Flash and data: When they are good « Teaching Online Journalism

Flash and data: When they are good

December 11, 2007

I’m late in posting about The New York Times’s excellent multimedia package about wrongful convictions, so a lot of you have probably already admired it. Let’s consider a few key points about it:

Made with Flash by one of the more adept Flash journalists, Tom Jackson. Not a guy who learned Flash last month. In fact, he learned it at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as a grad student.
Reporting began with a list (of 206 exonerated prisoners) from The Innocence Project. A newspaper can jump-start a large project by building on the work of an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.
The package is driven by stories. Individual, life-changing stories of men who served years in prison for crimes they did not commit.
The package is not driven by video — or by any images. Audio is the star here. SHORT audio clips, with emotional (not fact-laden) content.
The package really, truly encourages browsing by the person looking at it. Be sure to check out the drop-down menu at the top (Choose a Category for Comparison).
The Methodology/Credits screen concisely explains the reporting behind the package. This kind of transparency does a lot toward building credibility with the public.
All the names, dates, facts and audio are generated out of a database. This means the Flash developer does not sit there pasting text into boxes, but rather, he programs one box to accept structured text data, to replicate into as many boxes as needed, and then focuses his effort on the design and functionality of the package. Reporters and researchers fill in the text.

There’s a lot to think about here, in terms of how we approach a big journalism project, how we choose to tell stories, and not burying the reader/viewer in tons and tons of stuff.

Nit to pick: I really, really wish I could pause or mute the audio. If there’s a way to do it, I haven’t found it!

Tags: Flash, journalism