Drawing on strengths to paint a digital picture

Representatives from a diverse group of news Web sites — BaltimoreSun.com, CQ.com, Reuters.com, USAToday.com and WashingtonPost.com — demonstrated there are as many ways to tell a story as there are people to tell them, at the first Mid-Atlantic regional session of the Online News Association at American University's School of Communication Thursday. They also stressed that a company's traditional resources are something that should be embraced even as the online divisions explore new ways to present information.

Baltimoresun.com learns the beauty of sharing

Matthew Baise, interim editor at BaltimoreSun.com, offered a very low-tech summation of how things have changed at the site since becoming a subsidiary of the Tribune Company.

After dealing with the conversion to a cross-publication publishing system, called Oxygen, BaltimoreSun.com became able to seamlessly incorporate content from other Tribune publications with little more than a mouse click.

"We're now able to share content between 4,500 journalists in 18 of the top markets," Baise said.

This ability to share resources played a key role in both assisting and gaining original reporting from the Orlando Sentinel during the current wave of hurricanes that have forced the Sentinel's paper and Web site to contend with covering the storms while also preparing for possible evacuations and recovery efforts.

"We almost consider the other newspapers to be extended bureaus," Baise said. "We communicate with people who are 10 feet away as easily as we do with people who are 3,000 miles away."

CQ.com goes from automated to custom made

While BaltimoreSun.com has migrated to the use of a shared database, CQ.com, the Web operation of Congressional Quarterly, has evolved from an almost entirely database-driven subscription service to a robust site that more resembles other newspaper-based Web sites.

"Because we first came from this database background, when we first went on the Web, we had a tradition of having everything being 100 percent automated," said Jana Steiger, editorial product development director. "No editors touched content that was on our front page. We evolved from that and have a little more editorial control."

But while its home page has evolved, Steiger pointed out that because of CQ.com's heavy emphasis on e-mail delivery, much of its audience remains oblivious to any home page changes.

"When we were going out to gather information from customers [in response to a redesign] we talked to people who had no idea we had redesigned the site. They thought we still had frames, because all they would do is click their email. [They would say] 'Oh, I never click through.' Because our customers are paying us, we're not ad-driven. We have the luxury of not being wedded to whatever gets the most [Web] traffic."

Reuters pulls back the curtain

While its corporate ownership has remained stable and its level of automation has been very high for decades, Reuters has been dealing with identity issues of its own for some time now.

Reuters.com Executive News Producer Robert Basler concedes that more than 90 percent of his company's revenue comes from its business news services, "which means we make about six or seven percent of our money doing fun stuff that you would all call 'journalism.'"

The journalism Reuters is putting out is certainly not limited to text-based wire copy. Basler gave a brief tour of Reuters' video offerings which include a large and constantly updated collection of raw, un-narrated video footage (http://tv.reuters.com).

"Every time we start to have an identity, we start to come up with something cool and blow it," Basler deadpanned. "I don't know how many times a week our sales people come to me and say, 'That's a real cool thing. Do you know what it's doing to our demographics?' It brings in the people we want, but it also brings in the 'riff-raff'."

In addition to the video, which Basler said can be loaded to the site in as little as 15 minutes as news is breaking, he also offered a sneak peek at a new feature. "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," is a collection of relevant e-mails from readers and site visitors with notes from top editors in a red font. This product was previously an internal-only memo sent to staff, but will soon be made available for all of Reuters' readers to see and contribute to.

"I think this type of transparency is the only way to go in journalism in the future and I think it's really one step beyond having an ombudsman," Basler said.

WashingtonPost.com shows faces of the fallen

WashingtonPost.com senior news editor Steve Fox talked about the origins and future of a project in his newsroom. He didn't imagine it would be continuing as long as it has. Faces of the Fallen (http://www.WashingtonPost.com/wp-srv/world/iraq/casualties/facesofthefallen.htm) is a collection of the more than 1,000 U.S. soldiers who have died since the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Like many projects at a newspaper-based Web site, this one originated from a special section the print side was putting together for Veterans Day in November of 2003, Fox said. A request from higher-ups at the paper to keep updating the Web version of the project set it in motion, and updates to the flash-based display became the regularly scheduled duty of members of WashingtonPost.com's design staff.

If they had the project to do over again, Fox said they would have certainly built Faces of the Fallen to  be database driven.

"We initially followed the lead of the newspaper, but over time it really became a Web project," Fox said. "Looking back now I see how we might have done it differently. But the design is clean. When the 1,000 [deaths] story [was covered] a lot of sites were playing catch-up to get versions of this out."

Faces of the Fallen's interactive nature has elicited many responses, said Fox, and has at times helped editors gain more information to put back into the project.

"When we're talking about interactivity, this is really what we're talking about," Fox said. "Engaging the reader, and getting into a conversation with them." 

USAToday.com closes with a song

After more than an hour of learning about ways to use databases, flash, video and shared publishing systems, the gathering ended with representatives from USATODAY.com, who showed what can be done by two guys with a digital camera and a digital audio recorder. Oh, and a lot of work during their free time and a week from their boss to apply the finishing touches.

"Sing My Song" was a project conceived, storyboarded and produced by Senior Designer Ron Coddington and Photo Editor Denny Gainer. The two spent 48 hours at West Virginia's New Song Festival near Charles Town, W.Va., talking to entrants and gathering all the audio and still pictures they could get their hands on.

The project, which received a Special Distinction Award at the 2004 Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism, became a multi-faceted documentary which included about 60 minutes of audio, song lyrics, an in-depth look into the creation of the music, and even an interactive "you pick the winner" feature which, according to Coddington and Gainer, did not exactly please the competition's official judges, when a different winner was frequently chosen online.

"They still link to us on their Web site, though," Coddington said. "So that's a good sign."

The project ended up in the print product as a full-page feature and was praised by the Batten judges as "an exciting template for interactive entertainment news."

Coddington and Gainer showcased some other templates they have developed for covering breaking news and scheduled news events, including the Democratic and Republican conventions. The coverage featured numerous photo galleries and audio from inside and outside the convention halls. The templated nature of these packages is key, said Gainer.

"I can't emphasize enough the planning time that is required, " Gainer said. "In the case of the conventions, we had maybe four or five get-togethers to look at PhotoShop mock-ups and then take that into a working flash model and then getting comments from all the people that were going to get involved in gathering information and producing it whether they were going to be out in the field or in the office. [It's important] to talk through all the pieces [and try] to ask the smart questions so we didn't have those surprises. The worst-case scenario is you have a deadline and you're scrambling to make major changes to your template."