Innovations in Digital Storytelling: Jonathan McCarthy

Transcript for 2005 Batten Symposium and Awards for Innovations in Journalism
Sept. 12, 2005
National Press Club, Washington, D.C.

Jonathan McCarthy Long Island Editor, Newsday.com

I’d like to echo David’s sentiments on thanking everyone for the opportunity to be here. It’s really a great honor for us and our staff. I apologize also for following a very nice English accent with a veiled Long Island accent, so I’ll try to spare you from that this morning.

The interesting thing about the project is that for us to sit here today and essentially represent corporate national media with our small staff of just a couple of handfuls of people, is good for us. And the way this came about was actually born on the Web in so much that as the elections were coming up in Iraq, every good managing editor on the paper said, “Well how does this affect my beat?”

So in On Long Island we had a story and in Business we had a story and obviously our world reporters were doing a story, and it wasn’t until we had a meeting and I said, “Well I’m just going to put all this stuff on the Web,” that the paper was like, “Well hey, let’s make a series!”

And that kind of lack of serious planning really allowed us to have a lot more freedom on the Web because everything was done on deadline and that really allowed us to explore and push the envelope a little bit.

Some of the things that we highlighted—and as you can see we broke it down into six days—were what the price of freedom was in Iraq, how the military was stretched thin to every coast, and what it has meant for Long Island?

We used to have a fairly robust economy driven by wartime activities—building planes and all those types of things—and there are still some high-tech defense industries in our area so we focused on that.

And finally we got to the last part, which I felt was the most interesting: How come no one cared? There weren’t giant protests. Everyone had a yellow ribbon on their car but no one really knew what that meant. There wasn’t outrage about the number of dead and there was patriotism in so much that we stopped listening to the Dixie Chicks for a month but we never really did anything greater than that. So that was the rationale behind doing the project.

As far as the Web site goes, one of the questions we were asked to be prepared to answer was, “Why make it interactive?” And my answer to that is simple: Why wouldn’t you? There’s no other way to tell a story these days.

We set out to look at what the costs were locally, nationally and internationally and we set out to see how it was affecting families. But we also set out to really connect with a group of readers or an audience that the newspaper might not be connecting with, and we tried to figure out what the disconnect was in society with this war.

As you go through the days, each day was a little formulaic in that it started with a slideshow and an audio voiceover describing the day, but we had some phenomenal pictures from the scenes and we had some really good journalism to highlight.

On the Web we talked about how we could do this a little better, so you’ll see some of the Flash. We took a look at the database of the soldiers that were lost and we broke them out to show what the deadliest day was and how many people died and what they were doing, and we put faces with as many people as we could. We did an interactive timeline to this point—and this was in January—to show what was going on in the war and what had been going on.

One of the things that we tried to show was that we had the reach to tell this kind of story. Being that we were working with Newsday and all of its resources, we had 11 reporters in all different parts of the world, we had seven photographers contribute to this, we had three videographers contribute to this, and we also had two editors on the Web site and two Web designers. And we did this all on deadline, so the paper closed at 10:00 and we’d finally get all the text and we knew the pictures and we knew the gist so we weren’t working long. But this meant that at 2:00 in the morning each night a new piece would come up and we’d combine it with the old and that’s what you end up with here.

One of the things that was really interesting for us was that we were able to show how this connects with all different parts of society. One of my proudest accomplishments in working with the team on this project was that during this week before the elections, we were hit with our biggest snowstorm in 20 years, the fire department in the city of New York had their deadliest day since September 11, and we also had the deadliest day in Iraq, which ironically was day three of this series. So to be able to be in the middle of this series—and I really credit the paper with still sticking with it and staying on message—and have this happen, it really hit home. The front page had no choice but to again acknowledge that there was a war going on in Iraq. And we’re talking about a time in which we were very much focused on whether or not Martha Stewart was going to go to prison—that was the front page of our paper the week before this series. So it was a little different point of view that we were able to use.

As far as the technology, there’s an interactive graphic that looks at all of the weapons we use in the war and there’s a graphic that looks at what exactly a soldier is wearing. Some of the graphics that we were able to do that we were most proud of took newspaper graphics and actually made them interactive online. So if someone was reading this in the paper, they could go online and see those stories come to life.

In the videos, we went to a high school in a town on Long Island called Brentwood. At this point, six people from Long Island had been killed in the war and four of them went to this same high school. They were killed at different points in time, they didn’t graduate the same year and they were all in their twenties. It’s a community that is relatively poor and the recruiters have an office in the campus and they promise them a life outside of Brentwood and they get them to join up. So we went back to this school and took a look at a teacher who is teaching history and current events and how he’s explaining why it’s important to be a soldier, and we asked him, “Is that a hard lesson to teach at this point, as the flag is at half-mast what seems to be every other week at this school?” And we talked to some of the students and we did some video there.

This is another graphic that, in paper speak, ran as a truck. We took Flash and some effects programs and wrapped a globe together and you can rotate it and see where all of the troops are. So we talk about our troops spread thin, and it is important that people see that we’re not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’re all over the place, and you can stop at all these countries to see where we are. Those are the kinds of things we try to do.

The story itself is something that we needed to bring home a little bit, but at the end of the day the biggest protest we had was on the eve of the Republican National Convention. I ended up marching in that protest parade only because I had to get from my office to Madison Square Garden. I was trying to get in the Garden to cover, and the only way to get from my office to Madison Square Garden was to march a block with the protesters. And as I walked along, as an American I was kind of proud that these people had mobilized, but then I saw what these people were protesting. As they walked past Burger King they said, “We hate Burger King!” And on the next block was Foot Action and they said, “We hate Foot Action!” And they didn’t really have a message and they were just there for the scene. At that point I realized that the whole concept of our society being at war was something that I was glad that we tried to examine.

Audience Question:
What was the reaction that you got?

McCarthy:
We got some high school professors who wanted the project on CD-ROM so they could use it to teach their students, and some college professors who wanted to work it into their curriculum. What we tried to do with the six days as we went across was to give people all the information that we had. At no point did we try to say “the war is good,” or “the war is bad,” as no newspaper really would in a project like this. We tried to give everyone all the information they could possibly want to make that kind of judgment.

I was really happy when we got e-mails that said “great job,” and e-mails that said, “How could you do this at a time of war?” It was about 50-50 in responses of people that either liked it or hated it, so for me that means that we were probably right on the mark.

Audience Question:
How can you keep that relevant and fresh over time and keep people coming back to it?

McCarthy:
In this particular instance, we had to make a lot of concessions in the middle of it because the war was still going on as we were doing this. So we were able to take some of the things that we were already doing and make it part of the project, and things that we started for the project we continued to do.

We had a blog with a reporter and photographer as they were there for the elections. They had originally started blogging about what it was to be on patrol and then they stayed for the elections, and that was a way that we continued the story.

Once the elections happened and there was no giant terrorist attack on the day of the elections, everyone came home but our reporters stuck around.

Audience Question:
How do you keep citizen interest?

McCarthy:
One of the things that we were really proud of was that this was what it actually looked like in our paper on day one, and it’s essentially the Web site. For the newspaper to embrace this kind of design was a way for us to really bring it to the forefront.

On the Web site we can change things all the time, and this was a way for us to really keep things fresh. There were constantly stories about Iraq, so it was easy for us to bring it out here. Over the course of six days we had four or five different videos shot and we were able to highlight different things in different spots. We sent it out in e-mail alerts and we did everything we could do to get it out in front of people.

On the last day we offered a message board where people could share their thoughts about the war. So we were talking about society and we encouraged people to give us their take. For example, if you have a yellow magnet on the back of your car, do you know what it means? Did you buy it at the bagel store? Did the money go to somebody important? We tried to engage our users with those sort of things.

Audience Question:
Is there still interest in this?

McCarthy:
The week before the elections there was a lot of interest, and as we went through it we tried to keep it out there and keep it fresh, but I think that America, like any other society, just wants to gravitate to the next big thing. So Martha got out a couple months later and we were all over that and now we’re all over Katrina, but I would hope that it resonates still. We still get some response to it but I wish it was more, obviously.

Audience Question:
Did you use any resources available through the Tribune Company family? Did any other paper or broadcast Web site pick up your work?

McCarthy:
We were able to highlight the work we did on some of our partner sites. New York City’s WB 11 did a Sunday newscast and had one of the editors on and talked about it, so we tried to do things like that.

One of the graphics that we used was from the Orlando Sentinel, and that was really the only Tribune thing that we used. We used some AP photos but 98 percent of it was done in-house. After the package began, it was packaged and given to any Tribune site that wanted to use it. I think that it made some appearances on other sites but nothing as big as what we did.

Audience Question:
How did you track your users? How did they differ from your print users? How did you market the package?

McCarthy:
As most of us know, when you’re working with Flash it’s very hard to track how people go through and how long people stay on certain aspects of it. What we did was the very un-chic way of embedding the Flash on an HTML page and tracking that page. That was how we tracked it, but as far as the Flash and what people looked at, it was hard to get actual numbers.

As far as how we marketed it, I would say the one thing that the project suffered from was that it really wasn’t the type of thing that you go out and market like, “Hey we’re going to explain the war to you.” It didn’t really work out that way, but in the paper we were able to do some things where we had some giant boxes that said, “This is what’s on the Web. Go there.” So if you looked at the paper—these are the covers of the paper for the six days of the series (on screen)—we actually put the URL bigger on the front page, and that was the best way to market it. But as you can see, we had the blizzard and the firefighters die so it was a big week for other news, but it was the right week to do the story.

• Continue to Andrew Nachison’s panel introduction
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