Behind the scenes of 24MP: Covering our city, Mount Pleasant, in 24 hours via multimedia
I meant to post something on this earlier, but never got around to it until now. As you can see from sporadic updating since late August, being editor in chief at a student newspaper can be a tiring job, and it leaks into my out-of-office life a little bit, too.
But anyway…
On Oct. 14, the staff at Central Michigan Life unveiled an unprecedented and extensive multimedia collaboration: Coverage of the city of Mount Pleasant, its faces and places over one full 24-hour period, midnight to midnight. See below, which also is in the link to “24MP.”
This was an idea we had for a while. Our Presentation Editor, Matthew Stephens, pitched it about a year ago, maybe longer than that, after looking at a 24-hour project that the Daily Northwestern and North by Northwestern collaborated on a couple years ago. They used all video in telling stories of different faces and places for each hour of the day.
Our aim was to take it a step further and incorporate more than just video — we also completed photo galleries, Soundslides projects and a Vuvox presentation — and turn it all over within four days to create one collaborative multimedia project that effectively captures Mount Pleasant over one full day. Which, I can tell you right now, was no easy task. (NOTE: It would have been nice to get a domain for it and host it separate from our site, like the 24-hour Northwestern project, but it wasn’t in our budget.)
So how did we put it together?
Planning began Sept. 27, when the editors held a staff meeting to discuss the target day (Saturday, Oct. 10) and break down the topics over the 24 hours, from midnight to midnight. We mapped out at least one topic for each hour, with about eight different backups that could go in one of multiple spots of the day. Some topics were specific (i.e. football kickoff at noon), while others were simply feature hunts (Island Park at 4 p.m., or even Wanda Dague at 7 p.m.)
Then the editors called a staff meeting Sept. 30 for all reporters, photographers and videographers involved with the project. We assigned reporters and photographers/videographers to work with each other on a particular topic and to get going on planning, making phone calls and having everything ready for the big day. We held another meeting a week later to make sure everyone was on the same page and that all questions were answered.
All of this planning was important because, really, a project like this cannot have a hiccup. Should one reporter or photographer completely forget or mess up a time in this, the rest of the 24-hour project is compromised. So we had to stress planning.
Oct. 10 — the end of CMU’s Homecoming week with the football game against Eastern Michigan — came and went. I made myself on call the entire day should any problems arise and, thankfully, nothing did. We had backups for anything that fell through and, from what I heard from others, things turned out well across the board.
The staff then spent Sunday through Tuesday putting everything together — all 30 stories (we had some hours with dual stories) and 30 photo/video projects. We also had to push two newspapers out in the meantime (Monday and Wednesday editions).
This is where I finally come in. Late Tuesday, once everything was turned in and done, ready for posting the following morning, I began putting together the Vuvox presentation, which you see above. This involved me staying in the office until 7:30 a.m. (after working an 11 a.m. to midnight shift).
This was the first time I worked on Vuvox, so it was kind of a learning experience for me, in that respect. I originally was going to use Flash to centralize all the content. But Vuvox was a lot easier to use and did everything I wanted it to — it effectively visualized Mount Pleasant in 24 hours and singlehandedly linked to all our content through each hour of the day.
Aftermath
Now that we’re about two weeks removed from completing 24MP, there is a lot I can say the CM Life staff took away from completing this endeavor. Here are the three biggest things:
- Great things come from effective planning. We were working on this project for several weeks before actually executing it and putting it all together. Furthermore, we had to get about 40 people on our wavelength when it came to 24MP, and we had to make sure all of it was done right — like I said, one bad step for a project such as this and the rest falls.
- Some of the best stories come from simply going out there and looking for them. Our 7 p.m. feature on Wanda Dague was some of the best storytelling I have seen from CM Life, and it was not at all extensive. It was a simple insight into a woman many people might not know, but has a lot to tell. Our team, photo editor Ashley Miller and staff reporter Ryan Czachorski, didn’t know who she was when they first walked in.
- Finally, the project brought the staff together. A lot of the coordination involved reporter-to-photographer relationships, something our staff has struggled with from time to time. But especially during a time (early fall) when the majority of the staff has not worked with each other all that much, when you have this many people looking to make something great, you are bound to come up with something special. And it can do wonders for the working relationship of the staff.
Really, the entire goal of this project was to get a heartbeat of the faces, places, sights, sounds and overall daily life of Mount Pleasant, Mich., which is a city of 26,675 people and thousands more CMU students. Yeah, Homecoming was going on, but so was a lot of other daily lives. Think of the Muffler Man employee or Cathy the custodian. We wanted to get all the different aspects, and I think we did.
Let me know what you think of the project.
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