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 news blogs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label news blogs. 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.
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Ways to use Tumblr for journalism
I signed up for Tumblr about the same time I signed up for Twitter three years ago. But basically I’ve just used the tumblelog for personal musings.
It’s another great platform for microblogging, including photos, videos and short text posts, and people can comment quickly, “liking” your post, as on Facebook, or “reblogging” it to others.
Now, Chris Cameron reports, larger news outlets are turning to Tumblr, too.
I like what the New Yorker is doing.
Life is posting what it does best, photographs, including updating the stories behind some of its classics. Elle is posting fashion shots off the runway and off the streets.
Others have created tumblelogs but don’t have any content. Can't wait to see what Rolling Stone does.
It’ll be interesting to follow these and see how Tumblr can fit into our personal role as reporters.
For more details and links, check out Business Insider’s report.
(Via Kevin O’Keefe on Twitter)
It’s another great platform for microblogging, including photos, videos and short text posts, and people can comment quickly, “liking” your post, as on Facebook, or “reblogging” it to others.
Now, Chris Cameron reports, larger news outlets are turning to Tumblr, too.
I like what the New Yorker is doing.
Life is posting what it does best, photographs, including updating the stories behind some of its classics. Elle is posting fashion shots off the runway and off the streets.
Others have created tumblelogs but don’t have any content. Can't wait to see what Rolling Stone does.
It’ll be interesting to follow these and see how Tumblr can fit into our personal role as reporters.
For more details and links, check out Business Insider’s report.
(Via Kevin O’Keefe on Twitter)
Friday, June 11, 2010
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 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.
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.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
The new front pages, going viral and the myth of the nut graph
The story of the 102-year-old judge was almost an after-thought. The goal was to get U.S. District Judge Wesley Brown on video. But what happened from that exploded on our web site.
I’d first interviewed Brown when he was a spry 93. No one at my news organization had ever profiled the judge appointed for a life term by President John F. Kennedy. Judge Brown still worked full-time, took the stairs to the top floor of the federal courthouse every day and earned high respect and praise from his colleagues and the lawyers who faced him.
I said I’d do another story on him, when he turned 100. But that was before I began getting serious about multimedia. I had not gotten the judge on video.
It’s one thing to write about a man who has lived from the crank telephone to the Internet. People who’d heard about Brown, but didn’t know him, would ask: Is he really still sharp and qualified to be a judge. By hearing him talk and watching him, people would see what others did, and why most still had confidence in Judge Brown. They would also see why I no longer worry about birthdays.
Brown was reluctant. “I don’t have to do interviews,” the judge told me. “That’s not a part of my job. But I’m doing this, because it’s you.” Working hard on your beat has its reward.
I’d worked it out with our online crew to put do a series of videos on the “Common Law” video series on my courts blog. Although there’s nothing common about Judge Brown, I thought it fitting. Brown had always told me he wanted to be remembered as a good judge, not just one who lived a long time.
But after the videos started appearing, editors on the print side asked if I could do a text story for the newspaper. I wrote a short story, taking bits from the interview that didn’t make the videos. I had recently read a story in the doctor’s office pointing to studies that showed people who lived to 100 often worked.
The story didn’t have a news peg. Brown didn’t have any particularly notable cases that week. He wasn’t celebrating a birthday. And it didn’t have what anyone might recognize as a nut graph.
But it was a story about an interesting person. Human interest.
The story was the No. 1 one story on Kansas.com the first day it appeared.
Then Yahoo! picked it up for its front page. Online editors watched the page views ring up like a slot machine that had just hit the jackpot. The videos of Judge Brown that week surpassed anything we’d done before.
The American Bar Association Journal linked to it. So did the Wall Street Journal.
The story didn’t make the front page of our newspaper. But more people read it than any other story, and it probably set a standard for the year, according to our online editors.
Yahoo!, Google, MSN and Facebook are the new front pages and circulation that make our work go viral.
And the reaction is proof that an interesting story, whether it has a news hook, a nut graph, or not, will gain attention.
I’d first interviewed Brown when he was a spry 93. No one at my news organization had ever profiled the judge appointed for a life term by President John F. Kennedy. Judge Brown still worked full-time, took the stairs to the top floor of the federal courthouse every day and earned high respect and praise from his colleagues and the lawyers who faced him.
I said I’d do another story on him, when he turned 100. But that was before I began getting serious about multimedia. I had not gotten the judge on video.
It’s one thing to write about a man who has lived from the crank telephone to the Internet. People who’d heard about Brown, but didn’t know him, would ask: Is he really still sharp and qualified to be a judge. By hearing him talk and watching him, people would see what others did, and why most still had confidence in Judge Brown. They would also see why I no longer worry about birthdays.
Brown was reluctant. “I don’t have to do interviews,” the judge told me. “That’s not a part of my job. But I’m doing this, because it’s you.” Working hard on your beat has its reward.
I’d worked it out with our online crew to put do a series of videos on the “Common Law” video series on my courts blog. Although there’s nothing common about Judge Brown, I thought it fitting. Brown had always told me he wanted to be remembered as a good judge, not just one who lived a long time.
But after the videos started appearing, editors on the print side asked if I could do a text story for the newspaper. I wrote a short story, taking bits from the interview that didn’t make the videos. I had recently read a story in the doctor’s office pointing to studies that showed people who lived to 100 often worked.
The story didn’t have a news peg. Brown didn’t have any particularly notable cases that week. He wasn’t celebrating a birthday. And it didn’t have what anyone might recognize as a nut graph.
But it was a story about an interesting person. Human interest.
The story was the No. 1 one story on Kansas.com the first day it appeared.
Then Yahoo! picked it up for its front page. Online editors watched the page views ring up like a slot machine that had just hit the jackpot. The videos of Judge Brown that week surpassed anything we’d done before.
The American Bar Association Journal linked to it. So did the Wall Street Journal.
The story didn’t make the front page of our newspaper. But more people read it than any other story, and it probably set a standard for the year, according to our online editors.
Yahoo!, Google, MSN and Facebook are the new front pages and circulation that make our work go viral.
And the reaction is proof that an interesting story, whether it has a news hook, a nut graph, or not, will gain attention.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Talking Twitter with BeatBlogger about microblogging the news
Patrick Thornton of Beatblogging.org called last week to talk about how I use Twitter to cover trials.
Also look up Patrick on Twitter @jionoclast.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
SPJ Convention all a-Twitter with new media and online journalism learning
Random notes from the SPJ National Convention which ending Sunday …
Some SPJ members may see the organization as still being for a bunch of old newspaper dudes. You may think curmudgeons rule, but you couldn’t tell that by attending the workshops and sessions in Atlanta.
“People are getting new media here and loving it,” Molly McDonough said. “I don’t get that back in my newsroom.”
I would agree.
SPJ has kept its high-tech ambitions a secret to some, however. That’s evident this week, after SPJ’s Convention struggled with lower attendance, but the Online News Association, meeting this week in Washington D.C. sold out in advance.
Nevertheless, I didn’t talk to one person who came to Atlanta already a devotee of online and new media who didn’t rave about the conference and promise to return next year.
A few of the highlights:
Sree Sreenivasan on “Figuring Out Blogs & Whatever’s Next” – Every journalist should have a blog and know how to use it. Post often. And keep it short.
- “If you can’t sell it in six words, you can’t do it in 6,000,” he said.
Howard Owens on Reinventing Journalism, included his 10 Things Journalists Can Do:
Among them:
- Include informed insight and personal voice.
- Stop competing for scoops and awards
- Cover people not processes
- Be kinder.
- Be smarter.
- Emphasize accuracy, honesty, and transparency.
- Be the guide. Be the filter. There is a fire hose of information. Help your readers find it.
Molly and I got a great reaction on our "60 web sites in 60 minutes".
- It included a showing of Facebook with this live update: “Molly is thinking Ron should pick it up a bit or we won't get to 50.”
Want to find out what you missed? Or maybe you were there and want to pick up some sessions you missed.
You can from two of my new friends:
Rene Gutel wrote some great blog posts about the sessions she attended.
So did Jeff Cutler
And as always, you can read the reports from the talented students covering the convention onThe Working Press.
Don’t expect SPJ to retain its curmudgeonly image forever. We’ve put together a Digital Media Committee, which I’m co-chairing. You’ll see other of our members posting here in the future.
After all, nearing its 100th birthday, SPJ is the original social network for journalism.
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