Interactive Journalism:
Drawing in Readers with a High-Tech Approach

Presentation supported with a grant from the
Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation

Hello. Thank you for having me today here in New Orleans, which is always a fun city. You are convening at an important moment in the history of journalism and in a troubled year for the practice of journalism.

We’ve seen more mea culpas apologizing for bad coverage than ever before. And we see, daily, how our industry and our definitions of news are rapidly changing around us (and not in good ways). We also see how our longstanding journalistic conventions are failing to ensure that we deliver good, accurate reports.

So, today I want to start with an example of news — news commentary — that does not originate from what we classically think of as a news operation: AOL.

AOL News represents two major trends. Increasingly more news and newslike information are coming from non-journalists or quasi-journalists. And increasingly these news producers are using new information technologies to disseminate information.

For the 2004 Presidential Elections, AOL produced a terrific 2004 Election Guide. It offered comprehensive voter information and issues coverage and it was available to all online users, not just AOL subscribers; 30 million people have accessed it since the 2000 elections.

In 2004, AOL decided to try to reach out to young voters in a new way, using political humor. So it commissioned a number of interactive cartoons. Here’s one called Minister of Fear.

Now, what would you call this? Do you consider it to be a “news experience?” It informs, it engages, it makes you laugh. I think it’s a new kind of news experience.

AOL Elections, by the way, just made it to the top 25 out of 292 entries from 30 countries in PoliticsOnline's contest for 10 Who Are Changing the World of Internet and Politics.

Welcome to digital storytelling. It has arrived with a great deal of promise for making exciting new connections to readers in entirely new ways. Will traditional newsrooms be able to stay in the game? Will we be overtaken by new players: bloggers, nonprofit media, citizen journalists, online service providers?

As important: What can we do with our journalism that adds value – rather than simply adding more noise to an already noisy media environment?

We can stay in the game, but it will require a lot of creative thinking to make it happen. Since most of you at this convention hail from some of the most creative departments in any news organization, I want to share with you observations and examples of what I see happening around the country – and let your fertile brains take it from there.

First, some cosmic observations: Usually when we talk about technology and journalism, we use the word convergence. I hate that word.

• Speed — Who's first?
• Platform — How are we going to deliver it: TV, online, print?
• Mix — International, national, local, entertainment, infotainment.
• Revenue — How can we make money off of this?
• Moving Parts — How many bells and whistles can we add?
  

When you think about it, this puts the focus not on the consumer — our audiences, but on the supplier — the news organizations. It becomes an exercise in Us vs. Them. The last people we’re converging with are our readers.

In the end, you get a lot of “me-too” news that duplicates what’s already out there. It delivers very little added value, but it does deliver more noise.

Our early work in the civic journalism arena when I directed the Pew Center for Civic Journalism tapped into a public appetite new kinds of news and information. It was distinguished by a higher level of involvement, a more personal stake and lots of interaction: There were town hall meetings, task forces and solutions reports. The readers “got” it — they loved participating. They even thanked their news organizations for probing their opinions. These interactions in the mid ’90’s, of course, tended to happen in real space – a room. Now they are moving into cyberspace.

One example of what you can do with a solutions report online comes from WCPO-TV in Cincinnati, The Purple People Bridge coverage. You not only can read about the problem, in this case revitalizing a run-down side of a bridge connecting Ohio and Kentucky, but you also have 10 different opportunities to contribute to a solution. If you want to pay for a park bench at $750 or a flower planter at $450 -- just click a button on line. You’ve just empowered someone to be part of a solution.

How can we build interactive opportunities like this that are more than technological gee-whiz stuff? More than online chats and photo galleries?

Meaningful Information

I suggest that information becomes meaningful when the user develops some kind of attachment to it or involvement with it. Let me repeat: Information becomes meaningful when it is accompanied by attachment or involvement.

So, rather than focus on convergence, we should be focusing on another “C” word: connections and how new digital tools can help us build all kinds of innovative, new connections with our audiences. The potential of new media is not simply more noise – but information experiences and meaningful interaction– and even, I would suggest, entirely new kinds of civic participation.

• Looks out for my civic and personal interests — makes me feel like a better citizen.
• Makes feel me smarter — I get valuable information.
• Is something to “talk about” — makes me feel at the hub of my social network…

• Focus on the experiences you want to create in readers and let your news decisions cascade from there.
• Tweak less, innovate more.

• Story making in addition to story telling. And there are two ways to “make” a story:
  

  Consuming the stories we make (Content consumption) Making the stories we consume (Content creation)

• Deconstructing in addition to constructing stories
• News exercises in addition to news stories
• Civic participation in addition to news and information

• Truthsquading at factcheck.org
• People creating ads, like Bush in 30 Seconds, at Moveon.org.
  Here’s the winner: Child’s Play.
• Full-blown movies: "Fahrenheit 9/11" and "Outfoxed."
• Creative e-mails: We seen Howard Dean’s scream, not only rippling nationwide via e-mail — but it’s been mixed and scored to all kinds of music.

Is this journalism? Not as we’ve defined it. Are these “news experiences?” That’s an interesting question.

I think they are news experiences.

Opportunities for interactivity really distinguish what journalism can offer in a digital age. Participation gives consumers some attachment – and ultimately some ownership of the information.

It’s just like anything – once you get involved in something, you tend to form some attachment, care about it and want to learn more about it.

These new digital opportunities change the construct a bit from what journalists have traditionally done.

You could think of it this way: Future News might well be less about story telling -- the stories we journalists want to write, produce or tell -- and more about story making.

Less about storytelling -- and more about story making.

Think about it: People nowadays are able, thanks to new technology, to co-author or co-produce their own stories from various news experiences. In the new media world, I’m seeing two ways to “make a story.” One involves consuming the stories we make. One involves creating the stories we consume. One way is internal; the other is external.

Now, how do you get your daily news? Let’s see a show of hands. How many of you read you daily paper front to back? Be honest now. Is it a full meal or are you grazing?

Internal Story Making: Individuals as News Aggregators

Daily, most people are constructing their own internal master narratives of that day’s events or issues by assembling information from a variety of sources. Each one of us is an individual news aggregator. We find out what’s going on from:

• Through blogs. Technorati now tracks nearly 16 million Weblogs.

• Blogs as breaking news.
• Bloggers played big roles in unseating Trent Lott, in exposing the lack of verified documents in CBS reports about President Bush’s National Guard duty, and in scooping the national media to report that John Kerry picked John Edwards as his running mate.
• Beat reporter blogs.
• Around the country, reporters are using blogs to report information that doesn’t rise to the level of a full story, to add links to research that relates to their stories, and to tap reader expertise. The Spokesman Review in Spokane, WA, is a leader in this arena.
• Blogs as niche news sites.
• Whether reporting on the arts, on the media, on politics or on technology, blogs give individuals a way to aggregate news, opinion, or expertise on a particular subject.

• Through news exercises and games that allow people to interact with information. I'll talk about these more in a minute.

• Through citizen journalism efforts, such as OhmyNews.com in South Korea or NorthwestVoice.com in Bakersfield, CA.
• Stay tuned: I’ve just received a $1 million Knight Foundation grant to seed 20 hyperlocal citizen media projects in the next two years.

• Through e-mail newsletters, such as The Washington Post’s Lean Plate Club.
• The Lean Plate Club e-letter comes out every Tuesday, followed by a Web chat on Wednesdays. It started in August, 2002 with 3,000 subscribers. I recently interviewed its writer, Sally Squires, who’ll be here later today, and she told me that when the Post required online registration in February, 2004, she feared that would be the end of the newsletter. There were 16,000 subscribers then. Today, there are 122,000. And 75 percent of those who subscribe, open it.
  
  “The biggest surprise to us is the community that has grown up around it, ” she said.
  
  

Deconstructing News Stories

Now, whether the process of story making is internal or external a lot of it involves consuming not so much full stories but often pieces of stories – components, such as a headline, a photo, a graphic, a caption, a snatch of TV news, a push e-mail, an online exercise.

Now, here we are journalists and we spend all this time on craftsmanship, right? How can we produce a beautiful story package? And our consumers are sort of grazing and snacking on morsels here and there – what I call components of news.

So I’d suggest that future news will, in part, be about building the components that help users co-produce their stories – internal or external.

What are the components that will deliver news and involvement, attachment, connections, experiences? Now the process of assembling components involves deconstructing a story more than constructing – dividing it into its various parts (parts that can, of course, be re-purposed in a multimedia world).

This doesn’t mean that we don’t produce nice story packages. It’s not an Either/Or. It’s an AND.
Digital storytelling, as we see around us, is increasingly relying on such components as visual information, interactive databases, games, simulations, news bits, slide shows, streaming audio and video, polls.

These news components open up all kinds of possibilities for creating news experiences in addition to new stories – news experiences are components that accompany, embellish or add interactivity.

This suggests that a news organization's Web site becomes:

• Not just something you READ.
• But also something you DO.

It provides you with some ways to engage more actively in the news – consuming it, learning more about, reacting to it, creating it. What we see developing around the country is an appetite for a level of interactivity that is very much informing the nature and level of story telling.

The Pew Research Center for People and the Press recently reported that 44 percent of survey respondents had provided online content in various ways.

So, instead of thinking of our audiences as users, readers, viewers, customers or consumers, we need to think of them as co-authors, co-producers, active contributors – even active citizens.

Journalism therefore becomes not just a one-way pipeline for us to disseminate what we think people need to know. Rather it is a two-way conversation – for people to react to what we report, add to it and tell their own stories. People now expect this level of participation – they have gotten used to being part of the conversation simply because they can: They can e-mail, fax, voicemail, instant poll. And they like it.

So how do you involve people?

• By showing as well as telling.
• By providing knowledge as well as news.
• By providing entry points.
• By not just providing space for the stories we want to tell them, but also providing space for them to tell their own stories as well.
• By inviting participation.

• I hear and I forget.
• I see and I remember.
• I do and I understand.

• News organization blogs, such as the Virginian-Pilot’s use of a reporter outside the courtroom to cover D.C. sniper trial. Or the Dallas Morning News’ Editorial Page blog, in which the editors add transparency and insight to their decisions.
• Moblogs, which involve the use of mobile camera phones to shoot and send news photos and captions, such as this University of South Carolina experiment in covering the state’s Democratic primary.
• Tax and state budget calculators that allow users to try to close budget deficits or understand the impact of proposed tax bills on their wallets, such as Minnesota Public Radio’s Budget Balancer.
• Clickable Maps that invite users into public decisions. The Everett (WA) Herald invited readers to participate in rethinking riverfront redevelopment with this exercise.
• Searchable databases, such as www.chicagocrime.org, that invite people to find their own stories in police crime data.
• Election interactives, such as candidate matchmakers, Electoral College calculators, and vote-by-issues quizzes.
• Games, online exercises that allow for modeling scenarios or playing with planning choices are engaging more readers. The include such things as the GothamGazette.com’s Plan your Park game and the Everett Herald’s Fix Your Commute exercise.
• Devil's Advocate exercises. KQED public radio in San Francisco created its award-winning "You Decide" exercise to educate people about issues by advancing arguments on behalf of multiple positions.
• Create-your-own Web sites. The Providence (RI) Journal’s Tribute to our Troops invited readers to create Web sites for soldiers serving in Iraq.
• Explanatory exercises. WBUR public radio in Boston covered a Gaugin art exhibit with an interactive exercise in which art experts could be heard explaining various parts of one of his most famous paintings.
• Multimedia obits. Finally, some news organizations, such as The Spokesman Review, in Spokane, WA, have offered readers the opportunity to participate in news obituaries, talking about family members who have died.

• For instance, 11,000 users wrestled in the spring of 2004 with how to close Minnesota’s $4.2 billion funding gap using Minnesota Public Radio’s “Budget Balancer“ exercise. These people spent as long as 17 minutes on the exercise – then 4,000 came back and tried to balance the budget again. Who were these people? Interestingly, 43 percent were age 30 or younger.

• More than 2,000 people played transit planner last year with The Seattle Times’ “You Build It." The exercise let people figure out which transit projects they’d like to see built – and how they’d pay for them. Their “vote” was not binding, but it prompted the regional transit board to back off its proposed half-penny sales tax hike and look for other revenue sources to ease the region’s gridlock woes.

• After 2,000 people in Everett, Washington, “voted” on waterfront redevelopment options by using the clickable map created by The Herald newspaper, there was civic impact: Users strongly signaled they wanted access to their waterfront, so hiking and bike trails were added to the plans.

Civic Participation as Media Participation

This leads me to close with the suggestion that we are on the cusp of a new opportunity for media and I think it’s very exciting.

It’s redefining civic participation.

We’ve always measured civic engagement by voter turnout. But participation in civic life as measured by voting has been on a downward spiral for nearly four decades. Voter turnout has dropped from about two-thirds of eligible voters to slightly more than half as of the 2000 general elections.

And, of course, news viewership and readership have been on a downward spiral as well.

Yet, citizens’ use of media, especially television and the Internet, has steadily risen. All through 2004 we have seen important examples of how civic participation in the presidential elections was becoming a new form of media participation.

People used new media tools to fundraise, fact check, network, mobilize, blog, match issues, follow the money, play a game, design an ad, watch a video clip – and even score it to music. Howard Dean was just the beginning.

The important question for journalists is: Are people are not getting what they want from mainstream media and so are using new media tools to create their own information pipelines?

This moment is every bit as redefining as the impact of television on the political landscape of the 1960s.

The difference, though, is dramatic: Then, television empowered a small cadre of the powerful, who broadcast one-way candidate messages to mass audiences. Ordinary people had limited opportunities to respond: They could click the “off” button or cast their ballot. Now, ordinary people have almost unlimited opportunities to participate.

I hope new organizations don’t let this creative participation stop with the November election. We should look for opportunities to apply it to other issues – community issues, environmental issues, spending priorities and legislative proposals. This, and not convergence, is the real promise of a digital democracy.

News media can establish important connections to audiences by developing these participation opportunities. The participation builds attachments. The attachments build relationships. And the relationships build audience.

You can see most of the interactive news games at www.j-lab.org. Click on Cool Stuff or Batten entries.

Now in the few minutes we have left: I want to try to go hot and show you a couple of examples of interactive storytelling where I can demonstrate genuine interactivity.

Choices exercises – KQED’s “You Decide”
Nonlinear storytelling – P.O.V.’s Borders
Features coverage – USAToday.com’s “Sing my Song”