How to marry your online and your print

Being in D.C. on Sunday, I got a copy of The Washington Post. I didn’t get to read it until Monday, when I was on a plane. I got sucked into a story about football — American football — in, of all places, American Samoa. (Not to be confused with Western Samoa, by the way.)

Check out that refer box above. It’s about the size of a 3×5 index card. I love that it promotes a chat with the reporter that took place the following day. You should see how many comments the story got online — only a few are idiotic; most are very interesting, and even enthusiastic. Some valid criticisms were made as well.

I was a little worried because the refer didn’t give me any URL, and since it was Monday — well, I knew the story was long gone from the home page. But I typed “samoa” into the search box on the front page of the site, and I got a relevant results list, with the video I wanted at spot No. 9. I also realized later that everything related to this story was linked on the story page — including the chat transcript, even though that went up online later.

The video (7 min. 24 sec.) was hard to watch on the ultra-slow wireless in my hotel room, and I realized for the first time that recent Post videos do not download at all. That is, on a lousy connection, you can’t pause and wait for the darned thing to complete. It never does. So I skipped ahead six or seven times and watched it in fits and starts. I will watch it properly when I get a real connection, but man, what a shame that you can’t let it load so you can enjoy it if you’re cursed with slow “broadband.”

The pre-roll ad played perfectly, of course. No fits and starts there, no, none.

This story is by no means a highly produced “package.” Even though the parts are linked on one page, they open up into new pages that fail to link back to the main story. This story is part of a larger, long-term package about sports: Why We Compete. Not all the segments have been published yet. (This story is Part 4 of 8.)

I think the handling of this story — in its print and online formats — would make a wonderful topic for a brown-bag lunch discussion in any newsroom.

As you strive to integrate your print and your online, to make them work together effectively, here’s a model where one writer and one videographer went somewhere (okay, it was almost halfway around the world, but it wouldn’t have to be that far away!) and came back with a really interesting story. Then they figured out (with the help of editors, no doubt) how to produce remarkably non-redundant modules in different formats.

The text story was absolutely right to run on Page One (the sentence just before the jump compelled me to turn the page), and they gave it two full pages inside. The photos in my copy of the newspaper didn’t look very good (muddy color), and I have to say, they were not very engaging pictures. I think they may be frame grabs, and if they are, they make a strong argument against using frame grabs. But I’m a bit worried about saying that, as I’m no photographer.

There are four 360-degree panoramas online, and I found them interesting because they helped provide a sense of place.

The graphic elements are a small map (print only) and a large infographic, mostly text, that was identical in print and online.