Crisis in Darfur Expands

Posted on March 9, 2007

Washingtonpost.com has a new interactive about the the Crisis in Darfur.

Three beautiful, high-quality and breathtaking 6- to 8-minute videos make up the bulk of this project with 10 panoramic photos. I love how you can expand the video to almost fill up the width of the project’s stage; they look even nicer at the larger size. (Hmm … WP is using Brightcove.) And the panoramic photos put me right in the scene.

This is a heavy subject, and something as a reader I would want to spend time watching. As a Web skimmer, I probably wouldn’t jump into this on my first visit, but after seeing the quality of the video, this page would get tagged right away so I could go back to it when I had more time. (That’s the key, I think, when presenting long videos, audio slideshows, or an overall deep package — make the reader at first glance want to return to view more.)

I wish, though, there were some sort of introduction into this package. I found it from a “Did you miss this” link off the homefront, but there’s no explanation about the storeis when I arrive — perhaps they assume that I know about the crisis in Darfur already? Fair enough. But what’s the news peg? I have to watch all the videos to find out. I don’t want to have to do that.

Not until after I watched the videos did I even see a light-blue text link that takes me to the story. A missed opportunity to combine the video, photos and text.

Also, while the graphic design of the page looks nice compositionally and graphically, I don’t agree with the tone. The fanning of the photos along the bottom seem to convey far too light of a feeling for this subject matter.

~~Interesting that there are no credits on here except for the staff writer’s byline. Did Travis Fox shoot and edit the video and create the interactive, too??~~

Update: Sorry for my ignorance. They either added a credits at the bottom of the piece, or I missed it the first time around. Travis Fox is the video producer (and backpack journalist) who also wrote a story and shot the panoramic photos. The interactive was designed and developed by Brian Cordyack.

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Feeling overburdened?

Posted on March 9, 2007

You’re not alone.

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Five ‘E’s’ of online video production

Posted on March 8, 2007

I love how bloggers are summarizing conferences. It’s so helpful to us journalists who don’t have the resources to attend.

Jeff Jarvis has put together an informative summary of Jeff Rayport’s session on video at the Online Publishers Association.

Here are Rayport’s five “E’s” for producing online video, (quoted from Jarvis’ summary):

>> Extend content you have and bring it to online media.

>> Expand video activities to make new and experimental forms of content.

>> Expose (let the outside in; e.g., NY Times wedding videos, Le Monde user videos).

>> Explode (let the inside out; syndication, in other words).

>> Exhale (you don’t know what will work so relax).

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Not good enough for first place

Posted on March 7, 2007

Poynter’s Al Tompkins writes about how NPPA judges didn’t award web category first-place BOP prizes to the group that’s supposed to know video best: TV.

Tompkins reports:

” ‘The category itself is in its infancy, and it showed,’ judge Erica Simpson, a photojournalist from KGTV San Diego, said. ‘It is obvious these were people who came mostly from newspapers and were trying to learn a craft. They were making basic mistakes in telling stories with pictures. Since we have no bar set, since this is the first year NPPA has offered these categories, we didn’t want to set the bar too low and say this is what national award-winning online video looks like. We chose the best of the lot, but this is not where the bar of excellence should be.’ “

Here’s some advice about storytelling from Ira Glass that seems particularly apropos (video found via yourdailyawesome.com):

“All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. … There’s a gap; that for the first couple of years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great; it’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good … but it’s not that good.

“But your taste — the thing that got you into the game — your taste is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. You can tell that it’s still sort of crappy.

“A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people at that point, they quit. The thing that I would say to you with all of my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste, they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be, they knew it fell short. …

“The most important possible thing you can do is to do a lot of work. … It’s only by actually going through a volume of work, that you’re actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.”

Watch the clip here:

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More mapping

Posted on March 7, 2007

Cute idea from Bakersfield.com: Map your most hated pothole!.

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Design guidelines

Posted on March 7, 2007

Blogging about a blog that’s been blogged (did you follow that?), but this entry by Angela Grant, summarizing an entry by Joshua Porter about design guidelines needs to be shared.

I won’t list all the advice here, because it’s already been done twice. But I particularly like this advice:

Great Design is Invisible. An interesting property of great design is that it is taken for granted. It works so well that we forget that creative effort was involved to bring it about. Sometimes, like with the lowly spoon, the object is so simplistic that it seems obvious, and we disregard that at one point in history it wasn’t. Other times, like with the automobile, the object is so sophisticated yet easy-to-use that we’re blinded to the fact that millions and millions of human-hours went into getting it to this point. That’s a shame…every great design has a rich history. And every design has behind it a designer or designers who tried to make the world a better place by solving some problem or another.

Good stuff.

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BBC and YouTube

Posted on March 5, 2007

About 30 BBC channels will be posted on YouTube per day, per an agreement between the two, Journalism.co.uk reports.

“Users will be able to comment on clips, rate them, recommend them to friends and post their own video responses to communicate with the BBC and other viewers.”

NBC and CBS already have their own channels.

We’re going to try adding a channel for HeraldTribune.com video. If only we could have an automated feed sent over to YouTube rather than manually uploading each clip.

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Too many cooks in the kitchen?

Posted on March 5, 2007

I’m a long-time fan and a former Web editor/producer of USATODAY.com. And that’s why I so badly want to like the site’s new design.

The interactive components — opportunities to comment located just about everywhere, ranking of stories, tagging and finding related content from other sites are the future of newspaper Web sites. And USAT appears to be leading the way.

(Beware what you ask for, however. Comments on this story about Elizabeth Hurley include “Who cares?”, “This is front page news?” and “She is a has been, thi [sic] is not news.”)

All this is great — except I don’t see ANY of these new features on my Mac via Safari. Comment and recommend links don’t work. I don’t even see the option in the top right-hand corner inviting me to log in.

Deep sigh.

But not all readers are enthusiastic about the interactivity. One reader commented:

“I don’t want a blog, I want a newspaper. Web 2.0 is nice and all, but good grief- user comments on the front page?? I don’t care what marcie has to say about exercising. I want my news back, and give me the old site layout while you’re at it!”

Speaking of layouts, the new design is way too confusing. My first question seeing the homepage: What’s the top news? The old design was a clean, categorized page prioritized by journalists; this one looks like a jumble of links with few visual cues to what’s important. They replaced the valuable “chatter” (summary text under the headlines) with bylines. But only sometimes — randomly a byline isn’t listed for some reason.

And just like Ryan Sholin and Mindy McAdams, I get lost in all the white space.

Mark Pott accurately describes the problem this way:

“The home page is a mess: It looks like it was laid out with a shotgun. There’s very little differentiation among the various sections and stories—they all mostly carry the same, confusing weight. The reader’s eye isn’t really sure where to go.”

I can’t help but wonder if this is a case where too many people had input on the design because it has clearly become a slave to the functions it’s trying to support. Here’s what I found from a USAT blog:

“The redesign was a five-month-effort involving scores of developers, designers, and producers. Naturally, there are features that didn’t make the initial cut, but we plan to continue development to add them and squash other bugs we’re still discovering. Still, we think it’s a big improvement and we hope you’ll agree.”

There’s a huge lesson here for us all to note: Design is as important as the content. And it can help — or hurt — as you tell a story. It happens on many levels from clearly explaining an info graphic to presenting the news of the day on your homepage and section fronts. Web readers are fickle by nature; they’re SUPPOSED to click around and away from sites. It’s what surfing is all about. But we can’t afford to give them any reason to not come back.

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