Some thoughts on Rob Curley's presentation
Last night, I attended a dinner sponsored by the UT School of Journalism and Electronic Media, as part of this week's conference on Web journalism. I felt honored to be invited (since I'm not a journalist); I attended with some friends, and I also had a chance to meet several people whose work I've long admired (I wish I'd had a chance to say hello to these two).
Rob Curley, a vice president of Washingtonpost.Newsweek, gave a usually raucous and always fascinating presentation on Web journalism. He used several jaw-dropping examples from his past work to illustrate the depth of reportage that Web technologies enable; as Randy Neal mentioned, Rob showed how the use of an online framework enables the story to go "hyper-deep."
His examples were fascinating. One story involved a basketball season ticket controversy at the University of Kansas, written during his days at a Kansas newspaper; the online version of the story included a form one could fill out to determine one's new seating location (which was the heart of the controversy), a clickable seating chart of the arena, and photos showing the view of the court from that section. That was one of the simpler examples he used, but the most fascinating aspect of that tale was that they were able to write the entire story, program all the extra features, and publish it all in only about five hours.
It made me sweat just thinking about it.
The other examples (from Naples, FL and the Washington Post) included multimedia components directly relevant to the heart of the story, and all of it arranged in such a way that the reader could drill down into whatever detail they wanted. The use of video, audio, maps, and interactive graphics (like the seating chart) gave each story a level of depth and texture that could not even begin to happen in print, or even on TV. The full depth of these stories could only be told on the Web and nowhere else.
Beyond journalism, the general techniques of communication are changing all around us. It's always difficult to think beyond one's own comfortable boundaries; people like Rob Curley can show the rest of us how it ought to be done.
See Randy Neal's summary here; Jack Lail has a recap here; Katie Allison Granju has a summary here.