Eric Pryne
Reporter
The Seattle Times
"You Build It"

Thank you, Jan. After we unveiled our "You Build It" project last spring (2003), one reader who wrote to thank us for it quoted a Chinese proverb that I think captures the power of interactive journalism pretty nicely:

New technology now allows newspapers to interact with readers both more easily and more intensely than we could before. It allows us not only to tell or show readers news, but to give them the opportunity to do news and perhaps understand it better. We're just beginning to explore that potential.

"You Build It" appeared in The Seattle Times on Sunday, March 30, both in print and online. We invited readers to play the part of regional transportation decision makers -- to do transportation policy, not just read about it. We presented them with many of the same difficult choices real world decision makers face.

We wanted to explore a new way, and maybe a better way, to inform readers, but we had another goal: We also wanted to empower readers, to give them a voice in an important regional dialogue. This was really a civic journalism exercise, and the results exceeded our expectations. Nearly 2,000 readers participated in the 2 1/2 weeks we allowed, and many of them told us they understood the trade-offs and complexities much better than before.

The project also had an impact. After the readers made their choices, we did stories on what they wanted, and, in some instances, their priorities differed from those of the regional decision makers. After we wrote about that, the decision makers began to move in the readers' direction.

Some real world context: When "You Build It" was published, a new three-county board was piecing together a regional transportation package to submit to voters. At the time, they were looking at an election this fall. They had made some tentative, preliminary decisions on what taxes to raise, but they were deeply divided on what projects to propose. Some wanted more transit, some wanted more highways, and they hadn't come close to finding enough money to build everything they wanted. They also hadn't done much to involve the public.

The Times had been writing traditional news stories about this agency's deliberations, but we thought an interactive exercise would be a fun way to involve more readers in the issue. "You Build It" presented voters with a giant ballot of transportation projects and taxes, and asked them to design their own package. We asked them to pick the projects they thought should be built and then find the money to pay for them, just like the real transportation planners. We promised our readers that we would tabulate the results and report on them; that this would be a two-way street.

Each project on the ballot --let me scroll down here to give you some idea of what we're talking about -- included a thumbnail description of the project. For some of the more complex mega projects , we gave people a number of options, including a thumbnail description and a price tag, and people could click on the option they wanted and then scroll down and go farther.

We divided the choices into three categories, the so-called mega multibillion-dollar projects, other road projects, and transit projects. At the bottom of each category we gave a running total of what their choices were adding up to.

Each of the revenue sources included an estimate of how much money the tax would generate over 15 years. We asked readers to try to come up with enough revenue to pay for the projects they wanted -- to balance the budgets.

A game like this probably allowed us to present information in more detail, especially on projects, than we would have in conventional news stories. We could provide more detail because people were going to actually use the details. We could do some things online that we couldn't do in print. For one, online the calculator did the math for people and told them how much they were spending; they didn't have to pull out a calculator or anything. See, right now I have something like $19 billion worth of projects and no revenue so... (laughter)

We also had a pop-up box in the online version that came up when people punched "submit" that told them how close they had come to balancing their budget and then asked them if they wanted to revise their plans. We didn't require balanced budgets, but most people came pretty close. On average the people who participated online actually ran a small surplus, which is definitely not real world. (laughter)

We decided early on that with many older readers who probably didn't have Internet access, we couldn't just offer this ballot online. We thought we had to let people respond in print. However, of the nearly 2,000 readers who filled out ballots, about 85% of them participated online, and it's easy to see why. Filling out the ballot online was much less labor-intensive and time-consuming: People only had to click their mouses. But people who filled out print ballots had to pull out a pencil and a calculator, do the math, clip out the ballot, fold it up, put it in an envelope, address the envelope, put a stamp on it and put it in the mailbox.

So we got many more participants by going online and we also probably reached a different audience. We didn't ask many demographic questions on the ballot. We figured people would have limited tolerance for too many personal questions and that might affect participation. But from the few questions we did ask, we found that online participants, on average, had lived in the Seattle area fewer years than the print participants, and if you assume people who have lived in an area for a shorter time are more likely to be younger, then maybe we were reaching a segment of the population that newspapers are desperate to reach.

Putting this exercise together wasn't simple. We wanted to make it resemble the real-world, policy-making process as much as possible, but we also wanted to keep it from getting so complex it would turn readers off. Also, there were lots of variables and we knew we couldn't account for all of them. For instance, one political reality that the real-world transportation planners have to consider is geography, making sure every part of the region gets something. We decided requiring that kind of equity would make our exercise too complicated, although we did ask readers to consider it.

We had to make some fairly arbitrary decisions about what projects and revenue sources to include, and what estimates to use. We put the ballot together after consulting extensively with government agencies and interest groups to let them know what we were doing and seek their ideas. All of them were very willing, even anxious, to help us. We didn't do everything all of them wanted, but none of them accused us of stacking the deck against them.

We were pretty transparent in explaining our process to readers, as well. We included a sidebar in the paper and online that explained how the ballot was put together, and we didn't get many complaints. We ended up trimming that sidebar for space in the print version; we didn't have to do that online. We also involved The Times' public opinion research firm in our planning. We knew this couldn't be a scientific poll because the sample would be self-selected, but we still wanted our pollster's help in designing a ballot that would be fair, and we wanted his help later in tabulating and analyzing the results.

Now, reporting the results of this required some special care. We couldn' t report on it like we would a poll. We knew from the demographic questions that we did ask that our participants weren't statistically representative of the region as a whole, but we found no evidence that any interest group had stuffed the ballot box. And we felt the results were still worth reporting because the people who participated actually had spent some time pondering the issues and the trade-offs, making choices. They were informed, which isn't always the case with people spouting opinions in quickie scientific telephone surveys.

We didn't require it, but about half the 2,000 people who participated in "You Build It" gave us their names and phone numbers or e-mail addresses. That's a much higher percentage than we get in our regular polls when we ask people if they would like a reporter to call them later. Those 1,000 or so people who gave us their names and e-mail addresses are a valuable resource that we may use in follow-up exercises, and there's plenty of time for that now; the regional transportation board has put off a vote until November of 2004.

We're just beginning to scratch the surface of this, and this is just one of several interactive journalism exercises The Seattle Times had done. I do have a few copies, about a half-dozen or so, of the project as it appeared in print as well, if anyone is interested. Thank you (applause)

Question:
Who designed your online form? Was it in house or...?

Answer:
We did it in house, and I think if we were to do it again, we would do it a little differently. Scrolling through a long ballot like this can intimidate some viewers and readers, and I think we would have maybe broken it up into more pages. I think we also, let me see if I can, this is not my computer, as you can probably tell by now. We also had a map that people could click on to see the locations of these projects. (there we go) and I think if we were to do it again, rather than having a big map of the whole region like this, we'd put it together in smaller chunks so that it could provide more detail.

Question:
Can you still see the exercise online?

Answer:
You can look at it, yes. It's been disabled, so you can no longer enter anything. For instance, the pop-up box that asked people to balance the budgets is no longer something I can pull up, but you can look at it and still click on things and the calculator will still work. The url is: http://www.SeattleTimes.com/trans_budget/

Question:
Did you do any sort of usability testing to see how the citizens were using it: What worked what didn't work?

Answer:
No, we didn'tt. We were just sort of delighted that, with the response we got, that we figured enough people had found it worthwhile. I remember talking with our pollster beforehand. We were saying, "Wouldn't it be great if we got 1,000 people to participate in this," and the participation was nearly double that, which again shows the power of the Internet for us to engage in dialogue with our readers much more easily than we ever have before.

Question from Jan Schaffer:
Talk about the impact on the transit board.

Answer:
Yes, one of the things we found is they were looking at a tax package that was pretty dependent on sales tax increase, and when we presented a number of revenue options -- realistic revenue options to readers -- we found that they were much more inclined towards gas tax, vehicle taxes, and only a quarter supported a sales tax increase of the magnitude that the board was considering. I interviewed most of the board members after we reported the results and they said, "Yeah we probably need to go back and trim the sales tax and look at increasing the vehicle taxes." Now whether or not they do that remains to be seen; they still have more than a year to play with this.

Question:
I was just wondering how you had promoted this.

Answer:
We had a tease to it on the front page of the Sunday paper, we had another more extended tease on the local cover. The package itself in the paper filled up two pages inside the local section. We promoted it in the newspaper several times in the 2 1/2 weeks we allowed people to vote. And on the Sunday, we also highlighted it on our main seattletimes.com web page as well and kept it there in a prominent place for the duration of the exercise.

Question:
Did you say earlier that you did not get the ages for the participants?

Answer:
We did not get the ages, no. We figured that if we asked the demographic questions that you would normally ask in a telephone survey, people would shut down; it would be a turn off. So we asked where they lived, what part of the region; we asked how long they had lived here; and what their principle form of transportation was. That's it. We figured those were the most important for our purposes.

Jan Schaffer:
We'll take more questions at the end. Let's move on to Mike Skoler. Thank you , Eric, that was great. (applause)

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