Using the Web to tell more in-depth stories
If you haven’t checked out The New York Times’ “Assessing the ‘Surge: A Survey of Baghdad Neighborhoods,’” you should do so right away.
It is a prime example of how some stories are just better told online than in print — much better. Assessing the “Surge” is a difficult task, and this feature helps people understand how the “Surge” is working and where it is or isn’t working.
This feature specifically looks at Baghdad and breaks down the city into neighborhoods. It also allows you to see if a neighborhood is mostly Sunni, Shia’ or mixed. The “Surge” itself is a complicated military strategy, and it has differing effects on not only the country as a whole but on different areas of a city or location.
Go to the site and select a neighborhood. Dora is an excellent example of how well this project works. First, you can read a summary of the area.
Here is part of it:
A Sunni majority district south of the Tigris, flanked by lush farmland and a huge power station. With Saydia and other neighborhoods, Dora is part of East and West Rasheed district, an area the size of San Francisco with a population of 800,000 people.
Living in the southernmost section of Baghdad, residents have been uncomfortably aware for decades that it was Baghdad’s buffer zone, with the huge Shiite heartlands which began just south. It rapidly became a notorious killing zone for Sunni extremists who drove out Christians and Shiites, killed barbers and anyone not conforming to their Islamist edicts.
Then you can watch a video where an Iraqi woman explains how nothing has changed and how the area is very dangerous. There are also several photos of American soldiers trying to keep the peace. One of the most informative areas is the bottom of the page where there is a break down of progress before and after the “Surge” into quantifiable areas: Electricity, Garbage, Displacement, Freedoms and Outlook.
I really like how this project, unlike many other newspaper projects, is based in HTML and CSS and not in Flash. The project uses Flash to display the map of the area, video and photos, but uses HTML and CSS to build the framework of the section and display the text.
Flash is a bit of a resource hog, and it is often more time consuming to update in the future. By building this with a HTML backbone, the feature is a much faster and enjoyable experience. I also really like how it is its own feature, yet it is still part of www.nytimes.com.
By not taking users away from the site, it makes the experience more seamless and organic. Plus, it will encourage users to go back to www.nytimes.com for more content. Every newspaper should allow for features and multimedia stories to be displayed like this, while also understanding that some really big features may deserve their own, unique site.
If you ever thought that “new media journalism” was a fad or “not really journalism,” check out this feature. Read the information, watch the videos, see the photos and play with the graphic. Then try to tell me with a straight face that this is not journalism.
It’s one of the strongest pieces of journalism I have seen from one of the best journalism sources in a long time. That’s the power of the Web. That’s the future of journalism.