Slides, links for interactive storytelling tools webinar

Thanks to all who joined today’s Online Media Campus webinar, Interactive Storytelling Tools.

The tools I demonstrated during the webinar were Storify, Google Maps and Infogr.am. The tool Elaine Clisham mentioned in her tweets (below) was Tableau. Elaine (a friend from our days at the American Press Institute together) made some of the same points I did, about how easily and quickly you can learn to use a new tool.

@stevebuttry My first (feeble) attempt at Tableau: https://t.co/LWmI6jyk43. Had to get it done fast, still learning how to make it better.

— Elaine (((Clisham))) (@eclisham) June 9, 2016

@stevebuttry But start to finish, once spreadsheet was done, took me about an hour, including learning. No coding required.

— Elaine (((Clisham))) (@eclisham) June 9, 2016

@stevebuttry Thanks! For much better examples, check out @colleenodea‘s work on @njspotlight: https://t.co/5GtKIFaMLE

— Elaine (((Clisham))) (@eclisham) June 9, 2016

@stevebuttry I should say that the data for my maps had to be geocoded — but there’s a free online way to do that! https://t.co/CXgFyp0yu8

— Elaine (((Clisham))) (@eclisham) June 9, 2016

@stevebuttry And I learned the hard way that it’s much better to clean/standardize data before you import it. Big pro tip. (OK; done now.)

— Elaine (((Clisham))) (@eclisham) June 9, 2016

Examples I used during the webinar:

Holiday lights map

Fireworks map

Carrie Jewell Dugo Atavist story

Chasing the Beast

Here’s the link from my 2015 Interactive Storytelling Tools class, with my students’ tutorials on various tools and examples of how they used them.

Here is an earlier post with more examples of interactive stories:

Examples of stories using interactive tools

Here are my slides from the webinar:

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NPR analysis: Visual storytelling keeps the reader engaged

We've found that sequential visual stories are effective at getting readers through long stories. What about you? https://t.co/XH7lBmYLBb

— Tyler Fisher (@tylrfishr) November 19, 2015

Here’s why journalists need to master visual storytelling and interactive storytelling tools: They work.

Tyler Fisher analyzed user engagement data for projects by the NPR Visuals Team, and the deeper engagement, compared to the hit-and-run visits to most news stories, presents a stunning contrast.

I recommend reading Fisher’s full post, but this passage best explains how visual, interactive storytelling results in better journalism:

Ultimately, making people care is about the quality of the story itself, not about the format in which we tell it. But I think that, with stories where text plays a large role, we are capable of making people read stories longer than they normally would because of how sequential visual storytelling allows us to pace the story.

ICYMI: a blog post about the user performance of our @lookatthisstory-style pieces. Spoiler alert: They work! https://t.co/XH7lBmYLBb

— Tyler Fisher (@tylrfishr) November 19, 2015

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Examples of stories using interactive tools

In some emails last week and in my post on a workshop last Friday, I asked for examples of effective use of interactive storytelling tools.

Below are examples sent by some friends. I haven’t had a chance to check them all out, but I trust these friends’ judgment, so I pass them along enthusiastically. With the exception of Mike Reilley, all the examples come from my former colleagues at Digital First Media. I was seeking enterprise examples, but they sent interactive stories from a variety of situations. I think in many of these cases, other colleagues were involved. I wasn’t asking just for their own work, but for good work they had seen lately. With light editing, the list is pretty much what they sent me.

Buffy Andrews’ interactive stories

Buffy, assistant managing editor at the York Daily Record and a novelist, sent along these:

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Links and slides for workshop on digital enterprise stories

I’ll be leading a workshop today on digital planning for enterprise stories at the Excellence in Journalism conference in Nashville.

Much of the workshop will revolve around the questions for planning enterprise stories that I blogged about earlier this year.

Other links relating to the workshop:

Five Satins: A ‘Sunday’ story published digitally the Monday before

‘In the Still of the Night’: Five Satins recorded biggest hit in New Haven church basement

Sunshine Week project showed digital-first enterprise approach

Sunshine Week project

10 steps toward a mobile-focused culture for your news organisation

Denver Post’s Chasing the Beast

Denver Post’s The Fire Line

Nola.com’s then-and-now Hurricane Katrina photos

ProPublica Patient Harm Facebook group

Gettysburg 150 app

Cost of Dying app

Daniel Victor’s post on infusing community contribution throughout the reporting process

Carrie Jewell-Dugo project, story by Paula Ann Mitchell, photos by Tania Barricklo, design by Ivan Lajara, using Creatavist

Ed Stannard and Angi Carter interactive map on Yale’s tax-exempt property in New Haven

I’ll probably update this with some more examples. I welcome any you might want to suggest, whether by you, colleagues or competitors:

My #EIJ14 workshop this afternoon is on digital enterprise stories. Welcoming last-minute examples of excellent digital enterprise.

— Steve Buttry (@stevebuttry) September 5, 2014

Here’s my first update, a Spundge from Buffy Andrews of the York Daily Record, explaining a variety of digital tools.

Here are my slides for the workshop (also subject to updating as I get more fresh examples):

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Slides and links for SPJ webinar on enterprise stories

I led a webinar today on digital approaches to enterprise stories. It mentioned these links as advice and examples:

Questions to help newsrooms unbolt enterprise reporting from the ‘Sunday story’

Five Satins: A ‘Sunday’ story published digitally the Monday before

‘In the Still of the Night’: Five Satins recorded biggest hit in New Haven church basement

Sunshine Week project showed digital-first enterprise approach

Sunshine Week project

Denver Post’s Chasing the Beast

Denver Post’s The Fire Line

Nola.com’s then-and-now Hurricane Katrina photos

ProPublica Patient Harm Facebook group

Gettysburg 150 app

Here are my slides from the webinar:

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Blogging from the New Media in Russia conference

For the next three days I will be blogging/tweeting from Lyon, France, where I am attending a conference of IREX Europe, the New Media in Russia: Challenges, Successes and the Role of International Partnerships.

I am here because of my relationship with the Press Development Institute-Siberia, which invited me to visit Siberia in 2009 for two programs that I blogged about then.

I’ll mostly tweet about the conference, but I’ll embed some tweets here, updating through the conference:

I’m at New Media in Russia conference in Lyon, France, where U.S. & Russian journalists are meeting, sponsored by IREX Europe. #russianmedia

— Steve Buttry (@stevebuttry) April 10, 2013

Participants will speak in native languages. For Russians, I will quote from simultaneous translation. #russianmedia

— Steve Buttry (@stevebuttry) April 10, 2013

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A workshop on digital storytelling, especially liveblogging

I will be leading a digital storytelling workshop for Heritage Media staff and bloggers, with a special emphasis on liveblogging.

As a demonstration, we’ll feed tweets with the #dfmliveblog hashtag into a liveblog.

Here are some storytelling examples I might use:

• York Daily Record’s Finding Their Way Out
• Heritage Media’s tornado coverage
• TBD’s #wheretheyserved
• Las Vegas Sun’s Do No Harm
• ESPN’s A Man Obsessed
• The Center for Public Integrity’s Dangers in the Dust
• Des Moines Register’s Parkersburg tornado map
• NOLA.com’s Last Chance multimedia project
• Startribune.com’s 13 Seconds in August multimedia project
• New York Times’ Faces of the Dead and Washington Post’s Faces of the Fallen
• A data visualization project featured on Visual.ly.
• ARTE’s Prison Valley
• PBS’ America at a Crossroads
• New York Times’ Climbing Kilimanjaro
• Detroit Free Press’ Respect

In the afternoon, I’ll be discussing thinking and working Digital First with another Heritage Media newsroom.

Here are my slides for the digital storytelling workshop:

I don’t use slides for the workshop on thinking and working Digital First, but here are some slides I used to use with that workshop:

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A digital storytelling workshop

Update: I’m going to be doing this workshop a third time today (Dec. 2) for CBCnews.ca. I’ve added some new examples (EPPY winners and finalists) and some other links.

We will be using many of my tips and examples for digital storytelling (I will be updating them soon).

In a morning workshop, teams of participants will analyze the tools and techniques used in some of these digital stories:

• Las Vegas Sun’s Do No Harm
• ESPN’s A Man Obsessed
• The Center for Public Integrity’s Dangers in the Dust
• Des Moines Register’s Parkersburg tornado map
• NOLA.com’s Last Chance multimedia project
• Startribune.com’s 13 Seconds in August multimedia project
• New York Times’ Faces of the Dead and Washington Post’s Faces of the Fallen
• A data visualization project featured on Visual.ly.
• ARTE’s Prison Valley
• PBS’ America at a Crossroads
• New York Times’ Climbing Kilimanjaro
• Detroit Free Press’ Respect

Here are my slides for the workshop:

The workshop includes a storyboarding exercise, something like Knight Digital Media Center describes.

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A false choice — and an excuse — for journalists: Better to be first or right?

An editor asks by email a question I hear often as journalists address the challenges of digital journalism: “Is it better to be first, or be right?”

Three times recently, the editor said, his staff was beaten (not on breaking news), but the competition had major errors in its reports. “When we published, we got the stories right, though, again, not first,” the editor said.

I regard this as a false choice, but if you must present it that way, my answer is that you always want to be right. Accuracy is one of our highest values as journalists, and you don’t sacrifice accuracy for the sake of competition.

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Liveblogging workshop for Morning Sun newsroom in Mt. Pleasant, Mich.

We’re liveblogging about liveblogging again. My workshop this afternoon for the Morning Sun in Mount Pleasant, Mich., is about liveblogging.

 Liveblogging workshop

Here are some liveblogging examples from a 2009 workshop (some links are no longer live, but I will be using others today; I hope to post a fresher list of examples sometime soon).

And some liveblogging tips (also fairly old).

Here’s the liveblog from the last time I did this.

And here’s the curation of advice on sports liveblogging that I did earlier today.

I haven’t updated the slides much from these that I used in June:

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Visual.ly helps you visualize data (including my Twitter use)

I’m a great fan of data visualization, and it’s not something I have done much of myself (I can make an Excel graph). So I will be interested to follow Visual.ly, a fascinating new project that showcases data visualization efforts (check out Golden Parachutes and the History of Location Technology) and promises to develop and offer some dataviz tools.

For now, I used its Twitterize tool to visualize my own Twitter use:

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Storytelling in journalism: No estoy muerta (I am not dead)

This will be a long post about storytelling in journalism. It starts with a story I wrote in 2000 that was never published. This was from a trip I made to Venezuela as a reporter for the Des Moines Register. In this version, I identify the Venezuelans I interviewed only by their first names. I used their full names in the version I submitted for publication then, but I don’t feel comfortable using their names a decade-plus later (though some are identified in the published story linked below). Other editing of my original draft is minor. I’ll discuss some current issues relating to storytelling in journalism after I finally publish this story.

Blanquita de Perez, Venezuela — Like the houses and buses and mountainsides, the language barrier stood no chance against La Tragedia.

Even a journalist who needed a Spanish-English dictionary to look up his own trade (periodista) could understand the stories I heard as Ramon took photographer Gary Fandel and me walking through this village on the edge of the devastated seaside resort of La Guaira on a Thursday morning in February.

No interpreter was available, but the wide swaths of mud and boulders we had seen on the bus ride along the coast beckoned. We needed a close look at this carnage, known here simply as La Tragedia, The Tragedy.

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