Month: July 2010

UPDATE: I originally posted this blog entry months ago, yet it seems even more relevant today! It was announced this morning (Dec. 22, 2010) that the video portion of this project just won a prestigious Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, making the Las Vegas Sun the first newspaper to receive the award for multimedia storytelling.

I can’t even begin to explain how proud I am of the Las Vegas Sun, its amazing journalists, and its commitment to powerful, creative and relevant online journalism! And a special congrats to Scott Den Herder, who was a powerful force in helping the Sun find and tell this story.

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For several months — and for several reasons — I quit speaking at conferences, universities, etc… Since I’ve gradually started to agree to speak again, I’ve noticed that one of the Sun’s projects from the last year that gets a ton of attention and even more questions is our big gambling project from November.

I only thought to mention this because I’ve never really posted anything about the project — and now is a good time to do so. On Monday, the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors named “Bottoming Out” as the “best multimedia storytelling among newspapers” with circulation between 90,001 and 199,999 in the country in its annual contest.

Earlier this summer, “Bottoming Out” won the EPpy award for Best Web Special Feature – Enterprise. In March, the Sun’s gambling project placed second in the National Headliner Awards in the “Journalistic Innovation” category.

The series began with a pitch from then-Sun video journalist Scott Den Herder, who had found a local man who had been videotaping his life as a problem gambler. From there, we met with the Sun’s print editors and a few writers to go over the how and why of the story.

It ended up being a three-part series dealing with the prevalent, but somewhat hidden, social problems spawned by gambling — the very pillar of Las Vegas’ economy and tourist industry. And multimedia and audience interaction would be integral elements in our storytelling process.

The series revolved around one man’s personal tale of gambling addiction, made all the more interesting and rare in that he gave us access to a video diary of his journey to the depths of financial ruin and back. The series also explained the psychology of addiction and the technology that casinos use, which some say feeds the addiction.

Here were the major components of the project:

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MOVING PICTURES

The key Web component for this series was a video diary from Tony McDew, a local gambler who recognized he had a problem and thought he might be able to deal with it and help others by documenting his experiences. More than a year’s worth of struggling ends with Tony “bottoming out.”

It’s very dramatic and powerful to see this actually happen on video.

This video was a huge part of the project because we literally had hours upon hours of this man’s video diaries. Plus, Scott shot new interviews with Tony to help pull it together. But even once it had been edited, an initial cut was more than 30 minutes long. At that point, we had to decide just how long we could let the video go.

Ultimately, we decided the video would run just more than 15 minutes. But it was agonizing to get it that short. Interestingly enough, people watched it.

http://media.lasvegassun.com/media/assets/swf/mvc_video_2.1.swf

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THAT’S FLASHY, EVEN FOR VEGAS

We wanted to show folks why you are almost always going to lose once you sit down at a slot machine. It’s not about luck. It’s cold, hard math.

Regardless of whether you’ve put money into a Vegas slot machine, the project’s main interactive graphic from Tyson Anderson gave you a chance to see what it’s all about and how the math that powers these machines makes sure you go back to Boise with a lot less in your wallet.

It also became one of the most viewed pieces of Flash content our team has created since the Sun’s site was relaunched back in January 2008.

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NEW-MEDIA JOURNALISM IS A DIALOGUE, NOT A MONOLOGUE

Although I loved the storytelling techniques used in this project, this part of “Bottoming Out” was probably my favorite. We asked our readers to submit their own stories and comments about gambling addiction. And they did.

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YOU’VE GOT QUESTIONS…

We also hosted a live online chat with Problem Gambling Center Executive Director Krista Creelman, who answered questions about gambling addiction from Las Vegas Sun readers.

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GAMBLING ADDICTION RESOURCES

We also provided Gamblers Anonymous contact information, including a Google map of GA meeting spots and a 20-question self-test to decide if you might have a gambling problem.

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AND, OF COURSE, THERE WERE STORIES

The Las Vegas Sun’s newsroom wrote three longform stories that showed the dark side of gambling addiction when you live in Sin City and how recovery can occur.

* Part One: The pull of a drug, a push to the brink by J. Patrick Coolican
* Part Two: Illness theory gaining ground for gambling addiction by Liz Benston
* Part Three: Could the game be partly to blame for addiction? also by Liz Benston

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The first image I posted on this blog entry was for how the series looked in its Sunday newspaper debut. Here is how it looked in the print edition the other two days:

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What was interesting about this project to me was how it resonated with our audience. At one point, all three of the text stories from “Bottoming Out” were in our site’s top-10 most-read list, which was remarkable because they were spread out over a three-day period. As I mentioned above, the Flash slot machine is still one of the most-viewed pieces of Flash-based storytelling elements our team has created while at the Las Vegas Sun.

I’m often asked about what planning and coordination looked like for this project. Planning for “Bottoming Out” probably began three or four months before it was published and we knew after our very first meeting what the core elements would be: text stories, the video diary in some shape or form, a Flash slot machine, specially designed template/page for LasVegasSun.com (beautifully done by Danny DeBelius), and things like the chat, ability for readers to post stories and the Google map of Gamblers Anonymous meetings.

At first we met with nearly the full group: writers, editors (print and digital), photographers, videographers, designers (print and digital), everyone … But as we got further into the project, we met more with smaller groups based upon what we were focused on. I’d say for about a six-week period leading up to the project’s release, we’d meet for about an hour once a week or so.

Despite the large lead-up time, we were working on nearly all of the major elements — stories, the Flash graphic, the video and even the site’s design — right up until a few days before it was going to debut.

It was very coordinated, but still kind of casual. More importantly, it worked. This wasn’t just high-level journalism that other journalists appreciated, it was high-level journalism that our readers appreciated. And interacted with.

It represents exactly the type of enterprise and new-media journalism to which the Las Vegas Sun is committed.

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I’m often blown away by how much talent there is at the Las Vegas Sun, especially in regards to those who practice multimedia journalism.

The list of amazing (and basically “text”) journalists who have not only embraced our newspaper’s mission, but excelled at it, goes on and on. Someday soon, I definitely need to write something about how each of these folks has really made what the Sun does so interesting and special.

But the real reason I wanted to post something today was because there were a couple of really fantastic examples Thursday that show how the Sun’s newsroom works on a couple of very different daily stories.

The first story was one that ran on the front page of our print edition, along with an accompanying online photo gallery and video. It was a cool package about how the Blue Man Group (which has a standing show on the Las Vegas Strip) was holding an open casting call.

With the jobless rate so high in Nevada, this was a story that seemed interesting on several levels.

But from an “inside baseball” journalism perspective, it was interesting, as well. The story was told by Katie Euphrat, who came to our team as an intern just over a year ago. I said “told” because Katie did much more than just “write” the story.

Katie got her degree in print journalism from Northwestern University/Medill, but fell in love with video storytelling when she worked in Johannesburg, South Africa, shooting video to accompany her articles for one of that country’s first multimedia-capable newspaper websites. She went on to a broadcast internship at The Associated Press in Washington, D.C., and moved here to intern with us after graduating in 2009.

After six months as a video intern, she became a full-time video journalist with us, but she’s very eager to keep using her writing degree, too. And she has the chops to do it.

When we hire interns, these are exactly the types of journalists we look for: People who can really write, but have at least one other interesting media skill, like being an avid blogger, or knowing how to shoot and edit video, or having worked at a student radio station, or knowing how to write a little code or even developing a little in Flash.

Anyway, that’s where this Blue Man Group story comes in.

Katie wrote the lead story for the print edition of the Sun (which was edited a little differently for the online version — basically longer):

And she shot and edited the video for the story:

http://r.unicornmedia.com/content.aspx?uid=944323b8-db67-4623-b9bf-63069fd5dc37&at=a2f60022-9290-4986-a300-97a941887e64

The multimedia storytelling that Katie did for this story was really interesting because she did it while wearing several hats.

Plus, we got an interesting behind-the-scenes photo gallery for the package from Leila Navidi.

Then we got a cool sidebar from Sun newcomer Delen Goldberg, complete with photos from Leila.

But this isn’t the only type of daily, converged journalism that the Sun practiced on Thursday.

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An important local story broke …

Former two-term Nevada Governor Kenny Guinn died yesterday after falling from the roof of his home, where he was thought to be cleaning off pine needles.

Shortly after our morning news meeting on Thursday, a rumor began to float through the newsroom that Guinn had died. Several reporters and editors worked the phones for about 10 minutes before we almost simultaneously got two confirmations of his death.

Within those 10 minutes we had prepared a few sentences on the background of the former governor, which was immediately ready to post the second we received confirmation. Several reporters continued to conduct interviews and get reaction while another reporter drove to the hospital for updates from the family.

By early afternoon, about 10 reporters from across our newsroom had contributed with analysis, background and reaction from the top political leaders — past and present — in Nevada.

That was accompanied by a special page of every significant story in our archives about the former governor.

Working closely with all of our newspaper’s editors, online managing editor extraordinaire Tim Richardson skillfully kept all of the updates rolling seamlessly. (I’ve only said this about a million times, but I believe in my heart this guy is the best online ME in the country.)

The feedback we received on this online story was amazing. It started as a breaking online story, then kind of morphed into what would typically be thought of as a fairly in-depth “Day Two” story before it had even gotten dark outside.

And to complement all of that great text, our photo staff put together an amazing gallery of Guinn from our archives.

We also had a recent video of the former governor from a Sun package we had done a few years back when we invited several former governors to our offices to discuss what they would do if they were still in office.

What made all of this so remarkable was this was done before layout had even begun on the next morning’s print edition — which, by the way, had an amazingly well done follow-up story that basically epitomizes how the Las Vegas Sun handles a “daily” story in print.

Interestingly enough, in today’s print edition of the Las Vegas Sun newspaper, there was a box that included reader comments from Thursday’s online story:

Also, this morning our newspaper’s senior print editor sent this note out to our newsroom:

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Folks,

The Sun’s coverage of the death of Kenny Guinn displayed what we do that nobody else does better: all-hands-on-deck swarming to have the first and most thorough breaking-news coverage online, with second-day coverage in print that stood out from everyone else’s in town for its thoughtfulness and tone.

Add to that our editorial and Ralston’s column, and a marvelous photo gallery (anchored by Sam Morris’ file photo of the Guinns kissing with the McGuire Sisters singing on stage), keen copy-desk editing and great presentation in the paper…

We were one seamless news operation yesterday, and it was thrilling.

Thank you all.

Tom

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Yep, yesterday completely illustrated why I love to work at the Las Vegas Sun and am so proud of this newspaper.