BrianManzullo.com

A quick roundup of online journalism at work during Election 2010

As a journalist, I’ve never been too involved on the politics side of reporting.

With that confession aside — I love election days.

Not just because few feelings compare to the rush of being in a newsroom on an election night, either. I remember working Central Michigan Life’s website in 2008, during the presidential election, constantly posting voting updates whether they be local or national. I also worked a township election night at The Saginaw News as a reporter, although that was a little less hectic.

The main reason why I love election night: Much of what I wish for in online innovation comes alive, if only temporary.

Look, I know a lot of news outlets are innovating on a somewhat daily or weekly basis on a multitude of stories and issues. But on no other day during the year is there such a large plethora of “true” online journalism at work, across all platforms imaginable. It’s like a museum. Sites are going social, going visual, checking in, building graphs and maps, interacting, crowdmapping, crowdsourcing, fact-checking, . Some news outlets are even trending!

Could you imagine if this sort of quality digital journalism and innovation was employed on a much more regular basis? Not just with elections or politics, but with stories ranging across all topics and genres?

I decided to wring together some links showcasing the different examples of online journalism at work from election day (yesterday). Some of these ideas may have been done before, but made better; others are completely original and should be replicated in more markets. Either way, they’re all worth checking out.

• In social media: To track users who voted on election day, Foursquare encouraged users to check in and use the hashtag #ivoted, using this information to map out every voter via state. Using #ivoted on Twitter generated a graphic, much like we saw during the World Cup. (Speaking of Twitter, the Washington Post attained a promoted hashtag, #election, for its coverage) Finally, Facebook is tallying users who voted, much like it did in previous years, while also helping you find your polling place.
• MSNBC.com is featuring just about everything on its election page: From blogs to maps to graphics to indexes to hashtag art, even. It also offered readers a chance to join the election conversation.
• The New York Times created a Twitter visualization that tracks the number of tweets regarding political candidates over time. The coolest part is watching the visualization play out over time.
• TBD.com employed reader engagement by asking them to help track voting problems throughout D.C. using Crowdmap. This allowed other users to take a look at what could arise at their local polling booth.
• Many newspaper websites have been using Storify to embed voters’ voices to their sites during the elections.
• The Washington Post, as expected, has put together a ton of interactive maps and multimedia for the elections. One example: The live results map for the House and Senate, which goes from county to county.
• For being in a new state, azcentral.com has been helpful in making information convenient to find for this year’s election (Disclosure: I work here). My favorite part is the Fact Check tool, which helps hold Arizona politicians accountable for their claims. A great way to find out who’s honest.

More roundups (with even more links!):

• The multimedia blog 10,000 Words (now with multiple awesome writers, by the way) featured 10 exceptional election front pages. Every example employs a diverse range of multimedia coverage.
• Nieman Journalism Lab put together a roundup of what several news organizations had planned for election coverage.
• DNAinfo.com offers another roundup of election coverage links, although many of these I already have listed above.
• The Society of Professional Journalists’ Toolbox offers a huge list of election resources.

And last, but not least: Some election night visuals from newsrooms around the country, courtesy of Robert Hernandez, a professor at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. I miss that rush of being in a newsroom during a big news day such as an election night. Hope you all enjoyed it.

Have more examples/links to share? Use the comments below. I’d love to see them.

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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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5 feature/profile reporting tips for beginning journalists

Sometime last Spring, Central Michigan Life’s adviser, Neil Hopp, asked a coworker, Dan Monson, and I to spend some time working with some of the newer sports reporters on how to write extensive feature and/or profile stories. The request came after our Hearst wins – Monson placed 14th in Personality/Profile Writing for “Hidden pain” and I placed 18th for “A passer’s perseverence.”

We never got a chance to schedule a sports writing workshop. But I did manage to write five tips down. I figured I would share them here, since I don’t have much else to update with for now.

(If you have any of your own tips, please share them in the comments section. It obviously takes more people to provide a well-rounded number of suggestions. Thanks!)

1) Really get to know the subject by getting involved in your interview.

When I began writing stories, I would write my set list of questions down for each source, go through the list and be done with the interview. I spent little time really getting to know who I was talking to, and it paid off very little with my writing. Ask tons of follow-up questions when they spur in your head. Get details clear. Ask “Why?” a lot, to get more perspective. The more you know about your subject, the more you can convey it in writing, and the better you can describe them.

One of my editors at The Saginaw News told me that if there’s any certainty, people love reading about people. Even in event coverages, ask about the person you are speaking with. But especially in features and profiles, it’s essential to get the little details that make a person full circle for the reader. That doesn’t mean just age, name, hometown. Get inside their head. What brought them to where they are now (depending on what your story is about)? What inspires them? That sort of thing.

2) Be prepared to spend a lot of time interviewing many subjects.

For “A passer’s perseverance,” I did an initial one-hour interview with the main subject, Brian Brunner, and at least two follow-up interviews that took, on average, 10-15 minutes. The follow-ups came after I initially began writing my story and mainly were to clear up details, ask questions I came across while writing the story or to find other sources to talk to with contact information. These are extremely important for fleshing out your story, so plan on spending this extra time with the subject.

It also is important to get as many sources as you can, even if you do not use them all. Get a wide range of perspectives. You need them. When doing a personality profile, always talk to the parents, if possible. Usually, nobody knows your subject better than they do. Talk to friends, other relatives, colleagues, anybody. The more sourcework you get, the better chance you have of getting quotes that will emotionally vitalize your story.

3) Remember the focus of your story.

This might seem easy, but when writing a feature story upwards of 1,000 to 2,000 words, it’s actually easy to fall off track with what you are writing about. Be creative, but don’t stray too much from the focus. Don’t write too much on a particular aspect unless it’s extremely pivotal to the story. If you are writing a life story, write the meat of it in chronological order so you don’t confuse the reader. Let the details you write unfold the rest.

For a good example, check Central Michigan Life coworker Jake May’s piece he wrote for The Buffalo News as an intern there. It is on a woman who retired after 15 years as director of the Buffalo City Mission’s Cornerstone Manor. The focus is on what drove the woman at City Mission – her time during World War II as a refugee and a particular moment at City Mission that resurfaced those memories. I’ll leave the suspense to you (so you can read it, of course), but you will notice how despite the different flashbacks and moments, Jake never truly wavered from the focus of the story – each one played a part into putting the story full circle.

4) Get involved with different elements of the story.

Don’t just focus on the writing part of your story. Attend the photo shoot, if there is one. Knowing the type of art that will go with the story helps me come up with a lead that will compliment the design almost perfectly. Or, even better, if you already wrote the story, offer your ideas to the photographer and let them know what the mood of the story is. That will help them in getting a better idea of what type of photo to shoot. This type of communication does absolute wonders for a front-page package. Dan Monson and Matthew Stephens’ work on “Hidden pain” is a great example.

If there are any other multimedia projects that go with the story, be a participant. Shoot a video interview. Get sound bytes. Ask the photo staff to come up with a slideshow, if they have file art of the subject on hand, maybe. In today’s age, stories generally are better told through the use of multimedia. Plus, it’s great experience for you in the long run.

5) Have many colleagues read your story to proofread and offer suggestions.

You have no idea how important this is until you actually do it. I had 3-4 different people, including Jake, read “A passer’s perseverance” before I submitted it for editing. Jake had me read the story I linked in #3 before he sent it in. Your colleagues will have a knack for catching things that went way over your head, and can offer suggestions that could make your story up to two times better than it was before.

Another example: I wrote a story last March/April on Detroit’s Final Four practices in a contest for one $1,000 scholarship as a participant in the United States Basketball Writers’ Association weekend workshop. With the story completed and not due for another week, I handed the story off to Neil, Jake, Dan and two others so they could look at the story. Their suggestions and improvement, I feel, helped me win the scholarship a couple weeks later after three judges from the Detroit News and Free Press read all the stories. (What also helped was the advice I received from some of the nation’s top sports writers, such as the Boston Globe’s Bob Ryan and Washington Post’s John Feinstein, who were at the workshop) I will post this story in a later update if you would like to see it.

* * * * *

I could probably go on with little things that will help you when writing features and profiles, but that covers the gist of it. You never want to feel like you waved at what could possibly be a wonderful story for people to read. I’ve seen it happen all too often in my four years. As a journalist, you want to capture everything you can that will engage your readers and invoke a certain emotion in them. That is what will get you by in the long run as a writer.

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