Transcript for
2005 Batten Symposium
and Awards for Innovations in Journalism

Sept. 12, 2005
National Press Club, Washington, D.C.

Rick Hirsch
Director of Multimedia and Special Projects, The Miami Herald

I want to talk a little about a project we did on Miami’s skyline, and I have to say thank you for having me here. I am dazzled by the presentations, from David’s to the folks at USA Today.

I come to this from a news organization where, historically, 90 percent of our intellectual energy has been invested in the “iron and the ink,” so part of what’s significant about the skyline project is how it took us to a new place.

Welcome to Miami, a huge suburb that is undergoing a unique urbanization process. It’s one that we’ve told in print over the last couple years, somewhat incrementally, sometimes in project form, but we thought we needed to find a way to tell that story differently to people. What is unique about this project for our institution is that the impetus for this project came from online. We wanted to show the changes that were taking place in a city where, along the waterfront, there were a hundred high-rise buildings planned in a course of five years that were going to take the cityscape and turn it into something very different.

We wanted to show what we were doing with scale and with depth, so that led us to conceive this project online.

There are 61,000 condo units planned in the city within the next five years. We put those on this scrolling cityscape and made them accessible to people throughout the city.

It was a project that required participation from our newsroom. Our business staff had been writing these stories, but in this case our online staff came forward and said, “Let’s show this story. Let’s engage the community. Let’s actually give people the opportunity to see what Miami would look like if all these projects were actually built.” So we built it on a series of photographs and incorporated Flash to tell that story.

The response was tremendous. We had 55,000 page views to this graphic, and that doesn’t include the clicks within. We also had a great deal of discussion. More than 15 community organizations linked to our Web site, as did the downtown development authority, and realtors found this a very engaging place.

It led us to an interesting dichotomy within our coverage. We didn’t set out to show this development as something inherently good or bad, and yet it was viewed in both ways by people who accessed this project. We had forums that engaged people in a fairly vigorous debate, we had dozens of letters to the editor on the topic, and to this day there is still an ongoing discussion about this.

It has enabled us, as we continue our coverage, to drive people to the graphic. Every project we do in print pushes people to look at the skyline, and we update it monthly.

As you look at the different colors on the graphic, it shows you the buildings that have actually been completed, those that are planned, those that are under construction and those that are in preliminary stages. We update those and we’ve taken buildings off the graphic that have failed as this huge real estate boom takes place in Miami.

Audience Question:
Do you think the discussions would have occurred if the visual hadn’t happened?

Hirsch:
I really don’t. The Miami Dolphins and real estate are the hot topics in discussion in Miami most of the time, but there had never been any successful effort to put together what Miami would look like if all these projects were built. You have to understand, this is the prototypical sprawl suburb. As Miami reached south and north and west to the everglades, the city was running out of land and there had been talk for years about the importance of infill development, but it was something that never seemed to be real for Miami until the last couple years, hence this boom.

Infill development was good, but how much was too much and how would that tax and stress the system? Really, until we put this together, I don’t think that conversation was engaged.

Audience Question:
What out of this was from the iron and ink folks?

Hirsch:
Interestingly, the iron and ink folks produced a 1A story and a perspective section piece that went along with this. They also produced a double truck graphic, but it was built off of our work. So the components of that, which are the 114 buildings incorporated in our graphic, are shown here along with the sections of the piece. And of course what they couldn’t do in print, even with a broadsheet double truck, was take the eye and stretch it along what is about 12 miles of coastline.

Audience Question:
Could you have used actual pictures and made it look a little bit more realistic?

Hirsch:
We actually incorporated two photographs of the existing skyline in the graphic. This is built on a version of that, but to get the detail and to really pick out the buildings to some sort of scale, we couldn’t have done that.

Audience Question:
Were you able to incorporate some of the content from the reporting in a way that raised the issues and the opinions about whether this is too much?

Hirsch:
Absolutely. All the stories that appeared in print, and in fact all the stories that we’ve done on downtown development, are linked to from this project. As we do succeeding stories we add them to that, and we have an ongoing development forum.

A lot of the use of this site has come from neighborhood groups. There’s one neighborhood highlighted in a story called Edgewater, which is just north of what has traditionally been called Miami’s downtown, and all but about a block and a half of Edgewater is going to be high-rises in five years if all these projects are built.

Audience Question:
Could you gather data on the demand on electricity and water and other development issues and incorporate them on the map?

Hirsch:
I would imagine we could, and in fact we debated about how much detail to put with each building. It’s effectively limitless how much detail we can put, but it was simply a matter of workload and practicality. But it’s certainly doable.

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