Nieman Journalism Lab |
| CNN.com goes magazine for “Slavery’s Last Stronghold” Posted: 30 Mar 2012 08:30 AM PDT
CNN’s special report Slavery’s Last Stronghold isn’t just unusual because of its topic — the remarkable fact that more than 1 in 10 residents of the west African nation of Mauritania is a slave:
It’s also unusual because of its look. Breaking out of standard CNN.com templates, the story — by John D. Sutter and Edythe McNamee — is laid out more like a magazine piece: big photos, big, full-width text, type treatments, dropcaps, integrated slideshows and video, and a general design depth that indicates this isn’t just another CNN.com story. “We knew very early on we needed to do something above and beyond our normal templates on the site,” Meredith Artley, the vice president and managing editor of CNN.com, told me. And it apparently has worked: The story’s had more than 2 million pageviews since being posted last week, Artley said. The layout is a clear departure from most news sites, the text gets a healthy amount of breathing room, which in turn allows photos to run wide, while also incorporating maps and sidebars. For a website it feels like someone pushed the XL button (or maybe that “View in Zen Mode” button in the sidebar) — everything just feels wider, more open, and definitely a little iPad-y. Indeed, the Apple tablet was one of the inspirations for the layout for the the piece, as were publications on the iPad like Katachi, as well as print magazines, said Marisa Gallagher, the executive creative director for CNN Digital. Gallagher said the team of designers wanted to put the focus squarely on the reading experience. She told me the design “gets rid of the competition in a lot of ways. It literally does, in that you don’t have a right rail competing for your attention.” (Also not competing for your attention: ads, of which there aren’t any on the page.) One interesting step they took in producing the page was assembling a preliminary layout in Adobe InDesign to get a kind of physical sense of the various components of the story and how they would interact. “Sometimes you want to escape and be immersed in (a story), like a movie type experience, or you are seeking meaning so there is nothing else distracting you,” Gallagher said. As CNN has pushed into different devices and types of reporting, they’ve tried experimenting with different types of design, Gallagher told me. But for the bulk of what is produced on CNN.com, they stick to standard news templates, ones that, while functional most of the time, don’t work for all types of storytelling. “Our article pages feel a little constricting — it’s like a little tiny world you live in and the rest of your world is full-screen,” she said. Both Gallagher and Artley say more news sites will embrace the idea of varying design based on story types, especially as publishers play with the how stories are read on different devices. Since CNN is active in some many places —smartphone apps, tablet apps, web, mobile web, and oh-by-the-way television — they enjoy some freedom to experiment in how they deliver their journalism, Artley said. While video remains one of CNN’s greatest strengths, Artley said series like Slavery’s Last Stronghold show the depth of investigative reporting — not to mention international reporting — at the company. That’s why she’s certain we’ll see continue to see similar projects, and non-traditional designs, in the future. “I will probably have a line of a zillion people who want to use this [template] tomorrow and I’ll have to hold them back,” Artley joked. “But we want to save this for special occasions.” |
| This Week in Review: Grappling with ground-up activism, and a new ‘pay-less’ form of paywall Posted: 30 Mar 2012 07:00 AM PDT
Activism and journalism from the ground up: Now that the story of Trayvon Martin’s killing has moved fully into the U.S.’ national consciousness, a few writers have taken a look back to examine the path it took to get there. The New York Times’ Brian Stelter traced the story’s rise to prominence, highlighting the role of racial diversity in newsrooms in drawing attention to it. Poynter’s Kelly McBride gave a more detailed review of the story’s path through the media, concluding: “This is how stories are told now. They are told by people who care passionately, until we all care.” (This week, there was also bottom-up sourcing of a more dubious nature on the story, as the Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum pointed out.) The New York Times’ David Carr looked at the Trayvon Martin story and several other web-driven campaigns to assess the value of “hashtag activism,” acknowledging its limitations but concluding that while web activism is no match for its offline counterpart, it still makes the world a better place. There were several other strains of conversation tying into digital activism and citizen journalism this week: the Lab re-printed a Talking Points Memo story on the unreliability of Twitter buzz as a predictor of election results, and the University of Colorado’s Steve Outing wondered whether social media movements have surpassed the impact of traditional journalism on many issues. Meanwhile, the report of an embellished photo from a citizen journalist in Syria led some to question the reliability of that information, but GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram countered that citizen journalism isn’t displacing traditional journalism, but helping complement it when used wisely. One of Ingram’s prime examples of that blending of traditional and citizen-powered journalism was NPR tweeter extraordinaire Andy Carvin, who was the subject of a fine Current profile, in which he described Twitter as “the newsroom where I spend my time” and pinpointing news judgment as the key ingredient in his journalistic curation process.
Debating the effectiveness of news paywalls: Google formally unveiled its new paywall alternative in partnership with publishers this week: News sites include surveys that users need to answer in order to read an article. Google pays news sites a nickel per answer, advertisers pay Google for the survey, everybody goes home happy. Just a few publishers have signed up so far, though. (You might remember that the Lab’s Justin Ellis wrote on Google’s testing of this idea last fall.) Elsewhere in paywalls: Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger said his paper has not ruled out a paywall plan, though he also clarified that there’s “nothing on the horizon.” His publication is, obviously, far from the only one grappling with the prospect of charging for content online: The New Republic’s new owner dropped the magazine’s paywall for recent articles, and The Washington Post’s ombudsman, Patrick Pexton, explained why he doesn’t see a paywall in that paper’s future. Pexton said the Post first needs to build up its reader base and make sure the site’s technology runs better, and he cast some doubt on the helpfulness of The New York Times’ pay plan for its bottom line. The Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum picked apart Pexton’s analysis of the Times’ numbers, and asserted that a paywall’s purpose isn’t to be enormously profitable, and non-paywall digital revenue plans aren’t, either. “The point [of a paywall] is to stop or slow the bleeding and to help make the transition to an all-digital future five or ten years down the line — one that includes more than one flimsy revenue stream based on volatile and not-very-lucrative digital ads,” he wrote. GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram suggested a “velvet rope” approach to paid content instead of a paywall, in which users would volunteer to pay in exchange for privileges and perks. The Times’ David Carr was skeptical — on Twitter, he summarized the post as, “Don’t build a paywall, create a velvet rope made out of socmedia pixie dust and see if that pays the bills.”
Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger held a Q&A with readers on open journalism, in which he spoke of the tension between the print and digital products in enacting change: “In order to be effective digital companies newspapers have to free themselves of some of the thinking that goes into the creation or a printed product…But most of the revenue is still in print, so the transition is bound to be a staged one, involving fine judgements about the pace of change.” Rusbridger also tweeted the paper’s 10 principles of open journalism, which were helpfully Storified by Josh Stearns, along with some other open journalism resources. New accusations against News Corp.: A new branch grew out of News Corp.’s ever-growing tree of scandals this week, when two news orgs in Britain and Australia almost simultaneously broke stories about alleged hacking by NDS Group, a British satellite TV company of which News Corp. owns 49 percent. According to the BBC and the Australian Financial Review, NDS hired hackers to break into its competitors’ systems and get codes for satellite TV cards to illegally leak them to the public, giving them pay-TV services for free. The New York Times knitted the two allegations together well. The Australian Federal Police is now looking into the case, and Reuters reported on the growing pressure for new investigations against News Corp. in Britain and Australia. Meanwhile, Frontline aired a documentary on the scandal, and The Guardian reported on Rupert Murdoch’s attacks on the accusations on Twitter.
Mike Daisey, journalism, and advocacy: Interest in last week’s blowup over This American Life’s retraction of Mike Daisey’s fabricated story about abuses of Chinese factory workers turned out to be more intense than expected: As the Lab’s Andrew Phelps reported, the retraction was the most downloaded episode in TAL history, surpassing the previous record set by the original story. Daisey himself gave a much more thorough, less defensive apology this week, and Gawker’s Adrian Chen said he wished Daisey would have been so contrite in the first place. In Current, Alicia Shepard examined the story from the perspective of Marketplace, the public radio program that exposed Daisey’s falsehoods. In a long, thoughtful post, Ethan Zuckerman of Harvard’s Berkman Center compared Daisey’s story to the Kony 2012 viral video, using them to pose some good questions about the space between journalism and advocacy. Reading roundup: A few other interesting pieces that surfaced this week: — A couple of pieces succinctly laying out some of the growing challenges for those trying to control online content and discourse: First, a piece in The Guardian by Michael Wolff on the trouble that the rise of mobile media poses for news business models, and second, a post by JP Rangaswami positing Africa as the next site of resistance against online media control. — In a similar vein, GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram wrote about the ways in which the giants of tech are all moving in on the same territory of user data and control, arguing that the real challenge is getting users to care about whether we end up with an open or closed web. — NYU j-prof Jay Rosen wrote an insightful piece on how journalists claim the authority to be listened to by the public: “I’m there, you’re not, let me tell you about it.” — Finally, at Poynter, Matt Thompson put together an interesting typology of journalists: Storyteller, newshound, systems analyst, and provocateur. He’s got some great initial tips on how to work with each type, and play to each one’s strengths within a newsroom environment. |
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