By Kyle M. Orland
J-Lab Staff Writer
August 28, 2003

New York is a city of thousands of journalists and nearly as many news outlets. Amid such media noise, one small publication is creating news content that stands out from the crowd.

"About 10 percent of people will read a story based on its subject matter," said Jonathan Mandell, executive editor for the Gotham Gazette. "Our goal is to get the other 90 percent to learn about the issue."

For the Gazette, a city news site published by the New York Citizens Union Foundation, interactive content is the key to that goal.

The Gazette so far has put up three major interactive exercises that work towards that goal. The first,
"The Ground Zero Planner,"  went online in May 2002. The clickable map of the World Trade Center site invited people to develop the site with features such as park space, a memorial, and a cultural center. The exercise provided a simplified simulation of what professional architects and planners were doing in crafting their plans for the site.

Mandell said the Gotham Gazette timed the exercise so that input from ordinary people would occur at the same time that city planners were considering proposals from professionals.

The map was inspired by a similar map that was part of the Everett (WA) Herald's "Waterfront Renaissance."  More than 600 people submitted plans for the trade center site through the game, the Gotham Gazette reported

"The City Budget Game,"  went up a year later on May 12, 2003. It is one of the first efforts to apply the basic format of various state budget games to a city budget. "The New York City budget is the fourth largest government budget in the country,"  Mandell said. "The [city] figures you're dealing with are as large as in other states."

Interactive exercises are a good way to summarize a dull ongoing story in an interesting way," Mandell said. "We had done many stories on the budget, and it was of central interest to many New Yorkers & but after a while there's nothing new to say except 'They're in negotiations,' etc. What a game can do is sort through this very complicated issue and make it seem new and fresh."

More than 5,000 people have played the city budget game so far, including a few city council members, Mandell said. The game has been featured in Newsday, the New York Sun and the New York One TV station. Mandell said he even heard Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff joke about it at a public forum. "On our message board, one person said, 'I balanced budget in five minutes without closing the firehouses.' Doctoroff said, 'Let's hire that man.' "

The Gazette's latest game, So You Want to be a Judge,  is an ethics quiz that highlights alleged corruption in the Brooklyn Supreme Court. Mandell admits the game, which has attracted 1,600 visits so far, is a bit of a gag. ("If you make the unethical choice, you're the winner," he notes.) But he believes the game highlights an important problem in a way people can understand.

"From the first question, you find out that you can be a criminal and still be eligible to be a [Brooklyn] Supreme Court Justice. You look at that and say, 'If the system were different... corruption wouldn't be as easy.'"

The game, which took a team of eight Gazette employees roughly a month to complete, shows that even a small publication can make interactive exercises work, Mandell said. "We don't have a big staff. As a non-profit publication published by a good-government group, we certainly don't have a lot of money. All you need is a commitment to take advantage of the unique properties of the Internet."

Mandell said the Gazette plans to publish at least one interactive feature every quarter from now on. He said that he hopes interactive exercises will help draw readers in like a good feature story.

"What you're told as a feature writer is to write something to grab those people who aren't necessarily interested in the subject, but will read a story that's well written because of the pleasure of the writing. That's the general principle of using these games. You get people involved in this because it's fun. The people interested in the subject matter will learn and get their curiosity satisfied -- it's informative, it's accurate, it's journalism -- but we hope it will get people who aren't interested in the subject matter."