1. Thomson Reuters: Surviving the Tsunami

Produced by Thomson Reuters and the International Federation of the Red Cross, in partnership with digital storytelling experts MediaStorm, Surving the Tsunami is a great example of simple yet remarkably powerful online journalism. Indeed, this website features two sections in all. The first contains four brilliantly shot and edited videos which tell the story of four survivors of the tsunami, including that of Arko Datta, a Reuters photojournalist who returns to the scene of the devastation to find the woman he photographed for an image that made the front page of newspapers the world over. There’s also an interactive map which allows visitors to not only track the tsunami as it travelled across the Indian Ocean on Boxing Day 2004, but to read the story of this devastating natural disaster in numbers.

2. The New York Times: One in Eight Million

The New York Times spent a year filming some of the city’s most interesting characters for its One in Eight Million project. The results, right from the opening Flash sequence are staggering. This unique website compiles 365 different audio slideshows and is a great example of just how compelling the combination of quality audio with beautiful black-and-white photography can be. It’s a website you don’t just navigate through but can really explore and it’s a great snapshot of this most diverse of cities.

3. Washington Post: Mexico at War

Hats off to the Washington Post’s videojournalist Travis Fox for this superb series of 10 videos focussing on the war between Mexico’s government and the country’s violent drug cartels. The Mexico at War features are perfectly shot and skillfully edited and show exactly what can be done with a small – if not one-man – team. Besides the excellent footage, each video benefits from a strong narrative recorded by a journalist who has clearly taken time to research his topic and his interviewees’ stories. Again, the presentation is basic – the videos stand alone on the website, save for the interactivity offered by the comments section.

The Guardian's Twitter-based 'Budgetometer'

Today’s budget had it all: a 10 per cent hike in so-called ‘cider tax’ (how dare they?!), a doubling of stamp duty to help first-time buyers, a £100 million investment to fix those pesky potholes … and an ingenious idea from the Guardian, whose website keeps pushing the technical barriers.

The newspaper used its ‘Budgetometer’ to reflect the volume of positive and negative tweets to the hashtag #budget during Chancellor Alistair Darling’s speech.

Each tweet was tagged with a ‘plus’ or a ‘minus’ icon and listed on a dedicated page on the Guardian’s website, giving a fascinating (and, at times, hilarious) snapshot of public opinion. These tweets then updated a line graph and a swingometer, providing an excellent visualisation of how people’s feelings changed over two-and-a-half hours or so. It’s a great idea, encouraging readers to take part in the big news story of the day and, of course, building traffic to the Guardian website.

It looks like it’s been powered by the Google Code API (which I’ve only just discovered but could be an excellent (and free!) tool for presenting complex data online), presumably backed up with some extra software at the Guardian’s end. It’s also quite similar to Ultra Knowledge‘s work with Twitter, which was showcased at last week’s Digital Storytelling ’10 and which I mentioned on Monday. It will be interesting to see what other tricks the Guardian has up its sleeves, especially with the general election just around the corner …

Ultra Knowledge

Now, these guys could be a godsend for journalists the world over! Just check out what they’ve done for the Independent’s online search facility. No, it’s not the standard list of titles, descriptions and links we’ve become used to seeing. This is the ‘NewsWall’ – a visual representation of your 30 closest matches, with each result displayed as a thumbnail image that, when you scroll over, loads a snapshot of the story on the right-hand side. Clever stuff, especially when you consider that the Indy’s journalists aren’t required to tag stories or fill out complex SEO data, freeing them up to concentrate on, well, journalism. As Andrew Lyons from Ultra Knowledge said:

“Writing stories should be the hard bit; that’s an art form in itself. There are solutions out there which can do all the production work for you.”

Meanwhile, Adam Westbrook notes that the NewsWall is also searchable by date:

“Thousands of articles, currently consigned to history, will have new life breathed into them. New sponsorship, new ad revenue.”

Ultra Knowledge are also doing some excellent work with Twitter. Their ‘Wheel’ and ‘Timeline’ tools’, which display relationships between tweeps and show who was tweeting at what time, could be extremely useful for covering certain events. They’ve also come up with a way of polling people via Twitter and updating a web graphic in real time. I’d like to get my hands on that in time for the election…

1000heads

Molly Flatt from 1000heads (‘The Word of Mouth People’ who help clients like Nokia and Sainsbury’s understand the power of things like social media, blogs and media sharing sites) gave a really good talk, discussing the meaning of storytelling in a digital age.

It was a really thought-provoking half an hour or so and had us thinking about four main topics: comics (Molly says the next level of storytelling will be mobile-driven augmented reality, combining virtual data and the physical world); heroes (with big brands personalising their promotional work, making the audience feel like superheroes); symbols; and myths. There’s lots more on 1000heads’ blog.

That was the conundrum posed before yesterday’s Digital Storytelling ’10 and now, 24 hours or so later, we have a pretty good idea.

Some of the pioneers of digital media and technology were at yesterday’s conference at London’s South Bank University and here are some of the inspirational ways they have used when attempting to tackle this challenge:

Sojournposse

Salina Christmas and Zarina Holmes formed Sojournposse in 2006 and since then, it has grown into a digital collective of storytellers whose journeys are told through photography, poetry and sound. Contributors are based in London, Barcelona, Kathmandu, Madrid, New Jersey, Colombo and Cordoba and when you consider these guys are self-taught, their work really is quite impressive.

I found some of Salina and Zarina’s theoretical content quite a challenge (even at 1.30pm!) but I thought this was quite a stark assessment of mainstream journalism:

“Today’s mass media churns … it’s no longer about authenticity.”

Sojournposse aims to return journalism from machines to tools through its projects and says that to own our ideas, we have to make them. See how they’re getting on here.

Demotix

Next up was Nikola Ivanovski from Demotix, a “community newswire” with around 14,000 reporters stretching across the globe. It reminded me a little of the now-defunct Scoopt: users upload their images and Demotix attempt to sell them to the mainstream media, splitting the profits 50:50. What is different is that contributors aren’t required to sign over exclusivity rights and are free to sell their pictures to other outlets.

Demotix is growing by 1,000 users each month and is receiving pictures from as many as 1,200 events every four weeks. Not bad when you consider the website started on two laptops in a basement in Notting Hill.

Some Demotix users are making a decent amount of money. One member made around $8,000 from a three-megapixel picture of police arresting the prominent Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates outside his American home. The Guardian has also paid for three Demotix pictures in the last fortnight. But photographer Jonathan Warren is a little more sceptical on his blog …

It’s an ambitious project that aims to become the “crowdsourcing version of AP” in years to come, although Ivanovski warned:

“Our biggest obstacle is persuading newspapers that we can offer the same quality content as the likes of Reuters or AP.”

One audience member asked what would happen if Demotix failed to spot a doctored photograph, à la the fake Reuters photo of an air strike in Beirut. Ivanovski is confident that such a slip up wouldn’t lead to the demise of Demotix, although as a newspaper journalist myself, I’m not sure I would give them a second chance …

Duckrabbit

“The US is light years ahead of us in terms of digital storytelling; they really get this medium.”

So started Ben Chesterton’s session. But if Duckrabbit‘s outstanding multimedia content is anything to go by, the UK shouldn’t be behind for too long.

Adam Westbrook first introduced me to the superb Condition Critical audio slideshows, produced in Congo for Médecins Sans Frontières, so I was interested to hear more about Duckrabitt’s other work. Another audio slideshow, ‘Beyond Bangladesh’, gave a glimpse of what we can expect from the company’s work for BBC World Service – a worthy commission that is all the more ironic when you consider Ben left his job at the Beeb when, just like the dinosaurs, he feared extinction. (Things have changed somewhat since then, as Ben acknowledges).

The Berlin Project

This was my first taste of The Berlin Project, which evolved out of the G20 protests and aimed to document modern-day Germany 20 years after the fall of the Berlin wall. This fascinating experiment used the likes of Twitter, Audioboo and Qik to tell “a slightly more raw story”, covering things that the mainstream media (including Reuters, which actually backed the project) aren’t able to. As Dominique van Heerden, one of the five-strong team, put it:

“We thought, ‘Reuters can do [the traditional storytelling] better than we can, so why bother?’ You don’t have a choice but to think outside of the box, although it’s amazing what your brain came come up with!”

For me, The Berlin Project, together with the innovative way it is packaged online, was one of the most inspirational examples of journalism of Digital Storytelling ’10. The fact that the average user spent almost 10 minutes browsing theberlinproject.com shows this revolutionary way of covering a news event is also popular with a 21st Century audience.

Of course, you need to find the right type of event and you need to be reasonably brave to break away from the 250-word-plus-picture model of online reporting. But a few top tips from the Not On The Wires team behind The Berlin Project have encouraged me to look at trialling something similar later this year:

1. “People don’t read on the web; they are solution hunters who aren’t looking for long stories like they are in print media.”
2. “Habit can be an incredibly limiting factor in journalism.”
3. Some journalists have a “fear of novelty”. Pioneers need to “show a familiarity with the barriers of journalism” when inventing new ways of presenting a narrative or telling a story.

And there’s more …

Read the second part of my review of Digital Storytelling ’10 here.

The New York Times last week announced it was teaming up with the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute to create a local news and information website covering the city’s East Village. Former NY Times journo Richard Jones will edit the site but it’ll be students who supply the content. It’s a model that the newspaper is already using to good effect with similar ventures in Fort Greene and Maplewood.

Now the South Florida Times is launching its own collaboration with 17 students at Florida International University’s J-School (via Helena Humphrey at Editors Weblog). The Liberty City Link aims to improve news coverage of Liberty City, where riots, drug deals, unemployment and mass shootings tend to hog the headlines. Interestingly, the paper is to take things a step further by dedicating at least one page of its print version to this ultra-local content. Robert Beatty, publisher of the South Florida Times, said:

“It will yield quality journalists and quality journalism in a part of our community that is culturally rich, politically intriguing and vital to South Florida’s success.”

It’s an intriguing model and perhaps it’s one that could also work here in the UK? I know it’s an opportunity I’d love to have had during my studies at the University of Lincoln and one I’m sure journalism schools up and down the country would willingly embrace.