Sept. 2, 2006

By MARK BRIGGS
Editor, thenewstribune.com

Ibiseye.com: proof newspapers can compete with technology innovation

Newspapers have long been dogged for getting left in the dust in the technology innovation race. That trend could be changing these days and for proof, look to Sarasota, Fla. for a project that rivals anything Google, Yahoo! or anyone else has come up with in terms of massive information in a usable interface.

It's called Ibiseye.com and it's the brainchild of Herald-Tribune investigative reporter Maurice Tamman and web producer Charlie Szymanski.

Ibiseye originally began last summer as a project on property tax inequities. "We looked at all the standard ways of displaying data and they were wholly unsatisfying," Tamman said.

So the decision was made to use the Google Map technology (OK, so that kind of blows my lead, but you get the idea). And when Hurricane Wilma began to threaten southwest Florida, the decision was made to include a damage reporting system on top of the property data. Then wind data was included, then weather alerts, then a track of every major storm that's ever been tracked.

The result? A robust, navigable and incredibly rich data set all plotted on any detail of a map a user might want. Impressive, to say the least.

"A lot of the weather sites give information in the way meteorologists expect it," which doesn't work for lots of people, Tamman said. "This site allows us to give information dynamically in a way that newspapers traditionally do it."

Tamman, who previously worked as a database editor at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, did the database work for the site while Szymanski handled the web development. It has been a labor of love and the payoff comes in page views, especially when another storm begins to threaten the Sunshine State. "When we have storms, it goes gangbusters," Tamman said.

"It's been a lot of fun. It has really pushed me to very limits," Tamman said.  

But, he conceded, "my wife is utterly fed up with it."

Do you have great technology on your site? I'd love to see it: mark.briggs@thenewstribune.com

The Rocky Mountain News spent more than a year investigating the local impact of illegal immigration in its community and published a five-day series in June. Ambitious, for sure, but the paper added a serious twist: it published the first installment in both English and Spanish in print and published all components online in both languages.

The investigation found that "U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement failed to deport criminal immigrants who have gone on to commit worse crimes in Colorado. But half the immigrants deported by ICE, locally and nationally, have no criminal record."

The project resonated with readers, both for its substance and for its presentation in two languages.

"We found out that publishing something in Spanish was controversial," said Carol Hanner, projects editor at the paper. "That was a little bit of a surprise. And so was the intensity of people's feelings about immigration. They are very emotional."

The series had very few long stories, according to Hanner. Each piece was broken out into formats that included the issue, pros, cons, what people say about it, etc.

"I think that was pretty successful. It isn't easy to understand so breaking it up helped the readers. I think that's the direction to go," Hanner said.

Another important lesson learned by the team at the Rocky – which included eight reporters, a photographer and the entire web staff of eight – were the demands of the complex web presentation.

"We didn't allow enough time for web presentation," Hanner said. "It was more complicated because we did it in Spanish and we were using a new version of Flash. We wish we would have started a lot sooner."

Having three Spanish-speaking reporters on staff allowed the team to produce all multimedia in both languages, included voiceovers on audio for slideshows and all the video documentaries.

Drop me a note if you've seen (or produced) a great multimedia project lately: mark.briggs@thenewstribune.com

When the Spokesman-Review began to webcast its news meetings a few months ago, managing editors at other newspapers at some point probably remarked, "I'm sure glad I'm not on a webcast."

Online Publisher Ken Sands reports that, while the audience is small, the webcasts are worth doing for several reasons.

"On a good day there might be 30 (people) watching. A slow day only 10 or so," Sands said via email. "At the very least, we're improving internal communications, informed a few dozen interested readers, and being prepared for the day when there's a controversy."

"Also, having figured out the technology enables us to use it for other purposes. There's a highly contested sheriff's race on the fall ballot, and we had the two main candidates in for an editorial board face-to-face meeting. We webcast that, and archived a copy of the audio. I'm sure we'll do a lot more of that stuff now that we know how to do it."

Sands also reports that, as Executive Editor Steve Smith predicted, people in the newsroom have grown accustomed being on camera. The meetings seem to be fairly normal and, he confessed, possibly a bit more professional at times.

"And I think that's a good thing," Sands said.

Time to get 'cooking' with citizen journalism

The Hartsville Today, a J-Lab-funded citizen journalism project, has produced a "cook book" aimed at smaller papers interested in launching similar initiatives.

The first-year report is done and available through Doug Fisher's blog.

Says Fisher: "We think it's one of the most comprehensive reports available on setting up such a site, from design to recruitment to sales to the problems integrating it into the existing news operation. It has an extensive section where we coded and tracked five months of posts and those posting. We created a codebook that may be of help to future researchers."

Denver Post recognized for breaking news online first

The Denver Post's editor says his paper won't wait with a scoop, even if it means the rival Rocky Mountain News gets a leg up and matches the story in the next morning's edition.

Is this "old news" to you? Drop me a line and tell me when and why you decided it was no longer possible to scoop yourself: mark.briggs@thenewstribune.com.

New York Times pushing forward with Web makeover

"The Times is like a battleship," says Martin Nisenholtz, the senior vice president for digital operations at The New York Times. "It turns very slowly, but once it turns, look out!"

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