What Was the Post Thinking with Its “Salon”? This:

Among the many questions being asked about the Washington Post’s disastrous plan to charge lobbyists and executives for a private “salon” among “the powerful few”:

WTF were they thinking?

Thanks to the Post’s “Shoptalk” employee newsletter [posted on an employee alumni website not affiliated with the Post] we now have some idea. In the June 16 edition, Charles Pelman, the staffer who organized the salons, was interviewed by Shoptalk staff about his new job.

This interview came long before the Post had to backtrack and aver they had no idea what was being said about the salons. If only we’d known. . ..

The “money” quote from the interview, as it were:

What goals have you set?

We’re thinking of doing eight to eleven salons, five to six day-long briefings and one major leadership summit per year. The salons are two-hour dinners with reporters, editors, policy makers, politicians, advocacy groups and other people who have a stake in a particular topic.

How will you measure success?

Profits. We want to drop some money to the bottom line. We want to be one of the engines of growth.

Well, there you have it. WTF?

Here’s TF.

Digital News Innovation from. . .the Washington Post!

Enthusiasts of innovative ways to present news in web-native formats should check out the Innovations in News blog from…The Washington Post.

Regular readers of this blog [both of you!] may be surprised to hear this. I’m a regular reader myself, and nobody is more surprised than I.

Having issued a blistering broadside against the Post‘s [my former employer's] inept lunge at web-native storytelling last week, I had no idea that the Post was quietly accumulating some good digital news projects and aggregating them in a blog. It’s been published since mid-April.

Here’s the most news-oriented project of the items of the bunch, a wonderful D.C. Budget Game. It’s an interactive response to the old “You don’t like the budget cuts? You give it a try” dare.

In truth, aside from this, there’s little groundbreaking work here yet–most of the five features on the blog are soft efforts, of the cool-stuff-apropos-of-nothing variety, not journalistic responses to the news. The Post still badly trails the New York Times in innovative use of digital media to commit acts of journalism.

Still, it’s a sign of digital  life. And worth keeping an eye on.

n.b. Nobody at the Post turned me on to this. It’s not a “make-good” blog entry to try to curry favor with my former employer. It’s safe to say that that favor is beyond curry.

Washington Post’s Masterful Failure of Online Journalism

The Washington Post has just published an important, two-part story about an unresolved local murder. It is available only online, an experiment in web journalism by one of the nation’s [still pretty much] great newsooms.

[Interest disclosed: I am a former Post editor.]

“The Robert Wone Stabbing: Anatomy of a Murder Case” is a masterful piece of reporting and storytelling by veteran staffer Paul Duggan and his editors, a work of significant public service. It explores two different versions of events, one involving an elaborate cover-up by the alleged perpetrators, the other a scenario where an unidentified murder breaks into the house and does his deed. There is a theme of peculiar, ambiguous sexuality throughout.

It’s precisely the kind of local journalism that only high-quality print-based newsrooms have [at least temporarily] the staff, budget and skills to pull off.

And yet “The Robert Wone Stabbing” is an amateurish stumble, an obvious mismatch of medium and message, a squandering of scarce newsroom resources that delivers very little benefit to the community and creates zero business value.

Why?

The story is written, edited and presented as if it were to have appeared in print. Over 8,000 words of American English.

To get through both parts you have to click through 10 long-as-your-arm screensful of text.

I tried to read it all online and found it untenable. My carpal tunnels began to burn. My attention faded. I printed the two pieces out and read them later. It was very enjoyable, like indulging one of those great New Yorker articles that you have to ignore your family to finish.

Hard, non-negotiable facts: People read 25 percent slower online than on paper and can rarely sustain even that slowed pace through multiple screens. [By my math, it would take at least 45 minutes in front of the computer to read just the text of the story.]  Online users also behave differently. They don’t read long stories from point to point. [One outlier study by a news organization contradicts this, but many others verify the reluctance to finish long stories.] They restlessly look for things to click. They get distracted by ads, which of course they must be in order for the site to generate revenue. [For more on online reader behavior, see this precis by the annoying  half-genius/usability expert Jakob Nielsen].

The Post’s Wone story proceeds in either complete ignorance or simple contempt of these realities–despite the fact that it is published only online.

The delusion that the web is “an endless newshole” where journalists “have the space to do what needs to be done regardless of length” dates to, oh, the first term of the Clinton Administration. Few people who are serious about web publishing have sustained this fervid wish for this long.

It is true that the Wone piece is dutifully enhanced with multimedia assets.

• Some are inane digital reflex: The photo gallery illuminates nothing about the case. Bios of the principals are insufficient and pop up as text windows for no good reason.
• But some are powerful: The 7-minute audio of the 911 call is emotionally potent and illuminating about the incident in a way no words on a screen can possibly be. The PDF of the police affidavit that gathers all the facts (plus the “facts”) and witness statements is invaluable.
• There is a superb graphic, masterfully reported and beautifully rendered, that illustrates how unrealistic the “outside intruder” scenario is. It also includes a timeline of events and inset photos of key items in the story line.  But it is nearly impossible to find as presented with the package, badly mislabeled and in any case a “dead” graphic [lacking interactivity]; it could easily have accompanied a print version.

Note the way the graphic is promoted as part of the package. Look for it. . .It’s the “79-minute Mystery” item, last on the list, presented with an icon that looks like cell phone signal bars.

You even had to expand this box to even see this tiny, baffling reference. The editors did not consider it among the “top items for this story.”

[Elsewhere, off a top navigation tab, it is presented, oddly, as part of the "watch" content, as in "read," "watch," "listen," "talk," etc.]

So [you say], what should the Post had done for an online-only presentation of this story?

Funny you should ask. I dropped a note to a former Post colleague answering this question about how a newsroom could approach this experiment in online story-telling differently. [To be fair, he also didn't ask the question. I like to think that answering questions nobody has asked is part of my boyish charm.]

The text of my note to my former colleague, cleaned up a bit:

Here’s the exercise I use when I coach people on this:

Imagine you have this story to tell AND MAY NOT USE A TRADITIONAL STORY FOR ANY ASPECT OF THE PIECE.

YOU MAY NOT DO THE COWARDLY, TYPICAL THING AND WRITE THE MAIN PIECE AND DECORATE IT WITH MULTIMEDIA FILIGREE.

Why?

You will suddenly create a situation where you have people who have spent their careers internalizing the important heart of the journalistic endeavor — far moreso than the often less experienced, sometimes shallow producer class — and have forced them to engage creatively with the journalism of the future.

But it’s vital that these folks–the sweating wretches who have told the stories about fires and murders, who have spent long nights verifying facts and trying to get that one last interview, who have felt the wrath of sources’ anger and the satisfactions of exposing bad actor, who have committed their lives to this hard and important work–that these people learn to tell stories in the way the web demands.

Otherwise they cede the most essential platform for public service journalism to people who have not had those experiences.

So what could Duggan’s piece be like without a “story?” [Blurbs and brief content forms are not only acceptable but essential]

• Rather than a dead graphic buried in the package, I’d make an interactive version the centerpiece: An interactive timeline presenting, the competing interpretations of the murder. You’d be able to compare the alternative scenarios, examining for plausibility and holes, etc. You’d also see which facts are undisputed.
• Each item on time line would be linked to an asset when possible. For instance, that fascinating affadavit should have been broken up into chunks for this use, with different versions of the story “told” with this information at appropriate moments in timeline. Different witnesses’ versions of identical moments could be stacked, their points of divergence visually highlighted.
• That chilling 7-minute 911 call would be linked on the timeline at the moment it occured. With a transcript as well, since [usability tests show] clicking on audio assets is a fairly rare web user behavior. That transcript would be annotated by Duggan.
• Then I’d re-sort those assets using a “geographic” navigation–the interior of the house and its location on the street, with pop-ups of what happened where under each scenario. Again, this is presented in the current package, but dead and buried.
• I’d have Duggan annotating the timelines with audio/transcripts/written comments at various points–refereeing, adding subtleties and insights the raw facts and assets could not provide and that only someone in command of the story journalistically could provide. Add snippets, in text and occasionally in audio, of his interviews.

There are many other non-story approaches, some far more sophisticated.

But I’d argue that even the product described above would be far more powerful to an online audience than the Post’s platform-ignorant, beautifully written 8,000 word narrative. It would reach more people. It would serve the public better.

And I would argue, just to play angel’s advocate, that it would be superior journalism.

p.s. Readers disliked the online presentation for different reasons–largely because it was. . .wait for it. . .published only online. See the Post ombudsman’s column.