then export as a Quick Time Movie. That gives me a large file I can then bring back into Final Cut.  I edit the final clip from that file.

I've used doors snapping shut and people popping their "p's" as cues, setting the scrubber to the exact moment.

For video, I'm now using my Kodak Zi8, and Edirol R09 for sound. The stereo microphone on the Edirol is so clear, it picks up everything in the courtroom without the need for an external mic. I can pretty much set it anywhere in the room and let it go.

Another advantage is I can massage the sound separately, using various filters to blend out hums and the annoying sounds of the heating and air that fill courtrooms. It's not perfect by any means, but it's better.

And both the Zi8 and Edirol fit in my pockets. If I wanted, all I'd have to carry would be the tripod.

I don't always need to always sync the sound, either. The Kodak has an external mic jack on it, if I want to use it, but the built-in mic works surprisingly well, as I found when I did clips of a recent political debate.

Don't be afraid that something may be too difficult or complicated. Often, it's easier than you realize.

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.

Of video blogging and emerging narratives

I participated community session on blogging with colleague Carrie Rengers and Bobby Rozzell. Bobby has a great project, where he's indexed our city's blogs. I've posted the slides from my slice of the presentation, with links and videos to the multimedia approach I used with the development "Common Law" video series of our court system. The slides include various links and examples used in the presentation (my digital handout, so to speak)



Now that I've been doing this for the past year, I'm seeing an interesting trend within the vlog. We're starting to follow some cases as they progress from preliminary hearings to trials. Some defendants in previous episodes are starting to make return appearances, as they continue break the law.

These are emerging narratives within the series, reminding me of a theme in a recent post by Andrea Pitzer on the Nieman Storyboard.
In discussing developing fluid forms of digital story-telling, Pitzer says:

"It’s an interesting concept for journalists, which some storytellers have begun working on -- a kind of episodic, open-ended narrative made of individual stories that tie back into the issue at hand while providing outlets for viewers to engage on their own terms."

It's what I feel like is starting to develop with the video series. But it's taken some time. While patience isn't something journalists are known for, it certainly paying off with this project.

Photo galleries show cool way to display writing, too

Photographers love photo galleries. It really shows off their work. Online editors love photo galleries, because it builds up page views with each click.

Now writers can use galleries to great effect. See what MSNBC did with a gallery in telling the narrative of one of the richest, and most reclusive, women in the America.

The photos themselves may not have been strong enough to stand lone themselves. But with strong words, they play off each other, like a picture book.

The Times Herald-Record used a similar approach in the story of a man who spent decades in prison for a murder he didn’t commit.

I see all sorts of uses for this kind of story-telling, with evidence photos from court, or to spice up zoning and development stories. The photos help set up a sense of place and drive the words.

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.

“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.

Getting videos even your photographer buddies will think is cool

Face it, as reporters we are still on the low end of priorities when it comes to video.

Yes, it's now a requirement for us to know how to shoot, capture and edit video stories in a multimedia world. But try arm-wrestling for equipment, and you're going to lose to the real photographers in the newsroom, whose jobs are increasingly dependent on video expertise. And they should.

I'm not one to sweat the small stuff.  Online video is still an open adventure, and to be truthful, most web surfers would rather watch "On A Boat" (33.8 million views and counting) than any serious piece of news you're going to produce (200 views and hoping for more).

For the new video series, I'm using a Canon Elura 85 that our newsroom bought in 2005.  I don't think they even make the model anymore.  Our photo department long ago graduated to Canon HD cameras.

So I'm using the old camera no one else wants, and I'm okay with it. But it's funny, when I started asking for feedback from people I know and respect, everyone complimented the production values of the new courts vlog.

My main mentor, Stacey Jenkins, who taught us video two years ago, said I've got my lighting right. One of our most prolific videographers, Jaime Oppenheimer, said it was "awesome."

That's the beauty of this DV camera:  you have control over the settings, so I can adjust exposure to the low-light situations that sometime plague the courtroom. No matter what the price, try to get one where you can switch to manual in a pinch.  Also important is a jack for an external microphone. If you've got those, you can really do some good work.

What is most important for reporters shooting video, is capturing decent audio.  And let me just say, the audio on your beat is better than mine.  Courtroom acoustics tend to really suck. Even the television guys, who've been doing this for years, complain about courtroom audio.

I'm still working on perfecting the audio, but for the meantime, I've got a wireless mic set on loan from the photo department.  It was one they're not using. Scored on that. Another tip, show an interest and work hard, and you'll have friends who will help you out, such as pointing out the good equipment that no one else is using (thank you, Jaime)

I'm still also carrying the $10.99 Nady microphone I bought two years ago. It still works great for interviews. I also pack an Azden shotgun mic I found collecting dust in a closet, which can pick up sound from across the room. My next experiment will be to use both the shotgun and the wireless to collect even better audio from court hearings.

I'm hoping not using this camera forever.  We're holding out hope for some more higher resolution video cameras for reporters in the next budget. In the meantime, I'm using what I have.  And I'm not complaining.

I'm finding it matters less about being a gear head and more about what you're collecting with the equipment you have. I mean, in the old days, I don't remember ever hearing good reporters complain about what kind of pen they had.

What are you using to shoot video for your stories?

So then I started this video series to expand the coverage of my beat

After the Twitter experiment worked, I began searching for other ways to expand my court beat online.

What I really wanted to do is reach past the types of cases that usually made news. There's so much that goes on in the courthouse everyday, you can't cover it all.  But I figured the web enabled me to go beyond what I used to do when I only had the newspaper, and its limited space, as a venue.

I always quipped that I could walk into any random courtroom and come out with a good story. Here was my chance to prove it.

So then I started this video series, which we would eventually call, Common Law.

As with most online experiments that have worked for me, Katie, was heavily involved in the initial development. My then-editor, Jill Cohan, gave it the go-ahead.  She even wrote the development of the series it into my goals for the coming year.

In future posts, I'll follow my work flow and how I try to get everything done.

What made this a little easier is getting regular sources follow.  That's served as the foundation for the series: I have a judge, a public defender, a prosecutor and two courthouse guards. I have to credit these folks for agreeing the jump into something that's so new.

I regularly check in with what their doing and produce 2-minute video segments which run several times a week.

I then asked for critiques from friends and colleagues, many of whom I've met through this blog.  They all gave some great tips and were very positive about what I'd done.  This fueled me to keep doing it and improve it.

Among them, Angela Grant, whose blog News Videographer has served as one of my main learning tutorials over the past couple of years.  With this series, I got to put everything I'd learned from her posts, and her past critiques of my work, into practice.

One of our concerns in all this is that while courts offer the height of human drama, it's often delivered in the sterile, clinical confines of people talking in court.

Wrote Angela:

Usually, talking heads are boring and do not make compelling video. But I think the way Ron is using the talking heads here is actually very compelling. Maybe it’s because the subject matter is naturally interesting. Maybe it’s the easy-to-digest format: One graph of info, followed by a short video. Whatever it is, I think it’s successful because I was able to watch like 4-5 of these in a row and I stayed interested the whole time.

Taking what is usually a 20- to 30-minute hearing the editing it down to 2 minutes helps keep the most compelling information about these cases.  I'm often checking back with the judge and lawyers, to make sure I'm keeping everything in context and portraying the gist of the hearings.  So far, so good.

The reason we called it "Common Law" (Jill's title) is because we deal with the everyday type of cases that come to the courthouse -- the stuff you normally wouldn't see.

The video views are comparable to others being produced for our site, and several people have stopped me in the elevator and the hallways of the courthouse to tell me how much they're enjoying them.

But I'm always looking for feedback. If you can watch a few, when you get time, leave a comment and tell me what you think. I'm always looking to improve.

I can also see a variety of beats lending itself to this kind of treatment.

Who are we trying to reach by video: journalism, the audience or ourselves

As journalists, we sometimes let a good story get in the way of the news.  That tendency has plagued us, as we’ve moved to multimedia platforms.

Fortunately, the people we are trying to serve with information have a way of keeping us grounded.  Remember a few years ago, when everybody was preaching narrative writing?  The inverted pyramid was declared dead, a relic of the past. 

Then something interesting happened.  People stopped subscribing to our newspapers.  They went online.  They wanted their news and information quick and reliable.  Google became our new circulation department, and we needed those bots to find our stories. The lives of our newsrooms depended on bringing people to our stories, generating clicks. The inverted pyramid made a roaring recovery as the rule for web news writing.

With the ability for more journalists to relay information via video, another set of rules began to emerge.  Problem is, people didn’t flock to the video as rapidly as they did to the rally of the inverted pyramid.

Peter Ralph, in his blog Video 2 Zero, said maybe that’s because we are making the wrong rules. He inspires us to reconsider what we’re asking of ourselves with Seven strategies for video success.

Mindy McAdams followed with an excellent analysis of the state of web news video.

The key to all this is remaining true to our core mission of journalism – delivering news and information to people in a way they can easily use to make sense of the world around them.  Simple. But through our own vanity, we sometimes make it difficult.

That’s why I especially I liked Ralph’s discussion of his seven myths that may be getting in our way of doing good video journalism:

1. Shorter is better
   Sometimes, you need context and depth.
2. Content is king
   It’s not the content of the video that generates the return, it’s the ability to integrate the video into a larger information loop where value feeds back to the producers.
3. Connect emotionally
   Is our vanity getting in the way of providing information?
4. Avoid talking heads
   Ralph: “Associated with avoid talking heads is the notion that videographers should avoid information-intensive presentations. Information is more efficiently conveyed in text and pictures - it doesn’t need video.
   ”But many thousands of viewers would rather watch David Pogue than crack a manual….
   ”As the information density goes up, and the age of the target audience goes down - the preference for video over text increases exponentially. Absorbing even mildly technical detail from a book is a chore. That same information repackaged as visual media is digested effortlessly.”
5. and
6. The tripod rules
   I understand the point about getting the shot.  But I’m not confident enough to give up the sticks.
7. Lots of closeups
   Back off, man.
   
   
   

When I first read those last two, I could feel my friend Angela Grant cringe.  I was right, she did. But she also concluded, as I did, that we need to continually questions the rules we make for ourselves in order to grow.
“I’ve come to realize that the rules I’ve followed and preached are not working to attract the audience that online video must have to survive,” Angela said.

If the point is to report the information, then there’s a variety of ways we can do this, especially through video.

We could do video like Story of Stuff

This video breaks a lot of these rules.  It’s a talking head.  It’s long, at 20 minutes.  But it takes a complex subject – human production and consumption – and explains it so anyone can understand it.  I find it compelling.

Because it’s about the information.

But it’s not the kind of video you’ll find on most newspaper web sites.  And maybe it should be.

Hot links this week on online journalism

Jack Lail says "We'd get more readers if we gave them less frickin' news to read": “The news junkies, however, are the users that move the metrics and we focus even more on what they want because they are generating more pageviews and longer times on site. And thus we have less of what more casual news consumers want. Sort of like drinking ourselves to death?”

"We Were Print" – the blog of “former and soon-to-be-former print journalists” – chronicles the dark humor that is our business with links to this week's Doonesbury.

Don Himsel gives us the latest generation of point-and-shoot cameras as News Videographer.

Mindy McAdams reports on a session she attended on pro video at the Online News Association’s annual conference.

Best of online journalism: from D.C. to Middletown

"Fixing D.C. Schools" is the kind of project I still remember seeing for the first time on Washington Post.com.  It covered every aspect of the public schools in D.C., from the maintenance of the school halls to student scores.  It told stories across the multimedia platforms.

No surprise it won the Knight Award for Public Service during the Online Journalism Awards.

See the awards site for the complete list of winners, then linger for a while to marvel at some inspiring work, including "I Didn't Do Murder," by the RecordOnline.com, from The Times Herald Record (Middletown, N.Y.), which won best investigative piece for a small site.

Let these influence your next project.  Better yet, show them to your editor.  This is the kind of work we should be striving to produce in the digital age.

Deciding what to show and what to tell

When I’m taking a new path, it’s helpful for me to find one that's comfortable.

The first computer-assisted reporting project I tried 10 years ago analyzed restaurant health inspections – along with about every other CAR newbie in the country.

I’d written about the so-called “CSI Effect” from a courtroom perspective. But I’d always wanted to shadow a crime scene investigator and show, not tell, what they did.

When the Wichita Police gave me permission to follow Cory Rodivich around on a shift, my goal was to produce a mini-documentary and experiment with simple non-linear storytelling.

The result was published today.

Through video, I tried to produce a story capable of standing on its own, while still adding some depth to the print story. I wanted to break the video story into chapters, so viewers could pick their order. After years of driving the narrative through print, I’m still trying to wrap myself around the idea of non-linear storytelling.

I decided the print story would deal with the differences between television and reality, while the videos would show what the crime scene investigator really does.

While I don’t consider this my best work, it’s my best in this new area of multimedia reporting.

Above all, completing the project and getting it published improved my comfort zone. The minute I finished, I started planning the next project.

Failure is just a state of mind

I didn’t want to listen to the nearly four hours of audio and video I’d recorded for my most ambitious multimedia project yet.

After all, I hadn’t even listened to myself.

I had learned the rules dutifully, and I had passed them through this blog and to colleagues. I’d just finished a brownbag session for my fellow reporters on how to record audio. I’d called it “Get your Mojo Working,” for mobile journalists. Use headphones. Use an external, cardioid, directional microphone. I had those tools in the bag when I went out to work on my law enforcement story. Then, we got mobile, and my mojo wasn’t up to it.

I’d planned on using a wireless lavaliere for my main source, so I could follow him around with ease. But after I’d reserved it, reminded people I needed it, well, the only wireless lav our newsroom owned had disappeared. Never mind, though, because I’m not a gear head, and I have always found a way to get the story.

I did have a new Edirol recorder, which I packed away, along with my low-end, but reliable Canon video camera to catch some documentary footage off my crime beat. I had the cardioid mic I’d carried around for months and a set of headphones.

But once we started moving, I decided I didn’t want to be plugging headphones and microphones in and out. I had to move when my subject moved, get in and out of conversations about homicides and witnesses. Plus, I was getting audio two ways: with the Edirol recorder and through the camera. I had a backup.

When I returned after a late-night and early-morning round that I was too tired to contemplate repeating, I downloaded my mp3s. I heard the air conditioner in the damned vehicle. I also heard static creeping like a crackling campfire into the voices.

I did like the video. But audio, as I’ve always said, is most important.

I tried to relax over the weekend, which was great with my wife and family, except for the occasional moping about my presumed failure. Then I remembered: this business never was perfect. I remembered all the great quotes that didn’t make my stories, because in the haste to scribble them down, I’d made them illegible. My stories would have benefited from those extra phone calls I planned to make until deadlines got in the way. I resolved to learn some post-production tricks to make poor audio usable. I also knew what to use as the topic my next blog.

But then, another surprise. As I began logging video clips this morning, I heard the camera’s audio. Not crystal, but not drowned in static, either. The video camera had picked up the voices without the distracting air conditioner. I had some passable sound.

More good news: our photo staff had processed the images out of my point-and-shoot and proclaimed a few actually publishable, and a couple of nods of approval.

“So you learned this is not a science,” Katie, our web guru and my biggest cheerleader, said, seeing me ecstatic over audio that was not perfect, but not too bad to use.

What I learned is what I keep learning. This isn’t as difficult as you think it is. You can make it work.

Still, next time I’m wearing headphones and dragging along that mic – wires and all.

If you get audio and no one hears it, does it make any sound?

The chemical plant explosion shook buildings. The call from our desk told me to go directly to the emergency command center, which was under the big cloud of black smoke the officials weren’t so sure we should be breathing.

I was glad that I had been packing my briefcase over the past several months with microphones and at least a cheap digital recorder. The big gear we’ve ordered hadn’t arrived yet, but I’d been playing around with my Olympus recorder and $10 Nady microphone.

In the trunk of my car, a tool I hadn't used. The first time I’d tried to get audio in a pack journalism setting, my arm was wedged between two TV lenses, trying to hold a microphone close enough while losing feeling in my forearm. I longed for the days when I could stay back with my pen and little notebook, within earshot, jotting down quotes and pertinent information.

Screw this, I thought. This must be one reason for boom mics. Ever priced a boom? About $1,000, and I knew my boss wasn’t convinced getting audio is quite that important yet. I do, but I didn’t have that kind of cash.

When I was researching shooting video for the web, I’d read on Make Internet TV about fashioning a boom pole out of a broom. I didn’t want to tote a broom around to news scenes, but I liked the idea. I found a telescoping stage boom with a stand on sale for $22 from Musician’s Friend. I unscrewed the base and threw the pole in my car. I tried it out for the first time that day, going over the crowd, sticking the boom arm through the crowd. It worked. I even got a few nods and compliments from the TV folks, and they’ve been doing this much longer than I have.

I recorded everything. I ended up with some good emotional audio for a slide show on deadline.

I also ended up with audio that we could’ve used to better effect but didn’t.

Photographer Travis Heying shot some great video of the fire from a helicopter, but didn’t have sound to go with it. I had some compelling audio of fire chiefs talking about the difficulties of these kinds of fires and the reasons for evacuating residents because of the health risks from the smoke. I could have edited a minute of audio to put down as a track for Travis’ video. But he was up in the helicopter. I was on the ground. There was no way to get it back to the newsroom.

Despite all of our work, as a newsroom, we’ve still got a long way to go on a breaking story.

The good news: the community flocked to our web site to find out what was happening.

Oh, and despite having no audio, we were the first ones to put up video of the fire – even before television.

We’ll celebrate small victories. For now, that’s all we can do.