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

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

Session Three: Participatory Journalism: Telling Multiple Stories
Kinsey Wilson, Vice President and Editor In Chief, USAToday.com
Sean Polay, News and Operations Manager, Projo.com
Sean Fagan, Senior Producer, Interactive, KQED

Jan Schaffer, Moderator: I have a special affinity for participatory journalism, because it really derives straight out of the civic journalism playbook. When we were doing civic journalism in the 1990s, all of the participation was at things like town hall meetings and deliberate focus groups. By the end of the decade, I think we were beginning to see how cyberspace could be as effective, or even more effective, than real space as a room for engaging an audience.

What I think these panelists will demonstrate today is how the processes of making news and consuming news are really changing. We journalists like to think that we are the ones who author or produce all the news. I think that what you are going to see today will strongly suggest that ordinary people, our audiences, are now much more involved in the process of making the news for themselves. Making their own stories. And they are building their own stories using the tools that we journalists give them.

Here today, this panel, I hope, will show you how this is evolving. And we have Kinsey Wilson who is Vice President and Editor in Chief of USA Today, who really sees round-the-clock on-line production of breaking news, sports, entertainment, business information to more than a million readers a day. He is also involved in content alliances [and] syndication distribution opportunities. Sean Polay is from Projo.com, the Web site of the Providence Journal in Rhode Island, and Sean Fagan … is Senior Producer at KQED, which is a public broadcasting station in San Francisco, and he likes to say he started his career as a struggling screenwriter, which as you read the bios outside you’ll find interesting. I would like to start today with Kinsey, to tell us how they did what is really kind of a feature, perhaps even an entertainment, story; how they created a new model for doing that.

"Sing My Song"

Kinsey Wilson: Sing my Song is the piece that we singled out for the award. The other two there are subsequent pieces that we have done online that, in a way, draw from what we have learned from that piece.

USA Today ­ if you even have a passing understanding of it, you know that visual journalism is at the core of what it’s editorial has been about since 1982, when the paper was founded. Information graphics in particular … raised that to a new level, I think, and much of the newspaper industry has followed. It was natural in 1995 when the site was launched that we would embrace that as part of our identity. Not only was the on-line medium suited to aspects of visual journalism ­ even in the early development of the Web ­ but it was something that would allow us to differentiate ourselves from the competition.

The big news sites that we were up against – CNN in particular at the time, soon MSNBC – had vast stocks of video that they could employ in visual journalism. We didn’t. So we turned and leaned fully … on information graphics. I think that over time, as the technology has changed, as we have become more sophisticated, as a story telling tools have evolved, the form has changed a great deal. Some of the underlying principles that drove what we did in the early days are still there. It is first and foremost all about the journalism; all about the information.

My design director, Jeff Diney, has emphasized over and over again the importance of getting a kernel of the story and then figuring out what visual tools you want to use to augment or illustrate the story. The other thing that we have tried to do is to really lean on speed to market, fast turnaround. It’s great, and the piece you are going to see was developed over a long period time relatively speaking for a site like ours. But the real goal is to be able to turn around day and day out on a breaking news deadline. So that’s part of what we have worked for.

I think in the development of a site one of the real changes came with the uptake of Flash, when Flash truly became a pervasive tool that was really part of the repertoire and became capable of supporting audio and video in really dynamic ways. It suddenly opened the doors to the possibility of an entirely different type of narrative news delivery. The challenge that I have put to our staff is to figure out where we take that.

I am fond of saying that the Web at this point is very much like early television, where they were putting cameras in front of radio announcers and showing them on screen and hadn’t really figured out production values or what the binocular of what television was or how to best convey the story using the media to best advantage. That’s what we’re experimenting with here, and … in some ways this piece is completely atypical of our site. We’re a news and information site that goes 24 hours a day, headline scores, stock quotes, all the commodity stuff that everybody does. At the same time, at least elements of this piece are very much at the core of what we do, and with time we’ve tried to bleed this into the more traditional forms and figure out how to marry print and visual journalism and aspects of television and the unique interactivity of the Web.

With that set up, I should say that Ron Coddington, who is in the audience, is one of our senior designers and is conversing not only in the Web but in television and print, and Benny Gaynor, who is a very experienced photographer and photo editor, were the two folks who put this together completely under the radar. I had no idea this was coming. They were working for months; they were working on their own time. They chose to do ­ I think it’s fair to call it a documentary on the [20th anniversary of the] West Virginia New Song Festival. Had they come to me I probably would have said, “Can we try the Grammys or something that might have a little more visibility and attract a little more traffic, and can we condense it down a little bit, maybe keep it to two minutes?” This runs about an hour.

They spent 48 hours on site, they did countless interviews, six hours of audio, 300 photographs, I don’t even want to begin to know how much time they spent editing it into shape. I will show ­ obviously I can’t do it justice in terms of the form that it’s intended to take, but I want you to look for different aspects of the different elements that we used here and how we put them together.

[AUDIO: “I came here via Colorado, doing my first long distance tour, and this is my final finale kind of stuff. So I drove here yesterday from Missouri and that was a long drive. We ended up here at about 1:00 in the morning. The first festivalgoer that I’ve met this year, my wife and I were coming back from picking up a bunch of peaches last night.”]

This first tab here represents about 10 minutes worth of sound and photographs, and really tells a chronological story of the competition. And then each of the tabs behind it employ related but slightly different methods of telling the story. There is one devoted to the art of songwriting, again very much in the voices of the participants. There is no voiceover; it is all done in the voices of the individuals. They say it together. In other cases we included, we used text to sort of fill in the background information that you needed about individuals.

We experimented with using Flash to blow up photographs … if you came to our site during the Olympics, we used a slightly larger [thumbnail image] and blew it up to an entire full page to highlight some photography we were taking there.

There is a fair amount of text in here in terms of the lyrics, and I believe the profiles of the judges, with short biographies associated with them. And then we put together ... a poll that allowed people to, as they went through the music, vote on the songs that they would have selected had they been in the position of the judges. That was scored and you could listen to all the clips and so forth. Probably an hour is an underestimate here by the time you play all the music and so forth.

In the scheme of our site this … attracted relatively modest paid use, 30,000 paid use. A really strong breaking news story will do 100,000, 150,000-200,000 on our site. The point to me was not how much traffic this garnered or how much time went into it, but the opportunity to experiment with visual storytelling. And there are probably a dozen, at least, different pieces that we have since tried to tease out and use in a more demanding news environment.

Steel Ring was an enterprise piece that was initiated by the newspaper about cluster bombs in Iraq. This is a case where we met with the reporter ahead of time, gamed out the story that he thought he was going to cover, invited his participation in collecting the information, and then worked very closely with him upon his return to put this together. It works both as a complement and really as a stand-alone piece. It employs traditional voice-over narration, which we have done with information graphics to provide kind of background layer of information beyond what you see visually on the screen. These kinds of things are just a more elaborate version of something we’ve really been pioneering since 1995.

[VIDEO: “Paul Weisman talked to farmers about living in fear. This is a picture of a farmer south of Baghdad. His wheat field is filled with unexploded cluster sub-munitions. A US States Department team came out and looked at his field and decided it was simply too danger to go in there and try to pull them out. So he’s lost his crop. You see the wreckage here of an Iraqi military vehicle that was destroyed in the US cluster bomb attack. There is no question that this was a military target in this area. Iraqi troops were massed there. The problem is it was also a farming area, and after the fighting was over a lot of unexploded bomblets were left behind and the farmers have trouble making a living.”]

This was a case were we didn’t have the advantage of audio from a translator, or we could [have done] it in the more first person fashion. We used primarily text to tell the stories of the individuals on the ground. Very quickly, the last piece I want to show you—the next challenge, then, was this was a piece of enterprise. We had a fair amount of lead time on this. We were able to really craft the components. This last one was done very much on deadline, and was turned around the same day that Reagan’s funeral occurred.

[plays video]

I guess I will have to voice this one over. What we did was simply send a photographer and a sound person to the scene and the real breakthrough here for us we weren’t relying on sound that a print reporter gathered sort of haphazardly, and then trying to edit through masses of tape. We really went strategically, the photographer and sound person working together as much as they would in television, and marrying up the images.

A lot of the work was in the editing and creating what was about a minute and a half piece that completely gave you the sense of the cortege moving down Constitution Avenue and to the Capitol. And then there were subsequent chapters where we interviewed people who were standing in line, we covered the funeral, National Cathedral, and so forth, and these all went up within hours of the event taking place. It’s a work in progress; we don’t claim to have the Holy Grail as to how to tell these stories and what the ultimate vernacular will be for this meeting but we’re feeling our way along.

Jan: When you do something like Sing my Song, which is really out of the USA mold because it’s sort of a regional story, not a national story, what kind of reaction do you get from people who come to it sort of serendipitously stumble across it?

Kinsey: I’ll start with the reaction of my Managing Editor … he and I usually see eye-to-eye, and he has great news judgment, and he said, “You want to put what on the home front [page]? And why is this going to be of interest to our readers?” I mean the truth is, [the paper] and certainly the Web site has always been comfortable breaking out entertainment, sports, off-beat features and so forth and combining that with serious news, and this sort of fit in that vein.

"Tribute to our Troops"

Jan: Question, before we move on. We’re going to move on to Sean Polay. Kinsey sort of represents what we think as big-J journalism, and we thought of what the ProJo.com did was maybe small-J journalism that could be replicated in many ways. Tell us about Tribute to our Troops.

Sean Polay: My presentation today is decidedly low tech compared from what you've seen here from the rest of the panelists. I won't blame the [New England] Patriots’ victory last night as getting in the way of that. But really it's because it's a low-tech application and it was done that way on purpose. We were trying to facilitate interaction between our readers and their loved ones stationed abroad in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere.

The genesis of this particular site actually started 3 years ago after September 11th. It was right before we had started our partnership with Legacy.com. Those of you in the business [know] that Legacy.com allows us to post death notices online and tie in guest-book type features where people can leave condolences. What we did for September 11th was we solicited e-mails, and we received hundreds, possibly thousands of e-mails that we had to post manually each e-mail by hand. We decided we're never doing that again. And we had already had an existing application for user uploaded slide shows where users could come online and register just a few bits of information about themselves and post photos, and we had won an Eppy Award the year prior for our garden slide show where people could upload photos of flowers in their gardens. And we decided, well, hey we could use that technology or that programming for other similar applications, and Tribute to our Troops was one of them.

It's an interactive database populated by our readers and allowing users -- whether they be family or friends of service persons or members of the Armed Forces themselves -- to create Web pages simply by filling out a simple form. No special skills or Shockwave are needed. I mean, if you have a familiarity with the internet, you can use this site and you can go ahead and post, and it's really quite simple. And it's evidenced by how much it has been used in, I guess, the two and a half years that we've had it online.

We've also shared it out with several of our … interactive brethren sites, many of whom are in large military markets. Particularly WVEC, the television Web site in Norfolk, Virginia, has made use of this site, as have our sister sites in Texas, Louisiana and states that you see on this slide here. That tally is [as] of 10 o'clock last night, and it's still growing. I mean, there were another 51 messages pending, which is one thing I will show you here.

First of all, let me show you basically how easy it is to add a page, and you can see here I've typed in my e-mail address with the yellow there, and you click on “Create a new page now.” I happened to have already been registered because of testing this application, [but] if you've already done this once before, you simply have to type in your password. If you haven't registered before, we actually e-mail you a password to log you in, and you become sort of the owner of that page once you create the page. And this is all you have to do.

You just fill in the person's name, the hometown, their state, their branch of service and you can add a photo if you would like. One of the faults of this application is [that] if you forget to add a photo now, you're going to have to e-mail us to if you've come up with a photo later. And that's fine. We're more than happy to do that for folks, and I probably add a few photos a day for people who've forgotten to do it the first time around. And that's it. Your page is created.

Now, it doesn't immediately go online. ... Every two hours -- and you can see there are several people on staff who are [included in this e-mail too] -- [we] receive e-mails letting us know how many soldiers’ pages are pending, and how many messages are pending, to remind us that hey, amidst all the breaking news that you're covering, there are other pieces of the site that you need to maintain and here's an easy way for you to do it. So we're really trying to make it easy for the staff to maintain as well.

Here were 51 messages that had been added within the previous two hours ... This is our internal admin page, and there are all the messages. The approved button is already selected, so you just scan the messages and make sure that there's nothing derogative or defamatory or you know something you wouldn't want your kids to read. And there have been a few messages like that where there have been love triangles that we've had to take down pages for. And sometimes it's quite voyeuristic from where I sit sometimes because you get to learn a whole lot more about users or even casualties than you really want to.

But anyway, this is an internal administration screen for my staff. And so if find one to delete or if we find one we want to think about, we can hit the skip button and it will stay there as pending until we decide, well, okay we'll let it go.

Jan: But once it's up everybody can see everything.

Sean Polay: Yes, that's true and that's what I will get to next. But, anyway, so it just shows the simplicity of it, the low-techedness of it, but extreme popularity of it in terms of user contributed content. And we, ProJo.com, even since our inception in '96, really try to leverage two things. We try to leverage our breaking news capabilities and we try to leverage our interactivity.

And even this year, we finally collected a lot of user generated stuff, which is sprinkled everywhere throughout the site, into one section called “Your Turn.” And so there [is] our music site with music from local musicians. This Tribute to our Troops site with messages from people all over the globe. Our art site, which is posted by local artists, user uploaded slide shows, our forums and our surveys. We have daily surveys and interactive polls that we do as well.

We have a very strong recognition of the value of user content ... from a strategic standpoint it breeds loyalty. You turn a casual user into a devoted user and hopefully a devoted user into an evangelical user that goes out and says, “Hey, go check out ProJo.com. It's a cool site. I had a lot of fun there. I was able to my opinion mattered and it was published.” I mean, there's extreme value, particularly for a smaller newspaper like us. You know if you're published by the Providence Journal in our state in the state of Rhode Island, you've accomplished something. And so here we online can do the same thing.

As you might imagine, much of my 12-person staff pitches in daily to read and publish these messages and I participate in that as well, particularly on weekends when we have sort of an on-call system between [me] and my news editor. We go online and make sure ­ we're low staffed on the weekends ­ that the messages are getting published at least once a day.

And I am daily humbled and amazed at the quality and the heartfeltness of these messages. I mean, it is absolutely mind-blowing. Mothers writing to their sons and daughters, wives writing to their husbands, particularly new mothers talking about how a baby has taken their first steps and posting that to her husband. It nearly brings you to tears at times when you're reading through some of these messages. It's extremely powerful content.

And I'd just like to take a moment. At random last night, I picked a soldier from Providence. There's ten messages, and I'll just read you some of these. From Deborah Royal of Coventry, Rhode Island. “Hi Lema, my name is Deborah. I have a son, David Taylor, someplace over there with you. We pray every day for all of our guys and gals to come home safe. Thank you for what you are doing. Stay safe. Stay focused. Love to you and to all your comrades. Godspeed, Deborah.”

This from Aubrey Jones in Franklinton, Louisiana: “Hi Lema, we want you to know how brave we think you are and that we are praying for your safe return home. God bless you, Sheriff Jones and Staff.” And we've had people who ­ one particular poster from New York, who I think ­ and I don't if you saw on that introductory screen, we have the 10 most recent added soldiers. I think we have this woman from New York who clicks on all of those, and posts like 10 messages a day to people. And it's the same message every time, which actually makes it kind of easy from an administrative standpoint because you see her name and you say, approve, approve, approve, but here's the message that [she] types every single time.

It says, “Hi, hope you are doing well. Just want to say a big thank you for bravery and sacrifice in the service of our beloved country. I worked just six miles from ground zero in New York City. Being on the front lines of the home front we know all too well that freedom does not come free. I guess you could say we've been through the fire here, yet we carry on each day standing tall with heads high because of our awesome U.S. military of which you are a part. May God bless you and all of those you love and return you to them safely and soon. You will remain in my prayers and my very best wishes, Pat.”

There are messages not only from loved ones, but from complete strangers, and messages of gratitude. I have an acquaintance of mine who I went to college with who has served in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and I sent him sort of a little note of thanks. And he sent something back to me that said, you know those kinds of e-mails, they never get old. And I'm sure that the people whose pages are get online and read these.

And we do get messages posted from soldiers. In fact, I think I wrote down one here. Nelson Gonzales from Brownsmill, New Jersey, says, “Hey everyone, thank you so much. You don't know how much this means to me, and my wife is a very brave woman. The messages you all have left for me is the best thing in the world. Thank you all from the sailor overseas, Nelson Gonzales, II.” I mean, the soldiers do go online from wherever they're stationed and they do read through this stuff and so it is making a difference in their lives.

One last thing, you may have noticed that it's an unbranded site, and that was done on purpose, because we allow family support sites to link to it, we allow military sites to link to, we allow other media sites to link to it. To us it wasn't important that it was ours. It's the reader's site and that's why we didn't put our brand on it.

Question: How do the soldiers know it's there?

Sean Polay: You know, I'll tell you, we have spent absolutely zero dollars in marketing. And that's true of everything that we do, but it's especially true of this site. It truly is grassroots, word of mouth, really bottom-up kind of stuff. I mean, once some of these family support sites, once they find out about it, you see messages everyday. “Hi, I saw-- I know your wife from such and such support site, and she told me about this site and I just wanted to post a message of support to you on her behalf. She's a great woman.” You know, I mean we've seen all sorts of messages like that. It's really as grassroots as grassroots gets.

Jan: One question, and then we're going to move on to keep on scattering more questions afterwards.

Question: How do you deal with people protesting the war and making their desires known [to] be the same?

Sean Polay: You know, only occasionally, and even then, I'm probably overstating it. Really, 99% of the messages that I see ­ and I don't do it everyday, I really rely on my staff to do it ­ but I'm at least online there checking the messages two or three times a week, and no, I've not really seen that. I mean you see that more on our message boards. That's what they're for, you know.

"You Decide"

Jan: Last, but not least, I can ­ thank you, Sean. It's another Sean. This is a day of Seans. Sean Fagan from KQED, who I think will show us a different model for telling not just two sides of a story, but many sides of a story.

Sean Fagan: You Decide is a project started three years ago, actually, as a result of September 11th, sort of. I'm from New York, though I work in San Francisco now. And immediately after September 11th, there was a lot of scrambling going at KQED just to put up local resources for people, emergency contact information where you can send messages to loved ones and so forth. And I was a little disturbed by what I was seeing very rapidly happening in the country, which was sort of a ­ and I'm going on a life long passion of mine, which was critical thinking ­ there was almost a dampening down of critical thinking going on in the country at the time. People in Congress were suddenly trying to push through things that were 10 years old, like the national identity card, almost immediately afterward. And I thought, whoa, somebody needs to start emphasizing critical thinking in some way.

And we were actually working on a model, and the interface wasn't entirely ours. PBS had used it in a couple of places on different Web sites ... kind of an online devil's advocate that asked you a series of questions, [very] much like one of those "Choose Your Own Adventure" books. If you answer a certain way, it takes you to a different page than if you've [answered] this way. And the first one I did was on national identity cards, [since] I was struggling for a subject and I happened to be not on a project.

At the time, I'd worked on a dozen other Web sites, both as a producer and a designer, while I've been doing You Decide. And we did the first couple of them and they were so successful by our traffic standards that we were able to write a grant to the [Corporation for Public Broadcasting], and other people in the system that are here today know the CPB was throwing money at internet stuff around that time, where they're doing it a lot less now. And we managed to get a grant and studied up officially on something to be very simple and modular [that] turned out to be just this little job description for you to just stick on your site, because most public broadcasting sites have one person who half [the] time works on the Web, and it initially looks like a poll, and this is the draw.

Speaking just to some of the things that were said here today ­ how do you get people engaged [and] make it kind of personal? Ask them a question as if they're answering a poll. People love to enter these straw polls. [There is] some ambivalence about online straw polls because they're not scientific, and they can be spammed heavily by activist groups, and so forth. But here's an example of You Decide on our home page right now ­ and this is right now syndicated on 16 other public broadcasting sites. It looks much smaller, actually, than other sites, and we've actually gotten Salon.com to carry it. There's been no money exchange. We wish there was, but Salon has no money.

So it asks you an initial set of questions. Here it is: “Do Americans pay too much in federal income tax?” And when you click to answer, it goes, “Are you sure?” And I think most users … are a little bit teed off at first, because they thought they just were going to get to answer a poll. “Teed off” is actually part of the whole point of this thing ­ to kind of get people [riled] up, because that's what keeps them going through the activity. But we've discovered looking at our description boards and with actual exchanges with our users that it ends up calming down the conversation, calming down the rhetoric. And admittedly, You Decide is almost always about major wedge issues.

So you get a little bit of an introduction here. It tells you a little bit about the history of income tax in the United States and the fact that federal income tax didn't always exist, and so forth. It tells you a little bit of each side and then says, we're going to ask you this four or five more times. Some of the activities are a little bit longer, and only at the very end does you vote really count, and then we ask you again. And as you go through the path, there's really only two user paths. The site map for this looks like this [two parallel paths], you know. But it even though it's so deceptively simple, it really gets people thinking this site is talking to them. “Well, what if you knew that somehow the income taxes are unconstitutional?”

And we have seen on the discussion boards, the activities get a wide range of traffic. Some of them have gotten only about 1,100 [or] 1,200 people completing. Some of them, depending how wedged and how much they got spammed and attacked basically by groups that feel very strongly about these issues, have gotten upwards of 8,000 [or] 9,000 unique users completing the poll or activity, as I like to call it. Salon has had traffic that has exceeded that at times.

But it continues to do this throughout the process, considering this, until you get to the end. And when it says [vote], you can place your final vote, but it also invites you to go back through the activity and select the opposite answers of your own before you vote and note the fact that we're arguing your side too. Pretty interesting.

A lot of people probably have had this experience. You usually don't hear, one-on-one or at least e-mail-wise, from people who are happy with the content that you've produced. They're usually the people who are most motivated and pissed off. This one just launched, so the traffic is pretty low to it so far.

We also have a teacher guide that goes along with almost of the activities, which is pretty typical of PBS on mission when CPB required that of us, and that's grades 9 through 12. Though my sister teaches college freshmen, and she says they sure could use some of these critical thinking skills too, because they come to her with almost none.

The discussion boards have varied wildly in terms of traffic and some of them, they often start off ­ the first initial postings are usually somebody who didn't get the way the activity worked. And the interface has changed slightly over time. At first, we just threw you into it and argued with you. And now we have, as you see, that big yellow chunk at the bottom that says, “This is how this works.”

We don't say it to you in the beginning, because if we did most people wouldn't look at it. We're going to engage you in an activity that takes a half hour to complete. Then no one's going to click on that, right? Some people do actually spend the full 20 minutes or so it takes to complete one of these. The average time on it is about 6 minutes, but that, by our traffic standards, is very high. You couldn't just, you could click through the whole thing in about 20 seconds, fifteen seconds really, and just vote no.

So that 6 minutes [shows] they're at least looking at the major arguments and discussion boards show us that some of the people have gotten really granular and say, well, in here you say this and there's more to that. Our ultimate goal, and we say it on the You Decide home page, which ­ not many people come directly here because of the nature of the thing ­ that we do give you the option to get from the end of each activity, [that] the goal is [to inform readers that] these questions aren’t all black and white.

Unfortunately, these are often the questions that politicians use as wedges and become the major topic of national debate, when really there's more to the question. You know, we talk about figures, like we did one on the ethnic profiling in airports. We did one right here on this: “Should couples consider global population issues, before having more than one child?” There are often liberal versus conservative arguments at times, but I feel like we've accomplished something when I thought I had an opinion going into this and come away from it with a really gray feeling on the subject.

In fact, maybe the question wasn't the right question in the first place. We did one on physician assisted suicide, and I'd never even thought of the fact that, like, in an HMO system, if an HMO can kill you for $60.00 rather than keep you alive for $60,000, maybe physician assisted suicide is not going to work until you have like socialized medicine.

And we covered a huge variety of things. Some of them are clear, obvious wedge issues that have been national debates for a while, and some are a little more specific that we knew were out there and we felt, this would just make a good You Decide. Like, should fast food companies be held legally liable for the impact that their products have on consumers’ health. Not a lot of people like debating that in the media, but there’ve been legal cases around it. That's been also one of our big struggles [on] this site ­ the whole thing is done by two people. A reporter in Austin who I've only met once ever, three years ago, and I serve as editor and designer for almost all of them. A couple of people on my team have done the graphics, very few of them. But for the most part, it's just be me and Melissa, who's been just really digging in. She writes these in 40 hours, 20 hours a week.

… I would like to talk about one of the activities specifically. And, by the way, these have all been low tech, and I got to do one with Flash on whether we should send a mission to Mars. This is the only Flash one I got to do. Not because we don't like to work with Flash, but because we had no time and no budget. Speaking of that, we had no graphics budget whatsoever on this project from the very beginning. So you'll see on almost every one it'll say, “graphics courtesy NASA.gov” and it a gazillion other dot.gov Web sites, because those graphics are public domain.

This activity just recently was the most painful month I've spent on You Decide, and we’ve published about 24 of these. It publishes monthly. The reason is that that's kind of the way public broadcasting site traffic works. People are enormously loyal to public broadcasting sites. They come looking for a specific program, something that they heard on NPR, or something like that. So, we're both NPR and PBS and then they might stick around if they come across something like this. And we realized that we were publishing biweekly at first and that half our users were missing this stuff.

So, we published an activity because the assault weapons ban was coming up for renewal and should the U.S federal government continue the ban on assault weapons? I don't know if any of you is familiar with the term “freep,” but we got “freeped” on this heavily. Users of FreeRepublic.com, a very conservative Web site, they're sort of the equivalent of those MoveOn people on the left. They have heavy discussion boards on many, many different sites and they say “FReep this thing.” And when they see a poll around something they feel very strongly about, they'll post a message, and the traffic to this went through the roof compared to anything else we've ever done.

And the discussion boards ­ these users are extremely loyal to our radio and television media, but we haven't gotten them. Our site averages about 250,000 unique users a month, but you would think that they would really like to engage in our discussion boards. We make it really easy. You don't even have to log in. You can just make up a name on the spot. And that's cause a bit of a headache of late because some hate postings have been put there.

… And we did one about whether Saddam Hussein should be executed. They tried to “freep” that one actually and people just didn't get as passionate, but I've seen it on the [FreeRepublic] boards. This one ended up with 275 postings about assault weapons and, as you can see, some of them are quite, they're essay length, you know. And what I found really encouraging about this, even though it was kind of a very emotional experience … I've been accused of being a storm trooper for John Ashcroft, or several users on this one wrote to us directly and called us pinko Chinese, and they thought that was very retro.

Jan: How many people actually changed their mind on this exercise?

Sean Fagan: : There's no way we can track that. It's funny ­ I got an e-mail from a woman recently saying she was very upset that we did one on whether the military draft should be reinstated. And she said she's very upset because she'd gone through both sides and she's really passionate about her opinion on this issue, but she voted wrong. And she wanted ­ she said that it was a failure. She said, even in Florida, you should be able to correct your vote, you know, if you voted wrong. And I'm sorry, but actually you can't. Once you've put it in that ballot box, you've voted. And so I wrote her back and explained [that] we just don't have resources to … track every single user and say, have they voted before? Is this a different vote and they're voting opposite? This is a correction vote, you know. It was beyond any technology I knew, but I find really encouraging what happened with [the assault weapons ban edition], because this is a very stressful month for me.

They're actually completely correct in a number of things that they attacked us for. Some of the weapons, I had a very hard time finding graphics for this. It's almost [like] the U.S. government Web sites don't want to admit that assault weapons even exist, because this is a dangerous ground for a lot of politicians to get into. So, I just couldn't find any graphics and actually I finally got some from the Violence Policy Center, but I asked them if it was okay if I didn't credit them because they are [highly opposed to] gun activists. So that's where the guns that are in the images and the site came from.

But my original, I thought I was going on reliable information on a few real cheapo clip-art yearly subscription stuff that we have, and it said “this kind of weapon, this is an AK-47,” and so forth. Turns out I was dead wrong on several of them, and so there was huge discussion on, “This is misleading. You're showing guns that haven't been legal in the United States since the thirties when machine guns were basically banned.”

So, I went back and I'm actually not as proud of the graphics on this one because I had to slap this together really quick. Get the right kind of gun from the Violence Policy Center and put it there. But we also had a journalistic area that was really glaring in the very first paragraph of this thing. And this is just a perfect example of limited resources. I sort of have to rely on Melissa to check resources in more than a few places and she'd gotten a very compelling bit about a professor from Emory who wrote a book called, "Army America" that, based on old probate records, claimed that most Americans didn't own guns until the 1880's or 1890's when the big gun manufacturers like Winchester started marketing them to us, and that it was a myth of the Old West with everybody walking around with guns.

Well, that professor that was our leading paragraph, and that professor has since been stripped of his title, and the award that he got for the book that he wrote was also stripped. [Following protests on the message board] I removed it and apologized as PBS Interactive on this discussion board, and that calmed that down. But what I found was really interesting a lot of people were coming into this by the FReep discussion boards saying, “Go there and FReep this poll. They're arguing the assault weapons ban should be removed.” It was a classic case that we usually get only a couple times a month where someone just doesn't get it.

And then I always write back this form response: “We argue both sides. Please go back and look at the other sides of the discussion.” In this case, it was such a perfect example of, they'd been told before they even got there that we were arguing only one side. So, nobody for the first hundred odd postings here had bothered to click, yes, it should be renewed, to find out about the other side of the argument.

But what was interesting ­ it was self-correcting. This community itself ­ because we were able to get I.P. addresses of all of these sites that we're pointing to ­so I went and looked at all the discussion, which was on these other sites as well. People started coming out and saying, hey guys, I went and clicked on yes and they argue our side too. And as soon as that came into the debate, all the [uproar] calmed down and this discussion got quite interesting.

People started coming out and saying, “I don't know much about, I don't own guns. I live in the city. I don't know much about these things, but can you tell me at what point should we limit weapons? Should people be able to own bazookas and drive around in Bradley fighting vehicles?” And then the conversation got very leveled out because now they felt like they had a voice. … People are coming back from the same organizations ­ because they had the same logins, the same discussion boards ­ and [saying,] “That's a very interesting question. I debated that much myself because I'm very much an advocate of the Second Amendment, but I don't believe that people should be driving around in Bradley fighting vehicles.” And long essays got posted along those lines and it came full circle to something that I found very engaging.

When we first started You Decide, we talked to an expert on deliberative polling. And deliberative polling, for those of you who don't know, is where they take a bunch of people and they put them in a room, and they come from varied backgrounds, and they pose a series of questions to them and get them to vote. And then they keep these people for three days, like this seminar, where they come back and experts speak to them on the subject on various sides of the issue. And they ask them to vote again the second day, and they ask them to vote again the third, and people end up in much grayer areas. But not only that ­ and this is what I found, you know, very moving in what happened in some of these discussion boards ­ deliberate polling, its ultimate goal was to teach you that your ideological enemy is not necessarily evil and [not] like your physical enemy and out to do you harm.

You know, take the gun issue. If you live in West Oakland, guns to you mean gangs, and you just don't want them on your street because you want your kid to safely go to school. Well, if you live in North Carolina, guns to you might mean hunting, or even just target shooting, and your kids have never been threatened with a gun in school. But both of you are coming from this point of view that, “Even though I'm sitting across from you and there's this enormous ideological divide between us, I recognize that you just want to protect your children and I just want to protect my children and you just want to have an education for them and you just want safety. You want your family to be safe and you want your free speech to be recognized, and so forth. So you share all these values, it's just the way you want to accomplish them, the way you believe we as a nation should accomplish them, that is polarized.” And I've seen that again and again with these discussions.

And [then you hear] directly from people saying, “I disagree completely with this side of the argument, but I really want to thank you for doing this, for putting both sides there. I never understood this other side of the argument that well.”

Jan: Well, you are a wonderful storyteller.

Questions

Jan: We have time for about two questions before we have to move on and keep our train on schedule. Anybody got anything before we move?

[Inaudible question, re: USA Today’s use of infographics online]

Kinsey: We do both. Just to give you two perfect examples. We did very contained, very precise information graphics that we used that were about particular elements of men's basketball, for example, that were reported on the ground and maybe had 3 frames with a little bit of animation that extricated the particular aspect of what was going on. … We did one women's volleyball; we did one on cycling, and so forth where you had maybe 20 or 30 photographs in a montage with sound underlining, a combination of interview and natural sound, and so forth.

It was meant to convey the flavor of the Games on the ground. And I thought it was particularly effective in the case of the Olympics because we couldn't use video at all. We were left with just still photographs, words if we didn't do something like that, so [we were] trying to do both.

Jan: Anybody else. One more question.

Question: My question is also for USA Today. Mr. Wilson.

Kinsey: Yes.

Question: You earlier joked about had you learned of the Sing My Song project beforehand, you might have suggested that [it] might attract more traffic. I just wondered what kind of connection you see about the concern for traffic and the drive for journalists to engage the community. Do you think it helps or do you think it works the other way? And from your experience, what do you think will work out the connection, [as it] works out in a national paper as compared to a more local [one]?

Kinsey: I think it's a very double-edged sword. But we now have software that allows me to look in real time at what's getting hit on the site within 10 minutes of it going up. Interestingly, the people who have been most obsessed and most fascinated with this are my newspaper counterparts who have been flying blind for 20 years and basically going by the seat of their pants in box sales and very rough circulation numbers. And I almost worry that they don't understand the number of different factors that come into play and that there's a real risk of journalistic values being subverted. It's something that you struggle with each day. I think we pick up valuable information about what readers are looking at.

One of the things I noticed yesterday, for example, was that the stories about George Bush's military records were the second and first [top] stories on our site all day long, even when they weren't linked in [the top] positions. And it was an indication to me that all of a sudden interest in not just that particular issue, but the political campaign generally, now that we're past the convention, has started to take off, and that's consistent with what we've seen before. But there was a sort of a cue to me that maybe we need to start raising the visibility, now that we're past Labor Day. But there are also ­ I was thinking when you were talking about the visual reaction, the single element that has gotten the most page readers on our site is a snap question that we did on whether or students to have to say the Pledge of Allegiance in the classroom. And we got 8 million responses, and we don't have an audience [that large], and that was without the question actually being taxed by [an automated voting] program.

Jan: I want to thank this panel and ask you to save your questions for lunch – and I know you have more – for a really great point of [view] into the future.