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Multimedia case study: Inside the smokestack
USA TODAY Special Report: The Smokestack Effect, Toxic Air and America’s Schools
By Rebecca Heslin, American University
Screenshot, courtesy USA TODAY
Multimedia gives consumers of news an opportunity to participate in the story instead of it simply being a broadcast of facts, according to a former site designer at USA TODAY.
“Storytelling can be more than text,” Wesley Lindamood, now a web designer at NPR, said. “You can tell a more nuanced story sometimes with computer-assisted reporting, photos, videos and interactive graphics to give readers more context. It makes the news consumption process more personal for users and in the best cases, it gives people the ability to take action and encourage change.”
FROM IDEA TO MULTIMEDIA PROJECT
Such was the case with a project that landed on Lindamood’s desk in mid-2008. USA TODAY enterprise reporters Brad Heath and Blake Morrison had been investigating toxic air around schools across the country since March of that year. It didn’t take long before Heath and Morrison, along with their editor Linda Matthews, realized the potential for multimedia to play a large part in what was quickly evolving into a large story. The editorial team realized the story could be told through a multi-prong way to encourage further exploration of the topic and even allow a space for readers to take action and contact officials in regard to this toxic air data.
USA TODAY SPECIAL REPORT: The Smokestack Effect
VIDEO: Toxic chemicals outside our schools | Health expert explains how to use information | A snapshot of what’s in the air
INTERACTIVE GRAPHIC: Map of schools that ranked the worst | How schools can be hit by chemicals from several different industries
“The editorial team had done a lot of upfront research before approaching the web team on this project,” Lindamood said. “For a project of this size, we sat down with all the key stakeholders and talked about the context of the project.”
The key players in the project made up a team of about 12 people by the time it launched on USA TODAY’s website and began to run in the newspaper in December of 2008. In addition to Lindamood and the editorial staff, the projects team included two designers, Ron Coddington and Chuck Rose; a design developer, Chad Palmer; a backend developer, Lou Schilling; a producer, Rhyne Piggott; a videographer and photographer, Garrett Hubbard; a video editor, Steve Elfers; a photo editor, Denny Gainer; and a graphic designer, David Evans.
Each department had at least one representative at the table at that initial meeting in the early fall of 2008, with the exception of videography and photography. Each team had different goals and ambitions for the project, Lindamood said.
“I try to always represent the user voice in these meetings,” Lindamood said. “Why does this matter to our readers? How do we make this accessible and understandable to our audience? You have to break it down and translate what the newspaper’s goals are: We have this investigative reporting on a topic that hasn’t been covered much. The developers were at the meeting to reign in the big ideas and tell us from a technical perspective what was actually feasible.”
ROME WASN’T BUILT IN A DAY
As a senior site designer, Lindamood was tasked with creating a home for all the content each department was bringing to the table. It was at those early meetings where the ambitions were laid out and priorities were set. Meeting-goers walked away with a variety of ways to tell this story and it was on Lindamood to put the pieces of the puzzle together.
“Once we’d wrapped our heads around what this project was about, I started to translate that into a series of wireframes, or basic sketches of what this homepage would look like,” he said. “We didn’t jump into code too soon, we wanted to lay out our brainstorming on paper first.”
Before any HTML coding was written, Lindamood met with designers and developers, in addition to advertising and marketing representatives, to make sure everyone’s goals were being met. Once all had signed off, the wireframes were handed off to the development team to begin work on the “backend plumbing,” Lindamood said. Designers are brought into the process at this point to work on the look and feel of the page, and are also charged with making sure the project’s design is consistent with that of the USA TODAY brand.
“The trick was giving this a unique look and feel, while still staying consistent with the voice and tone of USA TODAY,” Lindamood said. “This was a small team so we were able to work very closely with one another throughout the technical implementation. This project was higher profile than most so we had to factor in the time to get buy in from all aspects of the organization from the editor in chief to marketing and advertising.”
There’s no set process or timeframe within these projects come to fruition, Lindamood said.
“It’s not easy to boil down what large projects will take time-wise but time constraints affect the decision-making process,” he said. “In thinking about a project you have time, resources and goals. Those three things you can kind of flux to accommodate what the priorities are. If you have more of all, you can be more ambitious. But in the news business, you have to make it work with what you’ve got.”
Since the team spanned departments across the company, there was a wide spectrum of skill sets brought to the table. Site developers and designers provided expertise in HTML and CSS to create the microsite. The graphic artist incorporated Flash skills into the interactive elements. The photo and video staff used their control of the cameras to tell a visual story, then worked in Adobe PhotoShop and Final Cut Pro to edit the still photos and videos, respectively. All skills were tied together with the work of the wordsmiths in editorial to put together a cohesive package.
“The entire project was developed from scratch,” Lindamood said. “We started with the wireframes, then translated those into HTML, CSS and java script. Oftentimes you start with a few functional components and build up from there. Some things on the surface that look simple are actually incredibly complex and technical on the backend.”
For example, the microsite itself was a custom-designed development. The story pages already existed, so the team worked with the advertising packages and plugged that code into new pages. The microsite was different than working on pages within the content management system, Lindamood said, in that an entirely new page layout was developed for this project specifically.
As for the two interactive graphics — one being the map highlighting the analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data showing the schools with the highest levels of dangerous toxic chemicals, and two being the interactive graphic delving into how the chemicals and toxins actually make their way from the industrial plants to the school zones – a graphic artist was given those assignments just as he would have been given any other daily assignment. David Evans created both interactives with little involvement in the project as a whole.
TELLING A NON-VISUAL STORY VISUALLY
The videos and still photos played a similar role. In a time when newsroom video production was becoming the new norm, everyone involved knew video had to play a part. It was at this point that the video and photo staff labeled these elements a priority in the project.
“We weren’t on the ground floor of the planning behind this project,” video journalist Garrett Hubbard said. “I think people involved knew they wanted video from the start, but no one foresaw the challenges of telling a story visually about something you can’t even see.”
Hubbard was tasked with shooting both video and still photos; a scenario he deemed less than ideal as one skill always suffers when trying to do more than one thing, which he said is part of the new reality. Multi-tasking wasn’t the only challenge Hubbard faced in this assignment.
“It’s a challenge because if you don’t have anything visual, or anything even happening, then your video becomes a talking head,” Hubbard said. “That’s always really boring unless the person is really compelling. But in this case, we were dealing with a sensitive subject, as these same industrial plants that were polluting the air around the schools were the same places that were the livelihood behind these small towns. No matter how bad it was getting, people didn’t really want to talk because there was always someone they were closed to who was employed at these plants.”
Hubbard recalled only having a month’s notice to tell this story through videos. He said that while typically videos have different needs in terms of characters, and interview style, in cases like this where it’s such a complex scientific story, he worked with editorial to pull sources together.
“The reporters had been working on this for a very long time, so once I was brought on board I had to get a crash course on the topic from editorial,” Hubbard said. “It also meant getting up in the middle of the night to drive to West Virginia in hopes of getting a photo of a school bus driving by one of these plants.”
Teaming up with editorial benefits both the reporters and the videographers, Hubbard said. Reporters can use information from interviews filmed with experts, and videographers can get help from editorial with writing the narration. Editorial staff was also on hand to simplify a very complex topic such as toxic air and schools as videographers prepped for on-camera interviews.
“When I’m interviewing these tech-y, scientific people, I ask questions that are broad and I frequently ask them questions again if they start answering with jargon the average person won’t understand,” Hubbard said. Another bit of advice he provided was to “keep the camera rolling after the interview in case the subject says something really good they were too uncomfortable to say in an interview setting.”
LONG-TAIL PROJECTS: THE GIFT THAT KEEPS ON GIVING
Hubbard, along with editors Elfers and Gainer, had no more than a month to plan, produce, film and edit the video and still photos. These elements of the project shared a deadline with the launch of the entire series, both online and in the newspaper.
“On day one, we had this entire microsite, and the video and multimedia was all done,” Lindamood said. “Over time, editorial released more stories as the series continued to unfold – something that is still continuing to happen today. This is a series that still has a role on the site and is continually explored by users. You’re giving birth to all these projects, and they don’t get thrown out the next day as newspapers do so in an ideal world you’re continuing to track and see how they’re being used as time goes by.”
“Long-tail projects” such as this one continue to live on and provide a reader service just as they did on day one. So analytics are extremely useful to track success in similar cases as it’s not just the number of visitors the project gets, it’s how much time and interaction is spent on the site.
“As much info as you can glean from analytics, including patterns of how users are spending time on the site, is always key for measuring the success of a project,” Lindamood said. “It’s the place where the editorial, the technology and the user all interact that matters most.”
The team decided early on to create and implement a proprietary search tool for this project in addition to a custom-designed navigation for each page. Lindamood said the goal of this was to encourage more interaction and exploration.
“We didn’t get to do it, but I would have liked to do product testing with users through usability testing to see if people interested in this topic are finding the information they want and using it in a meaningful way – that’s the ultimate measure of success,” Lindamood said. “One interesting thing with this project was that we noticed through analytics that people were really exploring pages across the site – much more so than we had expected. Our hypothesis going into this project was that the specially designed navigation would encourage exploration. Turned out we were right on with that, and by designing a very detailed search mechanism instead of using a plain vanilla search functionality, we were able to be successful in that hypothesis.”
Perhaps the best metric for success in stories of this magnitude is change. Follow-up stories in the series have since revealed EPA officials as well as members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee vowing to improve air quality testing and regulation, especially in the areas near schools.
CHANGING THE CULTURE OF THE NEWSROOM
Both Hubbard and Lindamood said USA TODAY was in the midst of a changing newsroom culture. Reporters and editors started to think in terms of visual online packages instead of merely how many column inches a story could run.
“People recognize the importance of multimedia storytelling, but are still trying to reconcile that with the day-to-day job responsibilities,” Lindamood said.
Hubbard agreed, and said he is pleased with this evolution of the newsroom.
“The more people can identify a story’s ability for video, the better,” he said. “I’m happy with where we are as a newsroom and where we’re going with these long-term projects. I feel like I’m being liberated from the middle ground, in that I can focus on larger picture videos that can live on for a long time instead of focusing on the videos that are up one day and gone the next.”
THOUGHTS ON DIGITAL STORYTELLING
I think this is a prime example of what happens when a newsroom thinks outside the proverbial box often associated with legacy news organizations. The reporters on this story could have very easily cut ties with this assignment as soon as the first story was published in December of 2008. But Heath and Morrison, along with all others involved in this project, knew there was an opportunity at hand to not only tell a story, but show it and create a space for readers to become informed as well as take action.
I think that all of the elements are here in this case. The graphics show what the story and video cannot. I think the proprietary navigation system is of high quality and really adds to the user experience. I do think that the landing page could have been more visual versus listing the latest stories and interactive elements. Embedding the videos directly on the microsite could have been beneficial, for example.
I would not change the ability for users to search for schools by state right from the microsite, though. In thinking like a user, this is an ideal set up in that the user never strays from this special report. Presumably as soon as they see statistics on the toxicity in the air near their local schools, they’ll be intrigued to learn more and cotinue exploration of the series. If they go to a video or a story, the navigation bar is still on the page which likely led to the deep horizontal exploration users experienced. The use of video and interactive graphics in addition to the text-based stories successfully facilitated a better understanding of the story. The Q&A and Methodology tabs also made for a well-rounded reader experience in my opinion.
The beauty of this special report is that follow-up stories continue to run in both USA TODAY’s print product as well as online, which is extending the project’s shelf life. I think it’s critical to the success of a site to measure the return on investment when it comes to multimedia. Perhaps it’s best to utilize partners and outsource the cut and dry, day-to-day assignments and focus resources on those such as the toxic schools project that will live on for years to come.
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