MSNBC: Complex Story Shells
Deliver Flexible Interactions

By Kyle Margules Orland
J-Lab Staff Writer
June 4, 2003

It starts like a typical "Rebuilding Iraq" TV feature. Amid scenes of lawlessness and chaos, Ret. Col. Charlie Borchini talks about improving security. Narrator Dara Brown poses a question -- but not to the expert. Instead she asks you: "Would you have what it takes to keep the peace?"

"Let's say you encounter looters while patrolling the streets of Baghdad," she continues. "What would you do?" A menu of four options drops down on your computer screen. Click on Rebuilding Iraq here You have seven seconds to decide whether to ignore the looters, warn them, or "shoot to kill." After you enter your choice, you see how other viewers have responded to the same poll and hear Borchini's expert analysis.

This mix of old media presentation and new media interactivity has been an integral part of MSNBC.com since its launch in 1996.

MSNBC.com "anticipates a variety of ways people might want to move through the content," says digital storytelling expert Nora Paul.

"You can follow the linear order or you can say, 'Oh, I just want to see this piece,' and go non-linear," says Paul, director of the University of Minnesota's Institute for New Media Studies. "They're really playing with the notion of a complex story shell that has a lot of different components to it."

Angela Clark, MSNBC.com's director of interactive content and editorial research, said the site incoporates two main types of interactive content: reference and narrative.

Reference content (which Clark calls "referential" content) is simpler to produce and adds background to an ongoing or complex story, Clark said. Such content can help readers get the information they need quickly, adds Ashley Wells, senior interactive producer.

"If you have a map that says, 'Here are the number of SARS cases in each state,' people will be primarily interested in their state," Wells said. "People just want to know what they want to know in the fastest way possible."

Clark credits reference content with being a convenient way to condense a lot of newsworthy information into a format that's easy to include with any story. She cites a table of previous Grammy Award winners to be included with a story on this year's awards.

"If you put the table in a story, it would just run wild," Clark said. "If you put it on a separate page, not as many people will look at it." With a small interactive application, though, people who are interested can look through the information themselves in a format that isn't as distracting to other readers, Clark said.

"The New York Times, The L.A. Times, the Washington Post... they'll spend tremendous effort on graphics that explain the damage of the World Trade Center, and it'll take two pages. An interactive [exercise] can tell it in a much easier and simplified way with much less energy. It's the best of all worlds," she adds.

Narrative content, on the other hand, presents a linear story from a specific viewpoint with "little windows of opportunity to interact in," Wells said. Narrative content, such as the "Rebuilding Iraq" feature, tells a story "unique to what the web is, one that is made for the medium," Clark said.

The ability for a person to select what to see is one of the best features of interactive narratives, Wells said. "If you've already seen a part, you can skip ahead," he said. "Just because you hit a part someone’s not interested in, you don’t necessarily lose them. On TV, you have to sit through that."

Narrative content takes longer to make, Wells said, because it is harder to craft a good narrative story. There may be only one narrative exercise on the site per week, Wells said, while there could be three to five referential exercises in a day. (see sidebar)

Nora Paul agreed that good interactive content can take a long time for news organizations to put together. "They can't really throw the effort into a story all the time, but when they do, it results in really interesting displays and packages."

Paul sees a generation gap between younger people who embrace interactivity and older people who prefer a traditional approach. "The next generation of news users can engage with the information in different ways," Paul said. "Static display is just not going to do it for them."

MSNBC caters to both audiences by making the interaction optional, Wells said. "We'll give [the users] 10 to 15 seconds to do something, then we'll move on automatically. Every time you stop you're going to lose a number of people. If you suspect older people don’t click on things, this is a good compromise."

MSNBC does not gather demographic data, but Clark believes it's news savviness, not age, that determines how much someone will like an interactive exrecise. News junkies will spend lots of time poring over in-depth interactive content while casual readers are more interested in narratives, Clark said.

People seem to be responding well to MSNBC's interactive content. Wells, who reads every one of the thousands of e-mails he gets, said 95 to 99 percent of the feedback he receives is positive.

The feedback Wells receives through e-mail, focus groups and individual-user tracking shows how different each individual's experience with an interactive exercise can be. He cites MSNBC.com's popular baggage screening game, which over 2 million visitors have used to find weapons in X-ray images of airline baggage. Click on Baggage screening game here

"With the baggage screening game... some people thought it was easy [to pick out the weapons] and some thought it was impossible. More so than any other medium I can imagine, it shows you how difficult [baggage screening] is or not."

Involving the user in an experiential interactive piece is a great way to involve them in the news, said Paul. "There are other ways you could try to describe to people what [being a baggage screener] is like... but to be doing it yourself, you really kind of get that sense of it. It allows you to tell a story in such an involving way that it's impossible to do in any vintage media."