Transcript for
The 2004 James K. Batten Symposium
& Awards for Innovations in Journalism

September 10, 2004
National Press Club
Washington, D.C.

Session Two: Digital Storytelling
Adam Howell, Interactive Media Producer, JournalNow.com
Shawn Bailey, Senior Producer, CBC.ca
Theresa Riley, Director, P.O.V. Interactive

Moderator: Dale Peskin, Co-Director, the Media Center at the American Press Institute.

Dale: I’ll open with two confessions for you. One is that I’m a recovering journalist. After many years in newsrooms, in news management, I now sit on the other fence analyzing media from the prospective of the audience. At the Media Center we talk about the new relationship between news and information that digital media and other media are creating with people.

The second confession is that I was a judge at this competition. So those of you who submitted notable entries, I want you to know that I voted for all your entries along with the other judges in the room, who you can talk to and I wish to introduce very quickly, including Bryan Monroe; of course Jan, whom you met, Mark Hinojosa from the Tribune, Jody Brannon, Lee Rainie who is with us a bit, and Chris Harvey. So thanks.

One of the things that the judges really look for is the quality of journalism and the relationship that this media creates with the audience. This is something that the notable entries, and indeed the winners really demonstrated. Some quality of journalism and innovation in this new relationship made them outstanding in a unique way. I think all the judges will echo that in different kinds of ways here today.

The three things you are going to see I think represent different bases in starting news operations. We have Adam Howell from the Winston-Salem Journal, a local news operation, which did some extraordinary journalistic work; we have Shawn Bailey, the senior producer at the CBC, a national operation in Canada; we have Theresa Riley from Point of View Interactive in public television. All three offer different kinds of perspectives into news operation. I am going to let each one of them talk about their projects, where they came from, the extent of their operations, and how they approached all of this, starting with Adam.

"Murder, Race, Justice: The State vs. Darryl Hunt"

Adam Howell: I am out of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. We are currently a three-person team, and at the time we did this last year we were a three-person team but one person has moved on, so now we are a different three-person team. In a couple of weeks we will be a four-person team. We tackled this beast knowing that it would be the biggest thing that we have done.

A little background on why that is exactly. In Winston Salem in 1984 a 20-year-old black man with cornrows named Darryl Hunt, who kind of hung out in liquor stores and other seedy places, was accused of killing and raping a 20-something young white woman, a copy editor at the Winston-Salem Sentinel. She was on her way to work one morning in August and was brutally raped and stabbed to death. During the investigation there were no real solid leads. But after about a three- or four-week investigation, police eventually narrowed it down to this one black man, Darryl Hunt.

Over the span of 20 years since it happened there were three trials and even more stories written about it. Because of new DNA evidence that came up towards the end of the year, Phoebe Zerwick, who became our investigative reporter after the story’s success, decided to delve back into the story in 2003. This created a general uneasiness in the community and in the paper somewhat. Many people were worried that there would be no breaking news for the story and no reason to re-hash it other than for entertainment. But the largest breakthrough she had in the story was a man named Willard Brown, who had actually committed an almost exact crime two weeks after the Deborah Sykes murder. He was never investigated because police believed that he was in jail when he wasn’t; he was actually on the streets. Her story mentioned that for the first time publicly. [Eventually,] it became an eight-part story.

After the story ran, police reinvestigated and looked back at Willard Brown. It happened that when his DNA was cross-checked with the database of the states, that he was in fact the murderer of Deborah Sykes. He gave a full confession and is now in jail. Darryl Hunt has been fully exonerated. He was released on Dec. 24, 2003, so he had a very good Christmas. It was a good story to work with. We had a lot going for us going into it. So that’s the background for the story.

What we did was print an eight-piece story and we ran somewhere around 700 pages full of documents, 20 or so documents which were multiple pages that covered everything from eyewitness testimony to original 911 calls, wanted posters, etc. The look that we were going for was kind of a, as you can see, a photo metaphor, giving the idea that the viewers themselves were going through and looking at all the different evidence. Though we thought it was a really cool idea at the time, looking back on it, it was kind of more trouble than it was worth.

As you will see, we have an iframe [inline frame] and there is a lot of scrolling and a lot of different parts to each story. But I’ll talk about that later. We had an archive of old journal stories to go along with the documents, and that archive went all the way back to August 11, 1984. We tried to re-hash and look back at how the paper covered the story from start to the finish. And it was actually pretty interesting because the story was very biased against Darryl Hunt back in the 80’s, and has since pretty much turned face.

We also had about 20 Flash files which ranged anywhere from audio to interactive maps, and because DNA was such a large part of the case, a DNA quiz. We also had a timeline of events, maps and photos, key locations of the murder.

The biggest draws, as far as public reaction goes, were the documents, because it was the first time they were released publicly for everyone to pursue – and people did. Second was an interactive map. Witnesses recanted, they changed their story, and so we created this interactive map to try to simplify the process. You could walk through what each witness said they saw, and then by looking on a 360-degree shot, you could see what they saw. And we went and we took 360-degree photos of the crime scenes, and then you could “virtually” walk through and see exactly what they saw and had a much better idea of what exactly happened. This took us a long time to try to figure out.

On the public reaction, at first some of the members of the community were angry for us bringing this story back up again. It was a very divisive story, racially, in Winston-Salem and pretty much stayed that way for 20 years. There were many members of the community who always thought he was guilty and said they always would. One of those people was Deborah Sykes’ mother, who, at Darryl Hunt’s exoneration, made a speech about how she did not believe his innocence mainly because she just wanted closure.

What would we have done differently with the story? Number one would be less metaphor, mainly because it is not easy to work with, as I am sure you all know. When we began the epilogue, we started finding out that Darryl Hunt [might] be released. We had to knock off the multimedia tab because there just wasn’t enough room, and so now the multimedia is kind of hidden away in the stories. That was obviously a pretty big problem. Next time we will try to hold off on the metaphor a little bit. Avoid iframes as kind of rule. We thought you could print out of iframes, but you actually print the entire page, which I now know.

Project and content management [files] are all flat files. We tried through Dreamweaver to check in and out files, but it just doesn’t work very well. And being a small paper, we are kind of controlled by Media General, which is our umbrella corporation. They let us do very few things, so flat files are often the only way you have to go. Hopefully in the future we will be able to change that.

Early on we started working with prints and conducted interviews. We did audio with [Deborah Sykes’] mother and with Darryl Hunt, but we could have started even earlier and tried to do video, try to do more audio, try to get more documents, etc.

Dale: What made you select the Darryl Hunt story for expansion into an interactive, online project?

Adam: This was a pretty easy one because it is the most well-known trial in Winston-Salem history. We have a story coming out now, an upcoming story of another black male who was in the area when a woman was beaten in a parking lot, and her baby died as a result. But the woman was being stalked possibly by her boyfriend. He was never investigated, but was arrested. The black man was arrested anyway. As it turns out, we seem to do racially charged stories, but maybe we’ll get over that and move on eventually.

Dale: Adam, another question we get is the research question. A lot of smaller organizations say we don’t have the resources to sort of attack a project of this scale and scope. Could you talk a little bit about sort of the issues of that you may face in the newsroom, and what expense it did to normal operations and the kind of decisions that went on about a project of this scope and scale?

Adam: Well since then we have focused more and more on turning a profit. Unfortunately, projects like this, without ads, are tough to fight for. We ended up working a lot of late nights because it was such a big project and we were only three people. Our boss always said that you just play to egos. If you make it worthwhile to us to do it, then I guess we will stay and do it. But that’s a rare thing. Luckily it came together. I hope it will come together again in the future. Three or four people just playing their strengths seems to be the only way to do it. You need to have one person who is good at amassing information, which helps to document.

Dale: We have a question here.

Question: How did you involve your audience?

Adam: With each day of the story in print we released the story online with relevant documents and multimedia. We had users give us ideas on what to do, give us leads at what would be more interesting, what the best audio would be, and what the most gripping story would be. But they also came and they proofread and double-checked everything. And we were very lucky to have a very involved editor and a very concerned reporter because this was her story and she knew this was really big. As a result, they were more involved than most people would probably be.

Question: Is the Web site affiliated with the newspaper?

Adam: We are. We sit in the middle of the newsroom, the four of us and everyone else, and each night’s stories we put through on the Web.

Question: One quick thing about the documents. Are they all original documents – just public records that they picked up?

Adam: Yes. I should have told you. I probably said it was the first time they were released publicly. It was the first time they had been amassed publicly is what I should have said. They were all public documents. They were also the reason we did the file analogy, because there was a file in the Winston-Salem police department, which has bolts and locks wrapped around files and folders that still have not been released publicly. In the future maybe we can get them with the others, but these were all publicly released and just never actually looked at.

Question: Can you talk a little bit more about the kind of work and responsibilities between your group and the newspaper group? It is really an interesting question that everybody grapples with. Where does the editorial leadership take place, what is your job, how do you fit into everything?

Adam: I will try to explain, because I am just a player in it. I am kind of directed at what to do — you know, "Adam, you’re kind of good at Flash, why don’t you make this map?" And we sit around and we talk about it. We come up with the idea. These stories were the exact stories that were written in the paper. As you can see we added where we thought appropriate. This was our call totally, where to put witness statements and links to the map and what to choose to put here, and we really only reported back to our immediate boss, the content manager.

We knew what the stories were. We had all eight stories already in front of us, and so we read through them and picked and chose what to make and then we just kind of delegated amongst ourselves. There isn’t much formal direction with these big projects; it is more what you all think you can do and pick four or five ways, do it, let print read it and okay, and then just make sure the packet is in order. So it is not as sophisticated as it probably should be, but that’s just kind of how it happened with this.

Question: But there is some advocacy in your newsroom to go ahead and embark on a project like this? It takes someone in the organization.

Adam: Yeah. We have lots of support from upper management to really push [inaudible] which is really nice.

Dale: I am going to take one more; we will all have a chance to ask additional questions after. But please, one more.

Question: I’m still not sure, was the reporter for the Web site -- or a reporter for the paper?

Adam: We actually don’t have reporters. It’s just us packaging content written by the print side.

Dale: We’ll come back and have another opportunity for Adam, but we want to share some other ones. The second project we want to look at was a different kind of story and a different kind of investigation. It was an investigation by the CBC into the crash [of] Swiss Air 111, which you may remember in Canada. A big complicated story that raised questions of why and how come. We’ll have Shawn Bailey here.

"The Nature of Things: The Investigation of Swissair Flight 111"

Shawn Bailey: I’ll give you the background first on this project, because it is quite different from anything we have ever done. This is a culmination of a 4-1/2 year investigation, and it was something where other news groups had only been allowed specific media spots to cover.

So there was a confidentiality agreement that was put in place with the Transportation Safety Board, with the Government of Canada, with the Swiss government and with Swiss Air. I was called into a secret meeting by our vice president of television and the executive producer of the program, Michael Alden, nine days before this documentary was to air.

I was told about the Swiss Air 111 movie that we had coming out and that it needed a Web component. And I said ‘Great, what do you want?’ and they said, ‘Everything.’ So I said okay. Because none of us on the team had actually been covering this as a story, I suggested we go to the journalists who had been covering this at CBC, and they said no you can’t, secrecy, confidentiality, and we cannot breach that.

So I said, "Okay, can I see the film?" and they said, "No." Can we speak to the investigators, and they said "Yes, good luck." So it ended up through perseverance we were able to track down the TSB investigators and work with them. They did open up a number of files to us. What we had to do is look back to the news stories that had already been posted to the Web site on CBC and elsewhere and look for problems in the speculation-based research that existed before this report had come out.

The main thing we had to address was what happened, what brought this plane down, and mostly, the recovery process. This was something that had never really taken place before. So how we did that essentially was to do something with the flight during this first section. We wanted to recapture the flight, but not really go in-depth beyond retracing the flight path and the exact details of what happened in the crash. This was simply because everything up to that point had been speculation. We felt it was probably best to re-visit that and provide information we now had access to that had yet to be released.

What is going to come up here is a series of animations. What we intended to do with this here was to retrace the exact flight path so that it was documented factually. It was based on the flight data recorder, it was based on ground radar, so everything that you see is actually over-laid maps that we took from the TSB.

I have turned off the sound here, but David Suzuki is narrating now the exact process of events that led up to the last 20 minutes before the crash, because we didn’t want to have people sitting around waiting for something to happen while the Flash movie was loading.

The controls that you see in the corner in the bottom right are accurate; normally those are just eye candy. When we are asked to do things for television, it’s "Make it splashy, bells and whistles." In this case, the executives had no idea we were even working on this, so we weren’t asked to put bells and whistles in. So what we did was we actually made it tell a story. The story it told was based on the actual flight data recorder. We programmed this so that the compass had as the altitude, the speed as is, from the investigation.

And the reason we did this was because this piece was international. We had what we thought might be a language barrier. We just did it in English as text. We wanted every possible angle we could attack on this to tell this story so that anyone in the world would be able to understand what was going on, through visuals, through the narration, through the video clips. So I will jump out of this for a second.

The three focuses that we put on were the recovery, the reconstruction of the plane, and how the fire spread. Now the most important was how the fire spread, which again for the purpose of language and understanding, we did as a series of video clips that track and trace where things were happening within the plane. If you have ever seen schematics and diagrams of how a plane is put together, it is millions of little parts. There is no understanding of what you are looking at. There are switches everywhere. So what is coming up here now is essentially a video in the corner that will show you exactly where the fire started. Then there is an animation that takes you through the plane to offer a real common understanding of what is going on.

Our hope was that by being able to track it to that red box that you see there, which moves as the fire moves around, we could show the exactly what is going on. We hoped that would give people greater understanding. Partially we wanted it because of the language. The other thing we were looking at were distraught families who were trying to understand what happened and that they were probably going to be asked to give interviews. We didn’t want somebody going out there just surmising what happened based on a 90-minute documentary film. So we really wanted this to be clear and concise to the point, another reason why we stripped back the graphics and made it very clean.

The color scheme was something that we looked at as well. It’s soothing, it doesn’t really distract from the content of the story. We thought that was quite important as a design. Normally everything is ‘make it look good, make it look splashy, make it have a big impact.’ Sometimes I feel that takes away from the content itself.

The memorial was something that we put together, just for reference purposes. We were going to have journalists from all over the world coming and taking a look at this. If there were any needs, they could reference them here. This was cleared by the TSB and the Swiss government. I’ll just scroll through the names. We wanted to create a piece aside from the fire because we also wanted to have a virtual memorial that represented what was happening through it. Two memorials are in place right now in Nova Scotia, and we just wanted someplace that reflected those spaces as well. We also offered information about the memorials, where they are located, why they were created, the sight lines. There is a story about the sight lines that you can read as well.

While people were waiting for things to load, we had an interactive map that we put in so that people could understand what ships were involved in this process, where they were located, references for the last known position of the flight, flight data recorder, the cockpit voice recorder, what each one of these ships performed in the recovery process. Most people spent a lot of time actually going through this and gained a lot of information where normally this would just be loading. So as we launched the piece, this became the story of the recovery, which was something that really wasn’t touched upon. That’s what we wanted separate.

What we wanted to do was add something beyond the documentary itself. News coverage as well as the documentary touched upon the recovery, but they touched upon it in a way that was just simply you know there’s a heavy lifting barge that has been brought in now, it is recovering the plane. Now they’ve switched to a scallop driver. What we wanted to look at was what that process meant, because this was a 4-1/2 year investigation where normally air crash investigations take a matter of weeks. This one was important in that the plane crashed in the ocean. They knew there was a fire involved. That meant that all debris that could be gathered that might lead them to the cause of the fire was actually part of the fire, as opposed to a post-fire, crash-burn scenario. So these investigators were away from home for 4-1/2 years, away from their families.

We wanted to tell their story as well as to what went into this recovery and why it was so important for flight traffic safety. As you go through this you can then look through the various points of this recovery process from the very beginning until the end, when they brought in this giant ship from the Netherlands that actually vacuumed the sea floor. So in the end they were able to recover 98% of the plane from the bottom of the ocean based on weight. They weighed everything. And I saw wreckage from this plane. Basically it was as if we all went six miles off shore, took all of the change out of our pockets and threw it overboard. Most of the pieces were of the dime/quarter size. So being able to recover that much material was an incredible endeavor that had never before been undertaken. We really felt that it was important to tell that story as well. And that was beyond the documentary or news reports that were currently in place.

Dale: Shawn, one of the things that struck the judges was the power of the visual story telling. There is very little narrative and very little text in all of this. I wondered how conscious that was of CBC. I know there is a broadcast notion to it, but I mean the emergence of a visual Web to tell stories, was that foremost in your mind in telling the story?

Shawn: Yes, we were very conscious of that. One because of the language barrier. We also wanted something that told the story without the text. I’m not online at the moment, but we do have an in-depth series on the Swiss Air site that goes into five years of recording; it’s an archive. So if technically you want to go back and read everything that’s been recorded about that crash, you have the ability to go there and do that. We didn’t want to recreate that here.

The technology now is to do a different kind of journalism through the animation and photo usage that you saw today. It was a synergy with the broadcast as well, that was the main reason for that. The other thing we got into was the plane.

Dale: Could you just spend a minute on that, and then we’ll go on and we can follow-up with some questions.

Shawn: Sure, okay. Part of why we did it visually and we stripped it back as well was to give details and explain, really show what happened based on evidence and not just instill fear. We didn’t want to have something that was very sensational and overbearing. We wanted to have something that just said, "This happened to this plane." You could understand a bit that the design schematics of the plane and the plane itself was for the most part safe. It was an insulation planted that was faulty that brought the plane down. It was just to really stem the fears of people in terms of flight. So I guess for that I will leave it there since we are running out of time.

Dale: Well, we can come back and ask some more questions about how this was done at the end, but in the meantime, Theresa Riley is here to talk about her project from P.O.V. called “Borders,” a different kind of story that we as judges thought set an expanded standard of journalism in the media as well.

"P.O.V. Borders: Environment"

Theresa Riley: Hi, good morning. I’m Theresa Riley from P.O.V. I have a little background first on P.O.V.

P.O.V. is PBS’s longest running documentary series. We are a film series on PBS. We typically have between 12 to14 films per year, and part of Interactive is a Web site. We have three people on staff including myself, and throughout the season, a couple of freelancers here and there. We are a pretty small team and what we mostly do is create companion Web sites to the broadcast. And then P.O.V.’s photos, which is what I want to talk about today is a Web-only series. We have a lot of fun on staff, trying to explore different ways to tell stories in the online environment.

Our content strategy at P.O.V. is to promote activities like learning, we are PBS, provide opportunities for further understanding of issues explored in our films, and foster discussion. One of the big reasons this series was started in the first place was to provide a national forum for people to watch documentary films and then be able to talk about them and discuss them.

And so with P.O.V. Interactive, which started in 1996, having an online component was a great help in that effort because people could go on and talk about films with each other in a way that they hadn’t been able to before. So today on the Web site we start to engage interactive viewers, and we also encourage them to co-author content, which means sharing stories of their own, their own experiences, contributing to conversations. That can be through a question or a comment for filmmakers or for characters in films, participating in polls, which we don’t do too much of but we do some of, and taking quizzes online just to find out more about their own perspectives and what that might mean on a national level.

P.O.V.’s “Borders: The Environment” is the second episode of the series. It explores how the individual choices we make shape our environment. We draw on stories from across the country within the framework of three basic elements, earth, air and water.

I think what I’m going to do now is just show you a little bit of the site. ... The point is to really engage them from the beginning, saying everyday we make choices about what we eat, drink, and breathe, and ask what do you choose, what are your choices. That sort of tells you right away what peoples’ thinking is about their daily lives.

For this intro we used Flash because we wanted to have people find different things happening as they moved around. So these are sort of previews of all the little stories that you will find. I’m just going to show you in our “Air” section.

This is the most traditional video story. Most video clips are between two and four minutes each. In our first episode, which launched in 2002, we found that a lot of our videos were a little bit longer and people didn’t really want to watch videos that long, or at least our audience did not. They were sort of confused that we were a TV show, with a Web site, and that the videos were going to be a half hour. They really weren’t interested in doing that. And so here we really try and sort of show that you have a little time here, it’s 2-1/2 minutes and actually has Larry David and it’s really exciting for people. You will see here his wife, his real wife, who actually is a big environmentalist and very interested in hybrid cars that he has several of.

[plays video]

I’m going to stop it there, so that’s one of the little videos, and the way that we sort of consorted this is there’s the video there but then there’s also some text there that you can read and sort of learn a little bit more on how this kind of fits in Hollywood and how it’s involved in environmental programs. And then also on the page we try and have just a whole bunch of different things that somebody can do to interact with the content themselves. We have a little pop quiz that you can take and then also we have this--which is where people can show their own stories about hybrid cars and where they stand on this issue. And we have gotten great response where people actually come out with a world of comments about the status of hybrid cars, and how popular are they in their neck of the woods. So you can sort of read what other people have to say and put in your own comments as well.

Another example is in the “Water” section. We found in our research that a lot more people listen to the radio as opposed to looking at images, so we wanted to do something that was more audio focused. In this particular story we wanted to look at the phenomenon of bottled water and try to figure out why, I think in the last 10 years, bottled water has gone up incredibly in the United States in terms of people buying it. It’s a $7 billion dollar industry. So our journalist here takes a look at the phenomena by going out on the streets of New York City and trying to convince people.

[plays audio]

A couple of more minutes, and you can obviously go to the site and check it out yourself if you want to watch more. This last part demonstrates the main point of this series, which is to look at a story in different ways. Taking an untraditional route, we wanted to use a game to convey a story so that a user experientially could sort of understand what was going on.

In this particular one we are talking about a farmer in Canada who was sued for over growing crops in his field that he hadn’t paid the license for. At the time that we made this, the case was still in Canadian court. So we wanted to show the story by actually having you play the role of the farmer in your field. His case was that the seeds had blown over from either a passing truck or another field, and that’s how they got in his field – it wasn’t something that he did on purpose. It turned out that he lost the case, but this is the problem throughout the world for farmers having things coming into their fields without them necessarily wanting them there.

In this game you sort of get to play with butterflies, not too much, but you get to sort of block the seeds, or you’re supposed to, before they fly into your fields. The real components of this is that if you make it through to the third bubble which is actually very difficult, but not too difficult -- it can be done -- we send you real seeds in the mail. You get to plant those in your garden. We thought this was really great in terms of having a real world component to an online activity. So you can take this and then go and plant them in your garden. And there are other things too.

Questions

Dale: Okay, let me ask the hard question. Here’s a site with sound and games and video and this stuff. How long did it take? What’s a project like this take to do?

Theresa: This took a long a time and this was our second episode so, our first prototype we designed had a very different-looking field. This one we designed with the intention of using as a template for future episodes. We’re hoping that future episodes will take less time. But in terms of getting this whole design and all the components, it probably took about four to five months. Obviously, we were also doing sites for the shows, so it was kind of like half time four or five months.

Dale: I should ask the same question of Shawn and Adam too. How long did your individual set of projects take to really put together?

Adam: Well, ours was nine days, with three of us working on it.

Dale: That’s extraordinary.

Shawn Bailey: My team is three people. No sleep. We had a couch. We actually had a closed environment. We had to build it in because of the confidentiality. We had a couch behind us so one of us would just rotate. Sleep on the couch for a couple of hours while the other two worked, in between jet-setting back and forth to Ottawa to meet with the TSB.

Question: I have a question on storytelling. There’s something explicit in all your presentations – what your theory of storytelling is or what you think has to work. How intentional was it? How accidental. Especially in nine days. How do you determine the storyline?

Shawn: A great question. For myself, we were visited by Gary (Kebbel)’s Ministry of Fear. Fear is a powerful motivator. We simply sat down and we knew that the thing that we had to tell was how this plane was brought down. So that was the key we needed to focus on. It was just hard core research into that. Beyond that we just explored the recovery story. How did we do it? Just non-stop research and perseverance.

Question: Theresa, the same question. How did you conceive of the game as a storytelling device?

Theresa: Well for us you know we decided we wanted to make our theme the environment. We actually had a branch of environmental journalists who came together and we all talked about what stories were important right now in terms of issues. And through that we came up with the idea of just breaking it down to air, water and earth. Doing it that way let us concentrate on one story in each area, making it easier for people to understand and grasp right away. But these stories, we sat around talking about different ideas and the project did start with a story and then we decided how we wanted to do it. So it was more the story first, and then thinking about how we can best tell it. Through video, radio, or something else. Actually we are working on our next episode now and taking proposals for stories if anybody has an idea. But we want to use different ways of telling stories again just to keep trying different ideas and see what works and what doesn’t. But it starts with the story.

Question: Question for each of the panelists, perhaps starting with Theresa. How did you promote these packages? I say start with Theresa, because yours was a Web-only presentation.

Theresa: It’s a real challenge for us. Typically with the broadcast component we can, at the end of the show or even during the show, have little Web markers to pick out our Web site for information. So we actually sent out postcards to different organizations through our network of PBS local stations. Obviously our home page was featured on PBS. We also did some work with Grist magazine, which is an online environmental magazine. We’re going to . . . have one of their personalities come over and answer questions from viewers in our Border Talk section, which I didn’t even get to, but that was where you can really interact with people. A lot of grass roots promotion, like have interns go to other Web sites and post “Hey, check out this cool Web site.”

The other thing is blogs. We really tried this time to make an effort to advertise to bloggers. We’d send e-mails to bloggers that seem to be interested in these types of issues, and see if they could post things in their blogs. We had some success with that.

Shawn: In our case, we didn’t really have the ability to promote it beforehand because we weren’t allowed to say that we were working on this. As the news story broke, the TSB released a report [and] it became front page on the CBC home page. We had about five minutes before the announcement to scramble and get the story up. Beyond that we had a number of sites that the victims’ families had put up as well. We sent them e-mails just letting them know that the piece was out there, about an hour before the program had ended. A number of them created forums and linked to it from there.

The Swiss government had just disbanded their Web division and were trying to rebuild it so at the time they didn’t have anything. They pushed through it from their television program. At the end of the program, there was a round table discussion. ... And then in the subsequent days there were other news stories that broke where they linked back and pointed to us. So for us it was more of an aftermath than before thought. Normally we try to push things in advance. Then just finding those Web sites where you can post stuff and say, "Hey, check this out."

Dale: And Adam, in Winston-Salem, how did they discover it?

Adam: Usually with things that we do online, especially if they’re exclusively online, we just have shirttails in our print stories that say go to our Web site. We didn’t do a whole lot of promotion online other than to put it on the front page.

Dale: I think we have time for about one more question.

Question: You have a lot of really impressive animation on this site. Was it given to you from the broadcast, or did you also build that?

Shawn: We built the majority of it using Maya. So vis-á-vis CBC, but we have huge graphics departments with all the computers in place. We purchased a model of the plane, which saved us an enormous amount of time, and then we used that plane in animation.

Dale: Let’s take one more. Your turn to get in.

Question: Why did you pick the environment, and did you say that you found that the audience was more interested in audio-based rather than video, or how do you judge that?

Theresa: Just from general research out there. People listen to radio at work. While they are doing other stuff they are listening to the radio. Radio is huge on the Internet. In terms of the video stuff, just from testing we had done with people. They seemed to like the shorter clips better. They didn’t really seem to have ... patience with the fact that obviously last week they just announced that ... there’s more people in the U.S. using Broadband now than not. It just went over 50%, so who knows if the future of longer video will be possible, and the whole conversion issue, which they have been talking about for years but it might happen. That might have a place in future episodes, but right now we’re focusing more on audio. We just find people like it.

Dale: Theresa, Shawn and Adam are going to be around to answer more questions. I want them all to know that I voted for all three of you as the winners. Thanks a lot.