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Transcript for
2005 Batten Symposium
and
Awards for Innovations in Journalism
Sept.
12, 2005
National
Press Club, Washington, D.C.
Andrew Sherry
Deputy Managing Editor, News, USATODAY.com
Thank
you very much for the invitation to speak here today about USA Today’s
election night results map.
USA
Today is very much about visual journalism and about delivering the
most information possible in the least amount of space and the least
amount of time. The challenge with visual journalism is that it is
very labor intensive and also that it takes a lot of time relative
to the pace of breaking news on the Web, which needs to be basically
instant. That’s what this map project was intended to solve.
Even
though we built most of this map and the infrastructure behind it in
the last few weeks before the election, we weren’t going into
it entirely cold. We actually learned a lot of the things we needed
to know to make this work about this time last year as we were covering
the election race itself.
As
you know, the presidential race in the U.S. is really 50 individual
state races, and we wanted to figure out a way that we could keep that
story going, presented visually and updated very quickly and easily.
So what we did was build this battleground state tracker. The breakthrough
was separating the data from the Flash map. So instead of a designer
having to go in and rebuild every single time we wanted to go in and
update one of these states, we separated the Flash graphic from the
data, which you see appearing down here below, and the data just resided
on an XML page, which an editor could go in and edit with Word Pad.
So
once the map was built once, our political editor could go in on a
daily basis and if there had been an important poll he could update
the poll results, which would cause the state to change color – if
he felt it was a credible poll within the margin of error – and
he could just put in a little line about that state. Some
of them didn’t really need to be updated that often – it
was pretty clear where Texas was going to go quite early – but
some of the states changed back and forth on almost a daily basis.
That
for us was really the breakthrough step in terms of technology and
design to open the door to what we did on election night.
Juan Thomassie
Senior Designer, USATODAY.com
As
Andrew mentioned, our challenge on election night was to design a map – an
interactive graphic – that would allow us to keep
the ever-changing information funneled into this project without a designer
or an editor having to actually touch pages. So based on the experiences,
we learned from the battlegrounds map that we were able to design an
interactive U.S. map with links to an XML file that was generated dynamically
from
AP’s election return information, and a click on the map would
take you to pages for each of the states.
What
was really interesting about this project, as we tested it on a mock
election days before the real election night, was
that we start
off with a blank slate; a white map of the United States. And as returns
began to come in, hour by hour, even minute by minute, the map began
to take on a life of its own and change from the east coast to the west
dynamically loading in returns – exit poll data – and then
giving us this very familiar red and blue map that we all looked
at after the election.
And based on what we learned from this project, we looked
at other places on our Web site where we might be able to integrate
an interactive interface
like this map with more dynamically changing information, and we decided
to use it on our weather graphic. It’s a very similar interface,
but with different types of information that load in by rolling over
different sections of the map, and by clicking on the map you can go
to more in-depth information.
Audience
Question:
Where
do you see it going in the future?
Thomassie:
I
don’t know. I wish I had a crystal ball. We
are really committed, though, to better integration of information and
presentation. USA Today’s newspaper was somewhat of an innovator
in the use of photographs, information graphics and color printing, and
our Web site has really tried to maintain that brand identity through
use of more design, perhaps, than an example of chicagocrime.org. Only
to fit it into the style, though, not to say it’s any better or
worse, but to maintain the look and feel of the Web site that our users
are more familiar with through other types of graphics that we produce.
We’re
looking ahead at opportunities to integrate content more seamlessly
with our Flash presentations and there are many projects that we are
now developing that tie into databases, including photo galleries
and other types of interactive graphics, like for census-type data, analysis
of neighborhoods and socio-economic information for a story like Katrina
and how New Orleans’ demographics might have affected the news
events of the previous weeks. We’re committed to doing more of
that.
Sherry:
We
definitely see it as a very important part of our future, partly because
what we all
need to do as news organizations to
remain viable is to use technology to leverage editorial judgment, and
that’s what you can do with this kind of stuff. That’s what
they’ve done with chicagocrime.org, by taking a set of data that
wasn’t addressed with editorial sensibility.
USA Today does a lot of stuff on the changing demographics
of the United States, so that could be an area to explore. But we also
are quite active
in our coverage of pop culture, so we’re looking at what other
possibilities are there to use databases combined with very different
kinds of visuals.
It’s really a range of things, but what ties it
together is using technology to leverage editorial judgment and add
value for the reader.
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