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.

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."

What happens in Vegas gets blogged

I'm headed to Las Vegas today for the Society of Professional Journalists National Convention.  I'll blog what I'm learning, and I always pick up some valuable tips. SPJ provides some cutting edge sessions.

You can also follow the #spj10 hashtag on Twitter to see what everyone is talking about.

If you're in Vegas, send me a message on Twitter or stop by the 60 Sites in 60 Minutes session I'm doing with Jeff Cutler at 3:30 p.m. Monday in Melrose A. We'll also be hosting a tweetup Monday night. Watch Twitter for the details.

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.

Quick lessons in newsroom geek speak

Ever see Twitter posting minutes after you’ve tweeted? May be something with the API. Hear folks talking about cloud computing and not sure what they mean? Create a Google Doc, and you’re doing it.

Wonder what the hell I’m talking about? Poynter has the answers with a “Digital Journalist Survival Guide: A Glossary of Tech Terms You Should Know.”

It will help you understand what your web team. And it will help you understand your job. You need to know these terms as well as you do "ledes," "cutlines" or "b-roll."

'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.

Why I love my Twitter followers

I’ve been drawing a paycheck as a journalist for 33 years now, and for all of the past three I never knew if anyone really read anything I’d reported unless they were angry.

That changed the past three years, when I began reporting via Twitter.

Until then, the only feedback journalists got were usually a letter to the editor or a short, terse phone call. Over the phone, you could hear them screaming. It usually took a special kind of anger to make someone sit down and write, in detail, why they hated me and my future spawn, because they disagreed with something I’d written.

In those days, journalists rarely heard from anyone unless they were hacked off. Occasionally, a colleague, or someone you knew, might say they liked something you wrote. But mostly, it was readers and editors telling you what you did wrong.

Twitter changed everything. I’ve gotten more encouragement and support on during the past three years on Twitter than in the past three decades before that.

I’m not the only one. Tom Jolly, sports editor of the New York Times, has found a similar experience. We met at the New York Press Association Convention, where he spoke on how the Times uses social media.

“The conversations on Twitter tend to be more civil,” Jolly said. “There’s a lot less of the ‘You’re an idiot’ type of posts. And that’s not always true of conversations elsewhere on the web.”

Part of it, I think, is that people on Twitter choose to follow what I do, rather than just having it thrown on their doorstep. Online journalism gives people more choices, and they can pick where they want to receive their information as never before.

Also, social networks like Twitter allows journalists to connect with their community as never before. This is one reason I advocate for keeping one Twitter account for both professional and personal use. I received some chiding by some folks who had followed me for the Roeder trial that they didn’t realize they’d also get such detail on weekends from Kansas-based basketball teams. Or when my kids wreck the car, or when I have knee surgery.

But these details have helped people get to know me. They know I’m more than a byline on a page, and I think knowing me personally will help them determine whether they want to keep getting information from me. It’s helped bring me closer to crime victims who I cover. I’ve made friends on Twitter, some of whom have become close personal friends. Others make me laugh, and we talk, even though we may never have met.

And the comments I get on Twitter are usually more thoughtful, and less confrontational, than the anonymous reader comments left on news web sites.

That’s one reason that after a busy day in court, or the end of the big trial, I try to remember to thank everyone who follows me. It’s not something I do because I think I should. I really appreciate everyone who chooses to listen to the stories I tell. And I always ask for criticism, because I do want to know how to do my job better. Usually, responses come in the form of suggestions, and those have helped me pace my tweets better during a busy part of a trial, give background, and link to other sources.

I do love my Twitter followers. And I take much more from them than what I may put out in the course of my daily news coverage. After 30 years of hearing little more than criticism and insults, the more congenial atmosphere of Twitter has helped given me a much brighter outlook on being a journalist. For that, I thank them.

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.

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.

Textual healing: The Roeder trial ends with a shot for out web site

Covering a murder trial can be as invigorating as it is grueling. The pressure increases when that trial becomes a national story, as it did with Scott Roeder, convicted of murdering Wichita abortion provider George Tiller.

As I said last week, I was assigned to report for web only. Another reporter took care of the print story. I did what I had been doing for the past two years of court reporting, using Twitter for my dispatches.

I’ve received attention for tweeting trials before. But this time, more people than ever were watching my twitter feeds. And we learned even more how valuable it was to driving traffic to our web sites.

Web producer Eba Hamid said early in the trial that every time I tweeted a link to a courtroom video, it got double the page views.

At the end of every trial, I routinely ask people for feedback, and I got 11 pages of responses.

Among them:

• @lummox_ict: @rsylvester Thanks for the tweets! Could you do the same thing for Avatar.
• @JenWPortraits: Thanks again to @rsylvester for lowering employee productivity all over Wichita this week. Great job!
• And @ryansholin (who introduced me to Twitter): @rsylvester’s tweets from the Roeder Trial kept me engaged with a story I’d usually only read as a headline from a national news org.

Back in the newsroom, Eba and content editor Lori O’Toole Buselt took my tweets and crafted them into text blocks for the daily trial updates. I would tweet links to those throughout the day, so people could catch up without having the read thought a bunch of tweets, scattered in the timelines with the rest of their Twitter friends.

Without rewriting the day’s events for print, however, I found myself missing one important element of what I do: writing and storytelling.

Sure, I always say Twitter helps you right tight. With a 140-character limit, there’s no room for wasted words. And people like you to filter their information. We are journalists, after all, and that’s what we do. But it’s just not the same as crafting a good story.

I got to do that at the end of the trial. My tradeoff for doing web only was I agreed to work on a narrative that was supposed to run in Sunday’s newspaper. It was a magazine-length article, taken from the week’s testimony. But when the obits ran two long in Sunday’s paper, it was sent to the web site only.

I'd been totally shut out of print for this trial.

Did it matter? Well, it was the No. 1 read story today on Kansas.com. It drew more readers, comments and reactions than the weekend’s basketball game between the University of Kansas and Kansas State, the local Wichita State basketball team, and an online database of traffic tickets that had dominated the top spot with readers for weeks.

It also shows people will read a story, no matter where it's told.

Reporting for web only during the Scott Roeder murder trial

My first day as a web-only reporter ended promptly at 5 p.m. – a rarity in my three decades of journalism. That’s when court let out in the Scott Roeder murder trial in the shooting of a Wichita abortion doctor. It has been receiving national coverage.

I had been accustomed to staying late after court to rewrite the day’s events on the web for print. But for this trial another reporter is handling the print story, which also appears online as the day-after report.

Despite leaving early, I was exhausted. A courtroom deputy commented on how my fingers were flying across my Bluetooth keyboard with my Blackberry. One of my Twitter followers posted a picture of me taken from a screen grab of the television coverage, as I frantically filed updates. Note: I need to learn to sit up straight on those wooden court benches.

I was actually writing two updates. In addition to the filing Twitter updates, which were coming anywhere from 1-5 minutes apart, I was filing longer dispatches for our web site, which they were posting time-stamped, blog style. Online wanted those every 10-15 minutes.

All fed onto our trial page. We know some people watch the Twitter feed from our Kansas.com page, without ever having to go to Twitter. For people who don’t want to watch the up-to-the-minute tweets, they can come back to the page every so often and catch up with what’s going on, while having the Twitter stream available to see what’s happening at that minute.

For additional multimedia, we have a still photographer in the courtroom, and a laptop in the pressroom downloading the video pool stream. Travis Heying, at one point, was shooting stills in the courtroom and running into another part of the courthouse on breaks to edit and upload video from his Mac. Later in the day, Mike Hutmacher took over as the still pool reporter in the courtroom and Travis took care of video.

Also notice our links section on the trial page. We are linking to other local and national coverage, including blogs and commentary on the case.

Inspiration for the links came from a session at the SPJ National Convention last year called “All the News That’s Fit to Link.” If you’re an SPJ member, you can hear an audio download of that session.

Bill Adee, editor of digital media for the Chicago Tribune, spoke in that session about the success his staff saw when they started linking to other coverage within their own.

“People aren’t going to stop reading when they finish your story,” he said. They’re going to get on Google and search out other information. Why not be the launching spot to guide them.

After all, as Adee and panelist Scott Karp pointed out, knowledgeable humans ought to be able to put together a better list than a Google bot.

With this trial, we’re trying to put together all the learning we’ve been doing about web reporting over the last several years and put it into practice.

I’d love to hear what others think about our efforts: what you like, what you don’t like, what we’re doing right and what we could do better. After all, the news is always an evolutionary process.

Prying the print byline from the hands of an old newspaper reporter

Last week began the trial of Scott Roeder, the accused killer of a Wichita abortion doctor.  It’s the latest story I’ve covered through my courts beat that has gained national attention (strange how many national crime stories have come out of Wichita). The trial is still in jury selection so the true onslaught of national media has not yet arrived, but we’ve already been making plans on how we’ll cover the story.

But one suggestion kind of shook me.  My editors pulled me into the office and told me they wanted me to concentrate on producing for online: doing live updates on Twitter, as I had been doing for the past two years, filing behind-the-scenes notes on my blog and updating the main story each day that would go on our web site.

True, this was kind of my dream when I first started throwing myself into online years ago.  This is the future of news.  It’s where the audience is growing. I would be the lead reporter on our web site with a story on the national stage.

But I hesitated.  The old newspaper reporter of 33 years still takes pride in that print byline on the front page, above the fold.  After all, that’s when I can take the day’s 140-character dispatches from Twitter, the brief blog posts, the scratched from banging out the latest online update, and turn them into a well-written story at the end of the day.  Someone else would be doing that now with “my story.”

I was the only one who felt this way.

“Do you like working all day and all night?” my wife asked. “If they offer you help, take it.”

“Who still reads print anyway?” said my friend Emanuella Grinberg of CNN.com. “Your biggest audience is online, anyway.”  She should know. She's a full-time online reporter.

Of course, this is what I had been preaching on this blog, and to my colleagues for years.  I know online will eventually replace print.  But it also showed me that like others in this business. I was a little more hesitant to give up the print cycle than I would like to have admitted.

And for just a moment, I felt my age.

“Sure, no problem,” I told my editors. “I’ll do online only.”

Size doesn't matter: Why metrics are no longer important to my beat blog

John Ensslin and I were talking over lunch at the National Journalism Conference last month in Indianapolis, pondering why the numbers on our news blogs weren't soaring as they did on the daily stories we posted off the crime beat.

We're both courthouse reporters. John produces " for the Colorado Springs Gazette. I do "What the Judge Ate for Breakfast for the Wichita Eagle. Like most news sites, we get metrics reports each day -- the kind that can drive old newspaper reporters nuts.

"Most of my stories are usually in the top three each day, but my blog isn't getting that kind of traffic," John said.

Neither was mine.

We discussed ways we might drive more traffic to our blogs.  Then when I returned to the home newsroom, I asked web guru Katie for advice.

"Stop looking at the numbers," she said.

Katie does know best.

Used to be, back when we banged on typewriters, circulation was the only number that counted. We just figured people were reading, because we were providing important information. Now that we know who is clicking on each story, and how long they're staying, we've become disciples of pageviews. We've also learned that the weird or salacious stories get the numbers -- not always our best work.

John and I both had revelatory experiences since our visit in Indy

A courthouse source called me with a story tip. This is someone I like and value, who had never called me with a story tip in my 10 years on the beat.

"I love your videos," the caller said, talking about the 2-minute documentaries from the courthouse I produce several times a week.

I received an email from an acquaintance from the Criminal Justice Department at Wichita State University saying a professor there was using those same videos in class.

I'd call that useful content.

John had a similar story, when we reconnected via email:

I was watching a verdict in a drug trial. It wasn't a big enough case to make the print paper, so I went ahead and posted it on my blog within a minute of the verdict.

Within one minute of posting, the judge in the case stepped out of his chambers and says "I see you've posted the verdict on your blog."

That made me realize that, in a very immediate way, the blog is my connection to the court house beat. Sure, it has all the candlepower of a kitchen nightlight (to borrow a line from David Carr) but it's also my way to own this beat online.

Not that we've given up on numbers: I'm confident that the people who read daily stories off the news pages will eventually find the little extras we do. Lori O'Toole Buselt, our web content editor at the Eagle, began linking to my blog from my daily stories and printing refers to the blog in the print edition. I'm also working to add some of the best practices I've read on BeatBlogging.org

But I'm also reminded what a good friend of mine, Michael "Supe" Granda told me years ago about his life as songwriter in Nashville. In any given club, on any stage, Mike said you'll see singers and bands playing their souls out, even if there's only a handful of people in the audience.
"Because in Nashville, you never know who's out there," he said. That small audience might include the music reviewer for the Tennessean or the executive with a major-label recording contract.

Sometimes it's who's paying attention, not how many.

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.

60 sites in 60 minutes: stampeding the SPJ Convention

Jeff Cutler and I were overwhelmed by the response to our session Saturday at the SPJ National Convention.

"Site Stampede: 60 web sites in 60 minutes" drew a large, lively crowd anxious to learn what we'd linked to around the web.

You can download a copy of the links (.doc) and Mitch Davis posted a series of videos, for those who couldn't attend.

We're hoping to do it again next year in Vegas. And if you come across any sites we missed or want to explore more, let us know.

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.

Breaking news without video, and still drawing hits

I returned from vacation to one of those two-week periods where the news broke at such a hectic pace that the days ran together, prompting calls from the copy desk late on a Monday night asking “Ron, did you really mean to say Friday, or did you mean Monday?”

Two local stories kept me on Page 1 and too damned tired at the end of each day to write another word—even in my blog. Now, however, I think of stories first in on-line terms, and each of these had different challenges in an interactive, or multimedia, world.

The Biz reporters broke the first one: the new amusement park, highly touted in these parts for more than a year as rare tourist draw, closed after only two months, owing money to nearly everyone within 100 miles. When one attraction is the world’s biggest ball of twine, which on some days is really smaller than one in Minnesota, touts of tourism growth get people all riled up. When the promise crashes, the tumble is all the tougher.

Once the second bankruptcy pleading rolled in, however, an editor ran to me and said “You cover courts: can you figure this out?” Bankruptcy is a specialized area, which we don’t usually cover it in this much detail. Those details included the Yellow Pages scrambling to take the failed business off its cover and the auction of corn dogs and frozen foods to raise some quick cash.

Multimedia? Our photographer Travis Heying had put together a cool panorama before the park opened which spoke now of emptiness rather than potential. But other than that, this was a document-heavy story. We put the source documents on-line – very 1999.

Interactive? You bet. The readers filled pages of comments. Everyone had an opinion and needed a place to express it. People were visiting our web site to post and read comments as much as to read the stories. The content of those comments showed they were reading.

And we owned the story. With no opportunity for fresh video, TV wasn’t following the bankruptcy proceedings and our numbers were growing daily.

Maybe there’s still room for good old-fashioned newspapering, no matter how it’s delivered.

Then the chemical plant north of town exploded.

The way it ought to work

I'm on vacation this week, kicking back at a lake in the beautiful hills of Arkansas, with my wife and the five children in our extended family. But I didn't want the blog to go neglected too long ...

On my last assignment before vacation, I covered a celebration U.S. District Judge Wesley Brown, who is still active at age 100. Judge Brown is quite a character and still well respected withing the judiciary. But our coverage, when it extended to the web, worked like we'd all been hoping it would, and maybe, that the multimedia bug is starting to spread around the newsroom.

I've received some e-mails since I started this blog about work flow, and it's something everyone has been struggling over trying to conquer. One reason, I believe, is because some of us jumped right on multimedia and embraced it. Others still aren't quite so sure. That left a few people doing much of the work. But the slide show on Judge Brown shows that all we really need is a little communication and encouragement.

That morning, I got with Bo Rader of our photo department and began talking about options for the web component of this story. We agreed that a crowd of invited guests talking about the celebrated judge might not make exciting video. But we decided I'd pick up some audio, and we'd see what kind of pictures we were able to get with an eye on a slide show.

Jeff Tuttle, our photographer, was wary the quality of photos once he arrived in a courtroom, where more than 150 people sat listening to people talk. But by the end of the afternoon, he was more excited, because Judge Brown had been so animated throughout the event. The federal court system had taken care of the audio problems, providing a plug-in box for my recorder. I was just glad I'd brought an XLR connection.

Jeff processed the pictures, I edited a minute of audio, and Bo put everything together, coming over to show it to me on his laptop as I finished up the story. I did the audio first, so I knew what was going to be in the slide show. That way, I knew I didn't need to put that in the story. I also selected audio that I thought showed the judge's personality and sense of humor it a way that wouldn't come through the printed page.

We worked as a team, saved time and it came together pretty well on deadline, I thought. At least, most of us made it home in time for dinner.

I'm still of the mind that reporters ought to be the ones collecting and editing audio. I was willing to ditch it if we didn't end up with enough pictures for a slide show. But that should be the decision of the photo department. Edit the audio, drop an MP3 into a shared folder, and see if they can pull together photos to fit. Bo said after he got the audio clip and photos, it took him about "five seconds" to put it all together.

That's the way it ought to work.

Now, there's a lake and a boat waiting ...

Quest for maps

It’s easy to be seduced by video and audio slide shows. They are like magic to print reporters who, until now, have been confined to words and the dreaded “info” boxes to relay information.

But multimedia isn’t just about pictures that move or fade, zoom or pan. We now have all sorts of tools to convey a story. We don’t have to do this all by ourselves. Photographers will produce better visuals. Graphic artists and designers will make it look prettier. But it will be up to us to bring home the information, the details that give the artist’s canvas color and detail.

Just as we’ve learned how to make graphic requests and photo assignments, we need to understand the tools.

Rule No. 5 of Multimedia: Embrace Google Maps.

Go ahead. You can even make one.

Get started right away with Atlas or MapMaker.

Mindy McAdams has blogged about this in detail.

There's a great tutorial to learn the basics.

Look at what my colleague Hurst Laviana did last week on a story about unsolved homicides. Each point gives a thumbnail of the cold case. All he needed was an Excel spreadsheet with the location, and pretty much the map programs did the rest.

OK, nothing’s perfect. Our programming goddess Katie fixed all the random dots that turned up in another hemisphere, even though the spreadsheet specifically said Kansas. Doesn’t Google Maps know we have a street that runs right down the Sixth Principle Meridian? The street is even called Meridian. It’s not in Arizona somewhere.

So everything has bugs. But Katie is skillful in Google Maps, so if there’s a problem, she can fix it.

To learn more about Google maps, courtesy of the experts at NICAR, especially Matt Waite and Jeremy Milarsky:

Read this, or at least talk someone in your newsroom into reading it: "Beginning Google Maps Applications with Rails and Ajax: From Novice to Professional," by By Andre Lewis
Michael Purvis, Jeffrey Sambells, Cameron Turner
(Apress 2007)

Check out the Google Maps blog. If you want to go even deeper.

Google Maps Mania: The Beatlemania of Google Maps. Kind of.

While we don’t have to know how to program all this, we at least need a basic understanding of what we'll need to set up your spreadsheet, so someone else can map it easily.

We’re just training in Flash. Pretty soon, we may be able to do the kind of cool stuff they do in Oakland.

That's what I'm talking about.