Angela Clark
Director of Interactive Content
MSNBC.com
"The Big Picture"

I hope you had enough of your dessert so you can be a little bit awake. I'll try to keep it exciting.

I'm from MSNBC. We're a partnership between Microsoft and NBC and so we are lucky to be able to have a lot of traffic, some experience in journalism from NBC, and some experience in technology from Microsoft.

MSNBC has been out there for seven years now, and we've been committed to interactivity that entire time. We've been really trying to learn lessons, trying to figure out better ways to do interactive journalism both in small and large ways. We make sure that we have interactives on all of our major news events. We make sure we have unique coverage of an ongoing story by having interactives give depth, breadth or context to the story, hopefully all three in one take.

It also gives our staff a chance to flex their creative muscles, and sometimes we go overboard with that. We also experiment with new storytelling techniques, and we're constantly checking to see what works and what doesn't, using a lot of both qualitative and quantitative information and I can explain that later.The No. 1 most important thing, even though it's last, is enticing the reader to experience, to think, and to engage themselves into the news.

With us, we basically have two choices when you first look at a story: What kind of interactive do I want? Is the story itself ongoing? Do I want something that is "referential," that is basically going to give a piece of information about the story that, if we put it in the story, in the text itself, it detracts from the story but you still need to have it. You know, in the text days... where you could type in a paragraph describing that long-running story of "Monica Lewinsky was an intern..." and blah blah blah. Now, we can use our interactives in that way, so those referential pieces give historical context, lots of information about a topic, or it gives a sense of why this story is important and why we're playing it so well.

So we'll get something that is, like, a small self-contained jewel, let's say, a piece of information. For instance, like this, that we had way back when where we had something all about Ephedra. Now this is something that could go into a story, and it was templatized, yet it provided a lot of information that we didn't have to explain every single time, and gave more depth and breadth to the story itself. Now because it's a referential interactive for us, we make sure that we templatize these things, so that Ephedra interactive you just saw was made in about 5 minutes. The longest time was to create the text and just type it in. So we try to make sure that those types of interactive are easy, quick, and that the editors aren't in any way encumbered by the technology behind it and can then concentrate on the journalism part of it.

As we've gone on in our quest for better interactive journalism, we've found there's another approach to interactivity and that's the "narrative." That's the one I'm going to be talking more about here. That's where we tell the story to the reader; we have an alpha and omega to the story itself. Whereas with a referential, somebody may want to find out more about why Ephedra is important, but they don't care about its effect on the body. With a narrative interactive, we have a specific story to tell, we want to make sure you hear it all the way through, and we want to make sure that we use all of the fabulous technology and resources that we have available.

We've also found that, every time you ask somebody to click on something, you lose about 50 percent of your audience, so we try to make sure we don't ask people to click for more information. You'll notice a lot of our stories kind of give people that "lean back" experience, similar to what you have in a television show. At certain times, we try to make sure where we re trying to get somebody to be engaged or think... that's when we ask them to click, because we're asking them to make that decision and we want the people who are engaged to continue on, so I'll explain all of that.

"The Big Picture" is our latest in a series of approaches to interactive storytelling. It is basically the latest of everything we've learned from all of our interactives, so I'll walk you through some. I'm hoping that you guys might have seen one of these before... You'll notice that we specifically ask people to launch this, we're telling them to adjust your volume and all this, because when you do an automatic pop-up, people in this day of pop-up ads will automatically kill those out. "The Big Picture" also requires broadband, and it also requires Flash 6. This is a very specific decision we made because at MSNBC our audience is at least 51 percent broadband and it's increasing by about 10 or 15 percent every year, so we're choosing to just do this.

We do some detection automatically, so that when you come to this and you're coming from a dial-up or you come without Flash it will say, "You need a broadband connection for this," or "You need Flash." So we 're already cutting off a big chunk of our audience, but it was a very conscious decision on our part.

So here, with the conflict with Iraq... (pause) it was, it was (laughter) Let's try this one more time, huh? There we go.

Audio runs:

Lester Holt, Big Picture Anchor:
"The ultimate weapons. A nightmare for a nation rattled by terrorism. After a decade of defiance, Saddam Hussein says he has nothing to hide. President Bush wants proof. And while many of America's allies hope for peace, it may come to war. The risks are enormous and the issues complex."

Dara Brown, Big Picture Narrator:
"Tackle the tough questions. Can inspections work? If not, should the U.S. go it alone? Would war spin out of control, and is it worth the risk? Get the facts, go in depth, and decide where you ultimately stand. I'm Dara Brown."

"And I'm Lester Holt. This is 'The Big Picture.' "

I'm going to go ahead and put this on pause as we continue. We've done three of these [Big Picture installments], and there are reasons why we do things the way we do. As we create each new one, we tweak and refine each time, but there are certain rules that guide us: We want to make sure that we give the readers control. So we have clear exposed navigation over on the left -hand side so that people understand the rundown, and what they're going to be listening to, so if they really are not interested in some elements of what we're telling them, they can control that experience. We have both the lean-forward and that lean-back experience. We give people control; if they want to click through and do what they want to do they can do that, or they can just lean back, and we'll walk them through all the way.

For example, in our Big Picture of the Oscars, we found it very interesting that about 20 percent of our readers completely skipped the best actress element and went directly to the best picture. I don't know why; maybe we had a large female audience or something and they didn't care about the best actress but really had an opinion about the best picture, but it was very interesting. We make sure to track all those elements.

We try to make sure that we have that menu over on the left-hand side as a standard feature of every story we tell. We want to make sure it has text that looks clickable, that is underlined in some way. We also use cues to help people remember elements, to encourage them to read or to use it.

For example, if I go back to Big Picture, we use what we call our "giant finger of interactivity," just let me see if I can get this here (pause)

Dara Brown audio: "Starting with commercial and spy satellites snapping pictures like these over Iraq. Imagine looking at an area twice the side of Idaho through a straw..."

We'll just go ahead and skip through this a little bit. We'll have the cues here, in the right hand side, you'll see it says "time to vote." This gives people the idea of, you know, you have only two more seconds, enticing them to go ahead and vote, but we're going to move on with it. So if they choose not to participate, choose not to have control over their experience, we're just going to move on, because this might be something they're not specifically interested in.

I'm going to speed up on it and not go through all these examples. Each one of these show some experiments we did on this control aspect. We've seen that in some cases it worked and in others it didn't, and that's why we're doing what we're doing.

So, as for depth. We want to make sure we give context, directly, where it's most relevant. We don't just want to give people way too much information. So we have a lot of different approaches we've devised, or stolen from other people -- things where you basically can opt out, where the presentation itself completely stops until the user makes a choice. We've found, as I said, we can lose 50 to 75 percent of users doing that, but sometimes it's very important that you make them make those decisions at those times.

Then there are the opt-ins in which you're pausing and encouraging users to be part of this, but it sometimes is difficult for them to see. For example, we'll go back to our big picture again... I've got too many Big Pictures going on... In this case & we have a piece in which we're talking to Ken Allard, one of our experts & right here, where it says "Click to ask Mr. Allard." Now it's very subtle but it allows the reader, if they want to find more information about that particular piece of content, or what Mr. Ken was saying, they can specifically click on that and find out more about it. We're not disrupting the storyline of what we think is most important, but we're allowing them to explore and to delve into this more. This is one of the techniques that we use.

Finally, we have the supplemental. One of the criticisms we've heard on this, and honestly I have a problem with it as well sometimes, is that, we have a lot going on at the same time here. We have Lester, with his talking head down there, we have other things going on, and you'll notice, down at the bottom it says, "Related: hear how people in the Middle East..." and so on. We found that as long as we have that set aside, it can't really be too much information, it has to be less than X number of characters or words, and we want to "save for later," because asking people to stop and explore that at that particular time is just not going to work and hasn't worked for us.

So in this case you hit "save for later" and it goes up over on the left-hand side, so that they can see those links later. We also offer the option that, when they leave this particular Big Picture, it'll say, "Do you want us to e-mail all of those that you saved for you?" so that those people can go back and learn more about that particular topic. That's something that about 20 percent of the people who saw this clicked on and actually used. So it was a very effective element.

As for introspection. We want to make sure we challenge the reader to think about the issues, so we have a survey system that we use all the time, voting and so on. It's not in any way scientific. I'm sure all of us who have used surveys on the Web have found that there are people who know how to hack them if they have enough time. But it does allow people to express their opinions, and we try to make sure that we place it in such a way that, if we want people to listen to the facts first and then make their decision, then we always place the vote at the end. If we want to ask people their opinion, and then give them more information, maybe to disprove or encourage or tell them they did a great job, then we put the vote at the beginning. If we're taking their pulse, then we just basically make the entire segment the vote itself.

Quite often we try to dissect it into smaller points, because these big pictures can last up to 20 minutes, and we want to make sure that people spend time listening to the information, and then we ask them the questions. But we don't get too deep into "I'm not really sure," or "I don't really feel that that's correct," or getting too deep into the questions. We want to make sure that we keep them there so sometimes we'll show the answers to the vote way at the very end, like we did on the Oscars, because that seems to keep them there a lot longer. We've kind of finagled a lot of that

And finally, with the community, we want to make sure we connect users with the story so we make sure that they become part of the presentation. We always have "e-mail this," "write this," and that's one of the most popular aspects of our site itself, but it's something that works really well with interactives. We'll read our viewer e-mail and incorporate it into the story. So if we take a look at that "Big Picture" again and continue on... I won't have you guys listen to all the experts here. So, for example here, we've incorporated our reader mail in this, so that you get a sense of how people reacted to this and whether it was effective or not.

We also want to make sure people comprehend, because we've tackled three things: the elections, the Iraq war and Oscars, two of which are very difficult and challenging topics. We want to make sure that people are active, that they're listening to it and they're engaged. We found, when we did something on Enron, that the best way to really engage readers and to make your point is to make sure your audio is in sync with your text, so you say it, you write it, you have them vote on it later. That's something that engages them a great deal. We want to make sure that we break up the audio tracks, we want to make sure that we ask them to form tasks that teach...

This is another project that we did...

Dara Brown audio: "...it's the air traveler's last line of defense against terrorists. The machines that scan our carry on bags are only as reliable as the people seated at the controls. Before Sept. 11, many of them trained just 40 hours, and often went months without seeing anything suspicious. Now the government is taking over, but the job remains the same: making out a few suspicious objects in a sea of everyday items. Is it enough? See for yourself.

You re about to take a two-minute shift screening carry-on baggage. The scans you will see are real, most will be innocent enough, but a few, like this one, have deadly potential. Your job is to flag suspicious items for your colleagues to investigate. Use these controls to zoom in for a closer look..."

That's the giant finger of activity.

Audio continues: "...show color scans that display organic materials, like that found in explosives, in orange. You can stop the conveyor belt at any time, but take too long and you'll hear about it from angry travelers (light laughter). When time is up we'll grade your performance. Ready? Good luck."

So you can stop this, zoom in and out, look at it in color if you want. This was something we set up as a game...

Audio of a traveler:
"Think we could get this operation moving a little bit faster here?" (laughter)

Traveler #2:
"I've been standing here for 45 minutes & can you believe that?

"So this was actually based on a series of stories we did where we were actually examining, it was a year after Sept. 11, and trying to figure out if things had gotten better or worse with the airport security situation. In this case, we actually went to the airport screeners, where they trained them, got the pictures that they use to test each other, and we created the game so you could be in that place. We also tried to give you a sense of the pressure that those folks were under...

Traveler #3:
"I just can't believe this. We're going to be here all day." (laughter)

So we tried to place people in the role of airport security officer. Interactively, we thought that this was a good way to present the information without actually forcing somebody to read a lot of... oh, there's a knife... all right. After two minutes, it comes back and it says "you caught X number out of whatever."We had a lot of discussions about how we were actually going to grade somebody or, how loose we were going to make this, and we decided that people still needed to get a sense of how well they did...

Basically for us, that comprehension, asking the readers to actually perform the tasks so that they could learn how difficult the job is, to be a baggage screener, is very effective. We've taken those kind of lessons from baggage screeners and tried to make sure we incorporate them into The Big Picture and I think that it's been very helpful. For instance, we've had a lot of baggage screeners write us and say, "Thank goodness somebody actually understands what we go through." We have other people saying, "I'm not going to be so mean to them the next time I go through."

Finally, there is uniqueness. We want to make sure that we do things that only the Internet can do. For that baggage screener, you wouldn't be able to have that in a newspaper, in a magazine or even on television, that's only something you can deliver on the Web, and so we need to make sure that we think interactively to break out of the bounds of what we know already. I started out in the newspapers and I find myself being very newspaper-centric and text-centric, but it's smart to have a lot of young folks who have experience in a lot of different media, so they'll come to you and say, "Well, wouldn't it be great if we could just do it this way?"

So we make sure that we ask questions of our readers, that we track who hits what when, that we do a lot of experiments as to whether a pull-down bar or a button saying "next" is going to be more effective. We make these little graphs for ourselves each time and spread them around the company to make sure that everybody learns the lessons so that the next one we do is hopefully going to be better than the last one. So basically that's my spiel.

Question from Jan Schaffer:
How long did it take you to do the big picture, I mean it's pretty pizzazzy...

Answer:
We're very lucky that we have some folks who are kind of very multitasking kind of folks, so it was about two weeks.

Question:
And what was the audience, how many visitors did you get, do you know?

Answer:
Well, for instance, the Oscar package we had up about a week, and it was really heavily played on both the MSN front and on MSNBC's front, and we had about 250,000 people come to it and experience it. About 20 percent went all the way through, I think it was an 18-minute experience, and that's pretty amazing for us, you know, that many people is pretty fabulous, especially for that long, and broadband, and Flash, and all those things that are going to cut a lot of people out already.

Question:
(inaudible)

Answer:
Sometimes, yeah. Yes, some of it they got from NBC or MSNBC cable or CNBC, but, for example, the expert panel that I was going to show you are things where we specifically were able to track down those folks because MSNBC had them in house and we just asked them a series of questions and cut and spliced it as we could.

Question:
(inaudible)

Answer:
That's a very good question. I led the team of only about four people, and three of them are journalists who learned technology, and one of them was a technologist who learned journalism. It's fabulous to have that kind of mix, because the technologist will think of templatizing things that the journalist wouldn't, but the journalist will figure out how to use that technology to better tell the story, so it's a really good approach to have both types in your area.

Question:
(inaudible) During the 18-minute experience, is there any time to slip in a commercial message?

Answer:
Did my business-development guy, like, complain to you? Basically we do have & let me show you & we have something here that we call advertisement, in this particular case it was just basically a static ad, but we didn't have any specific thing so, quite often, my team, we're the ones out there experimenting, and then the ad guys kind of catch up later once we've templatized it. So we're at the stage now where we have templatized it and they are selling it where we'll probably, in the advertisement, it'll be a streaming media ad, and they'll be sponsoring it as well.

Question:
(inaudible)

Answer:
Thank you. Well, we've been a part of the interactive television realm quite some time with Microsoft and with NBC, and we've kind of gone back and forth asking them what's the best approach. This is definitely a combination of what we've learned from those experiments, but at this stage we're not quite talking with them about using this approach. I think that there are some elements of it that interactive television really hasn't caught up to this yet, but it will probably in the next couple of years.

Question:
(inaudible)

Answer:
This was actually about the conflict with Iraq on its way up to the war, so we did not show much of that. That was the most difficult aspect of this, trying to figure out what we would show and wouldn t show. There was so much associated with the conflict and what was the best approach to this. I think we made some decisions that, if we were to do it over again, we would do it differently. So that didn't really answer your question & For instance, I think some of the things that we did in regards to weapons inspections, we were only able to tell half the story because and that was mostly because we didn't know a lot at the time and it was a very timely situation where it was important at the time but after a few weeks it wasn't important anymore.

Question:
(inaudible)

Answer:
Not in this particular one. We have other elements in which we do show a great deal about the Iraqi people, but not this particular interactive, not in this particular Big Picture, yes.

Question:
Is there a URL that they can go to?

Answer:
Basically if you go to http://www.MSNBC.com/modules/bigpicture/ and then whatever the topic was -- so Iraq, Elections or Oscars.

Question:
(inaudible)

Answer:
Well they want to make sure that & a large part of the big picture is it's evergreen... so we have to be a little too generic about things sometimes, and quite often, because of that, we can't maybe use that NBC spot that was submitted simply because it was too specific. But from a visual standpoint we don't really have any problems; the conversion of the video --this is flash video -- you degrade a lot of the quality, so obviously you don't want to have, you know, thousands of people in the background and expect the HDTV look, but we didn't really put that in that smaller space anyway.

Question:
A newspaper would chortle with glee if they got 20 minutes spent on back-to-back coverage. Yet you have done these exercises that take that much time just on one topic. What do you make of the fact that your users are spending that kind of time playing with these exercises? What's it telling you? Is it telling you anything? Is it telling you anything about our traditional journalism? Is it telling you anything about demographics?

Answer:
Well, from the big picture, if you closed out of the interactive too early, it would basically say, "Why are you leaving?" and most of the time it was people saying, "I just don't have enough time." At least from the interactive standpoint. you're getting people who are basically slacking off from work a great deal of the time, and you want to make sure it's going to be information that they can go back to either later at night, when they go home, or something they can experience in bits and pieces throughout the day, and so we would fall to pieces to see somebody staying with it that long, especially since most of our traffic is during the work day,

Eric Pryne:
For a segment of our readers, admittedly a small segment, this gives them something that they haven't been getting before. Our Sunday circulation is 475,000, we had 2,000 people participate in You Build It, if those 2,000 people spent 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes with the newspaper -- and we had one respondent e-mail us and say, "You know, my family and I spent a couple hours discussing this around the kitchen table" -- well that's just the kind of thing that newspapers want, readers to spend some quality time and feel that we are essential to their lives and add something of value. This isn 't going to appeal to all readers, but those it does appeal to are going to feel a tremendous sense of appreciation and increased loyalty.

Mike Skoler:
I think there's another element to it, as well. In a daily newspaper, a daily radio show, regular listeners or readers are actually following that story over time, so they get a fair bit of information over time, but they don't necessarily catch everything. So, I think when you see people stay for 10, 15, 20 minutes on something, in a way it means you grabbed them. But in a way, I think that natural interest is there and that they can go back and get a big picture on a story that they've been following piecemeal and may have missed elements. So I think it's encouraging in one sense because people feel very comfortable with this medium and spending time on it. It would be great if we could capture even more people doing that, and I have a feeling that societal trends are bringing us to a place where people are going to spend more time on specific subjects and less time kind of reading through front pages and skimming the tops of articles. We'll see.

Question from Jan Schaffer:
These exercises are remarkably devoid of conflict, it seems. You don't get a sense of scorecard journalism where it's "Democrats vs. Republicans," "Mayor vs. City Council," "The Governor vs. the state legislature." Any thoughts on the departure from that standard kind of framing?

Mike Skoler:
The Big Picture, actually, in some of that voting, kind of raises those issues in a sense. Tell us, do you support Dole/Gore... or not. I think one of the common threads here is that we're tackling some of the bigger more complex issues, and we're trying to provide more of a glaze than typical stories where there's a clear conflict between a governor and a legislator or whatever. I think part of it is that these stories wade into stories that you only get a piece.


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