We just launched our latest little mini special feature on the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, and it has some important lessons in how to and how not to collaborate with print and Web editors on a project.
The idea for the project came from writer Steve Mraz and photographer Ben Bloker out of our bureau in Germany. Before troops in the Middle East ever make it to Walter Reed or Bethesda, they go to Landstuhl. Mraz and Bloker went around for a day interviewing four different people at Landstuhl from the four different branches of the armed forces.
Mraz wrote four different stories about the people he met, but he wanted to take his audio clips and use them on the Web. Ben took a lot of good photos, and the two of them thought it might make a good audio slide show project.
The idea was relayed to the Web staff at our main office in Washington. After going through the photos and audio, Melanie Bender and I decided the project was doable. We also decided to make it into a special site, with a unique design, instead of just dumping the content on our normal site.
Why? Mostly because we could, and it was fun. But also because the site we developed help convey the power of the photos and audio better than our own site ever could. It was also a nice way to tie all the content together.
Plus, it had been awhile since we got to do something really cool on the site.
What went well:
Unlike a lot of special features, series, etc that run in the print edition, we were notified weeks before this was scheduled to run, and we had gotten ahold of all the content in advance. We have had several occasions where we found out that a series was running in the paper the day it was being laid out in the print edition. Needless to say we didn’t do anything special on the Web.
But this project was the opposite. From the start, Mraz and Bloker wanted this to be a Web-centric project. Yes, it has a written component, but they wanted to be able to utilize the Web from the start. Whenever you have writers and photographers who think like that, it makes a project go a lot smoother.
Most of the time Web is an afterthought. This time they had a clear vision of what they wanted. We combined their vision with our vision, and it turned out that everyone was really happy.
Usually, something gets lost in the translation when we try to work on projects with our overseas bureaus, but that didn’t happen this time.
I really like the package that Bender and I put together. For the slideshows, she handled the photos, while I edited the audio. She put them together in a nice package in Flash.
We came up with a design we liked, and I used CSS and AJAX to make it as smooth as possible. We wanted a site that would look nice and be elegant without over powering the content. Ultimately, content is the most important thing on any news Web site.
What went poorly:
With every project, there are always a few things that could be improved. While we had good collarboration with the the staff in Germany, there was poor communication with the print staff in D.C.
The Web staff was under the impression that the stories were fully copy edited when we were given copies of them. This was not the case. Apparently, the print staff in D.C., which does the final edits on stories, did not know we were running the full project ahead of the print edition.
So, as good as the communication was with Mraz and Bloker, the communication was very poor with our own copy editing staff. That’s something that will need to be addressed. It’s a unique challenge for Stripes, because we have so many writers and editors overseas.
The audio is not very high quality. It’s below the standards that I would accept out of myself or anyone else on the Web staff in D.C. The reason is quite simple for the less-than-stellar audio quality: poor equipment and little training.
You can hear the difference in equipment between what my staff has and what the other staffs have. Stripes needs to do a better job of getting quality equipment out to reporters in the various theaters we cover.
Beyond just equipment, it’s a training issue. Once we get the other bureaus up to speed on the equipment that we use, we need to properly train them. Capturing audio isn’t easy to do well, especially in a challenging environment like a busy, war-time hospital.
You need to know how to use the equipment the best you can, the proper settings and which equipment to use when. I did clean up the audio once I received it, but there is only so much you can do.
Conclusion:
This might have been our smoothest special feature yet. On the Web end, we were able to put it together in about two days (and it would have gone smoother if we weren’t getting in new computers this week). It was also very helpful to have print staff people be so willing to make this work on the Web.
There is no substitute for enthusiasm. When you have print people who want to do cool stuff on the Web, you’ll probably end up doing really cool stuff. That’s what I love.
The audio certainly could have been higher quality. We are hoping to get our overseas bureaus the same equipment we have this year, and also get them training. We certainly could have Webified this more and made it a much bigger feature.
Ultimately, however, not everything needs to be a big package. We can easily do a feature of this size weekly, while also working on bigger, more long-term projects. And that’s with two people working on these projects.
Imagine what a much bigger staff could do.
With the ever-changing staffs in newsrooms today, collaboration and communication are key to produce quality Web products. Once you start showing people what is possible, more and more people in your newsroom will start to believe.