Multimedia storytelling starts to grow up

I have a theory: Put “graphics” in a panel title anywhere outside a Society of News Design conference, and attendance will be low — but use the words “Flash” or “storytelling,” and that room will fill up.

Three news graphic artists showed examples of their online work to a packed room during a panel titled “Integrating Multimedia in Storytelling” at the Online News Association conference, on Friday afternoon. I don’t think anyone in the audience was unhappy to be looking at great animated graphics. But I do think half of those people would not have come if the panel had been called “Great Online News Graphics.” I don’t know why — maybe people think “graphics” means “pie chart”?

Newsweek graphics? Yes!

I loved it when Xaquin Gonzalez Veira (assistant art director for Newsweek, responsible for the magazine’s online interactive graphics) implored us to make multimedia pieces “real stories” — not merely add-ons to something else such as a text article.

He called this 3-D package about IEDs (improvised explosive devices) “a failure,” because it isn’t able to stand alone. His team wanted to add an audio interview with a military expert on IEDs, but they ran out of time. Gonzalez counted as a success this original treatment of the September 11 anniversary — The Hole in Manhattan’s Heart — because it can stand on its own. The idea was to look at other huge building projects that had been started and completed since 2001, while the infamous site at Ground Zero remains barren.

From the first, it was conceived as a multimedia piece, and not as anything else, Gonzalez said. It was the lead feature on the Newsweek site and at MSNBC.com that day. It drew eight times the traffic of the next most-visited feature.

This story impressed me because I wanted to learn more, immediately, about why construction still has not begun at the New York site. Great journalism: Make me ask why, make me want to find the answer, and give me the means to do so.

Outgrowing bad Tribune technology

At the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, interactive graphics were long consigned to a ghetto of hidden sections and pop-up windows, in spite of a talented group of artists and award-winning projects. Why? Because of the weak content management system imposed on the organization by the corporate parent, Tribune Co.

Len De Groot (graphics director at the Sun-Sentinel) showed us how a new CMS is finally allowing graphics to appear where they belong: front and center, at the top of the page. Check it out. He made a couple of wry cracks about “putting in a change order” to the CMS vendor — which seemed to be much appreciated by other suffering designers in the room.

De Groot talked a bit about tracking. Any intelligently run organization will collect stats from its multimedia graphics — even though it requires extra work. De Groot said right now their ActionScript talks to some JavaScript, which talks to an external tracking system. As for future improvements — “We’ve got a change order in for that.”

Meanwhile, in New York …

Matthew Ericson (deputy graphics director, The New York Times) explained how the Times has been refining its graphics template to streamline workflow. “People are not coming to our graphic to learn a new interface every time. They’re coming for the content of the graphic,” he said. (I wrote about their smart template in August, when the Times used it for the Minneapolis bridge collapse graphic.)

Ericson works in the still-separate print graphics department at NYT — but nowadays they have a multimedia producer sitting with them (Only one? I thought), and that’s brought a world of improvement. He described the old days, when sometimes the print graphics desk would remember to call the multimedia staff … and sometimes, they wouldn’t. Or things would run way over schedule, and at midnight when it was all completely done, they’d call the online folks and say, “You can have it now … we’re goin’ home!”

The memorable plane crash graphic from fall 2006 was one of the first they did after multimedia wizard Shan Carter joined the print graphics desk. Communication improved immensely, Ericson said, because “you can just yell over and say, ‘That floor plan in frame 8? Ain’t happening!’”

A couple of recent beauties that Ericson showed off: Assessing the “Surge”: A Survey of Baghdad Neighborhoods (please be sure to click on the map and see the detail page for one neighborhood — the reporting is awesome, and the left-side navigation is a wonderful interface — clean and clear, all good); the campaign finance section of Election Guide 2008 (make sure you play with the sliders on the bar chart at the bottom, and roll over the big bubbles on the map too).