Investigative story as multimedia package

In comments about the 2005 IRE Award Winners, the judges had this to say about the Bergen County (N.J.) Record’s top medal-winning story, Toxic Legacy:

This work stood out not only for its exhaustive reporting and clear writing, but for its riveting multimedia presentation, which set a standard to which larger publications and broadcast outlets should aspire.

You KNOW that got MY attention! I have now spent several hours inside that multimedia package, and I have a few thoughts about it.

The story is astounding. You would expect that from an IRE Medalist (the investigative journalism equivalent of Olympic Gold), but unlike some large investigative projects, here the story has a compelling (even heart wrenching) human side, as hundreds of rural residents suffer still from the effects of paint and other toxic substances dumped in the North Jersey woods by agents of the Ford Motor Co. in the 1960s and 1970s. The five-part series ran in The Record in October 2005.

The production quality of the online package is fantastic. Designed and programmed by Yuri V. Demidov, the Toxic Legacy package is one of the best online journalism packages ever. I have explored hundreds of multimedia journalism packages online during the past five years, and I say “one of the best” without reservation. The first-rate design and production aspects include:

• Single-screen experience: No pop-up windows, no flinging the unsuspecting user outside to separate HTML pages. There are elements that open in new, full-size browser windows — PDFs, a discussion forum, and a set of HTML pages for each story from the print newspaper — but (a) each of these is clearly labeled as an external element, and (b) the package functions as a complete story unit without these.
• Screen-appropriate fonts: Too many Flash packages have blurry or hard-to-read text. Demidov used aliased sans-serif text that is highly legible on a screen, both as black-on-white AND white-on-black. (Caveat: The text is small and cannot be sized up by the user.)
• Persistent navigation: After the intro, all sections of the package are available at all times, no matter where you go inside the package. Navigation is segmented into three congruous sets, each containing no more than five links. You NEVER need to click Back to return to the navigation.
• Suitable for a wide audience in 2006: The package fills the screen at 1024 x 768 resolution without spawning any scrollbars, and it loads quickly most of the time (I found it to be sluggish on Sunday morning, but for the whole previous week, it was lickety-split). One user in the discussion forums complained that people on the low half of the digital divide would not be able to access this package, but I don’t think it makes sense to build content for the slowest and oldest technologies in use, any more than it would make sense to build only for the fastest and newest. In journalism, we aim for the middle. This is the middle today: Flash player 7/8, 1024 x 768 resolution, DSL connection.
• Understated and consistent animation effects, graphics and interface cues: These include the purpose-built text scroller, small 3-D buttons to open contextual still photos and videos, and transitional wipes and fades.

The package would be better if it didn’t follow such obvious print newspaper conventions. Although Demidov has smoothly integrated large photos and videos (shot by Record photojournalist Thomas E. Franklin), the primary metaphor for the package is five print newspaper stories. These are excellently reformatted, true — and the integration of the photos and video works wonderfully well, true — but the bottom line is still that five PRINT stories have been placed on the Web as essentially PRINT stories.

I can easily imagine a dozen reasons for this, and I do not mean to put anyone down by making this observation.

Here’s my own deep-rooted stake in all this: We who care about journalism all want stories like this to matter. We want them to be known and talked about. We want them to make a difference. That means the public, the people, have to hear, see, learn, read — the story. This story is so well-written (exceptionally so), it would surely be read by lots of newspaper readers if it appeared on Page One. It draws you in fast, and it holds your attention. Amazingly, this is true of each one of the five installments. The Record’s reporters and editors really did themselves proud.

But that’s not how online grabs and holds us. Even writing as good as this can’t do the job alone.

Imagine reading text on your TV, with few or no pictures, and no sound. Even if the text is big and legible, you’re going to push a button on your remote pretty quick.

People WILL read a lot of this story in the package, because it is such a good story. But more people would read it — and more important, MANY MORE people would get the gist of the story even if they DIDN’T read a lot of it — if the story were designed to be more in tune with the online medium.

So here are just a few ideas for how that might work, using this story as the example:

• Provide multiple entry points based on key story elements: the people harmed by the toxic sludge in the woods (so many stories! Such good pictures!); the places (an animated map would show relevance immediately to many residents of northern New Jersey); the problem (it affects everyone’s drinking water); the responsible parties (both Ford and the companies it hired to dump the waste; officials who ignored the pollution or inadequately addressed the cleanup). I might go to any one of these first, if I had the choice. Any one of them could be the hook that reels me into the story. I am advocating a different approach to the story than the print convention of putting out five full-text stories. It’s a different kind of narrative, better suited to this medium because it gives the user more ways to go inside the story.
• Use pictures to pique curiosity and open pathways into the story: This package begins with five photos, but after the intro, the pictures act merely as add-ons to the text. Photos galleries available in the supplementary materials have typical (short) newspaper captions, which do not engage the user. Online techniques such as moving, zooming, and cross-fading still photos can hold a user’s attention either during a voiceover or in conjunction with text interspersed with the animated photos. Think in terms of movie trailers (previews): You engage the user’s senses by continually switching content for a duration of about a minute. It nails the eyeballs to the screen. It’s almost like taking the user prisoner, just briefly. This technique can be exploited to expose the user to key ideas in the story.
• Maximize your graphics: This story is accompanied by beautiful maps from The Record’s Bob Rebach, but the potential goes far beyond what we see here. One missed opportunity in this package is size. These maps could be much larger, and they would be more useful (and usable) if they were. (There are about six maps in the Maps & Charts section; the most significant to the story is probably the one linked from “Ford dumping ground” within that section. Several of the maps could have been integrated into one storytelling device online.) An animated map that zooms in from an overview of northern New Jersey to the site of this story would orient the user and also show relevance. Used in conjunction with a voiceover, or animated text explaining how everyone’s water supply might be affected, it would be a sure attention-getter. A nice additional infographic would be one that showed the relationship of water flows and reservoirs to the polluted area.
• Video online must be short and tightly content-focused: Photojournalist Franklin shot most of the video himself, and I must say the production quality is really nice! But people’s attention span for video on the Web is pretty short, unless there’s some action — and there’s NO action in most of these videos. However, there are excellent overviews of the wooded area where the hardened sludge lies like candy-colored lava flows, and also some really poignant one-on-one interviews with affected residents of the area. They just need to be edited down more ruthlessly. I see this at a lot of the newspaper sites. It’s certainly going to improve as these new video shooters gain experience in the medium.

So there it is, my two cents. I have to reiterate that the Toxic Legacy package is a marvelous accomplishment, and I hope to see great work in the future from both Yuri Demidov and The Record.

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