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.

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."

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)

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.

'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.

A pocketful of software just for journalists

Here’s a useful new tool that fits in your pocket: a USB loaded with software you may need while working on computers in other places.

Josh Sprague, writing for Mediactive, has compiled an interesting list of applications for both consuming and producing media, that fits on a USB drive, and he shows you how to load up your own.

An interesting workaround to problems you might encounter working with computers in the field.

Multimedia workflow presentation for SPJ Regional

Below is a copy of my presentation weekend at the Society of Professional Journalists Region 7 conference in Omaha, NE,

One thing about PowerPoint: it’s easy to share them later, via SlideShare.

All the links work. The videos don't, although I was able to upload the one about the lawyer searching for witnesses in Africa. It will play if you click past the slide to the next slide. Here is the related story.

Here is the package, story and video series, on the 102-year-old federal judge, Wesley Brown.

Thanks to all who attended. I appreciate the opportunity to share what I’ve learned, personally, as well as learn from the audience participation and what they do to help get their work done.

Have anymore workflow tips on how to get everything done a reporter needs to do these days? Add tips and comments. We can all learn from each other.

Making multimedia part of the work day

View more presentations from Ron Sylvester.