The Reyes Report

Earlier this week, I attended a lecture with the NYC chapter of the Usability Professional Association called  The NYTimes and the Online News Experience . The lecture was outstanding, so I’m sharing my notes perchance others find the content worthwhile.

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Date: 27 January, 2009
Location: Bloomberg office tower, midtown Manhattan.
Speaker: Andrew Devigal, multi-media editor for the New York Times
Presentation materials: Pre-read – renegade cybergeeks in new journalism | speaker’s slides — grrrr, supposedly these are on his delicious account, but I wrote down the wrong URL and I’ve just spent 20 minutes not finding them; will add later if I can dig them up.

Ok, let’s start with first impressions. The venue was enviously gorgeous. A glassy, techy homage to success and money money money. I brought a few colleagues with me and we couldn’t be sure if we were more impressed by the video cameras at the security check-in, the moving monitor screen art representing the famed Bloomberg terminals, the fish-tanks-as-columns in the atrium, the free-coffee and free-snacks stations (that’s “stations” plural) or the amazing two-story hall that led through it all, up a glitzy open stairway, to the open bar and hors d’œuvre buffet at the auditorium’s entrance.

But I digress … we should move past the meat of the mini-burgers to the meat of the event.

The lecture opened with some words from Bloomberg’s CTO — I tried to dig up his name for you as well, but apparently my Google foo isn’t fully charged today. I did think one of his points worth noting: he said at Bloomberg, they “now push out terabytes of data, every day.” And he empathized with the audience asking them to imagine the “usability challenges of to how display and work with all this information in a useful and intuitive way.” — hence the invention of the two-screen Bloomberg terminal and the massive amount of text and information they can put at the fingertips and eyeballs of people across the financial industry … in milli-seconds. IBM has a similar history of necessity-driven innovative design.

Andrew’s presentation was not really about usability though. It was about using multimedia to tell and present graphic and interactive narratives — a thing he called “visual journalism.” Like any good journalist, he broke his story into 3 big chunks: the Who, the Why and the How.

The Who
The New York Times (NYT) organizes their reporting teams into 2 primary desks: features and news — but between that now sits the multimedia crew, composed into 6 main groups (which he presented in a venn diagram of overlapping skills and complimentary components): Interactive news; Graphics; Design; Multimedia; Photography and Video. Together these teams collaborate on a few pieces a year that turn data and news reporting into a whole new sensory-rich experience.

He described the transformation at the NYT – the need to move 1400 paper journalists to new medium. We can understand that moving a big ship is no easy task. To work through and help this, they identified a smaller group and empowered them — within that group they further gave license to a few rock stars to really lead the pack. And slowly, the NYT ship is beginning to turn.

The What and Why

His goal was simply stated: Use new media to tell a story in a way that empowers the voices of the many.
He illustrated this point though a few compelling pieces: voice and data used to tell the story of pardoned and compensated convicts; his team created an immersive experience with video and graphic blueprints to give a virual tour of a new exhibit at the Met museum.

There were a few types of stories he called out specifically:

1. Non-linear interactives – What if someone reads a story and wants to explore further. We tend to tell stories in a left-to-right, top-to-bottom way. But this isn’t the experience of the Web – someone can dive deeper, learn more on a sub-topic, and then return to the story to continue reading, only to dive deeper again. In the current model, we lose people to Google to Wikipedia or to other articles. But what if we plan a story that isn’t linear. He also encouraged us to think about involving media in the story – rather than, “see the video on the right” or “listen to the podcast over there” … he said, “We tell stories because they are stories, not because they are media types.”
2. Data-driven story telling – NYT has a beautiful understanding of using data to tell a story — and by providing the data in a raw but understandable way, they empower the readers to interpret the data. Examples here included Election-day results (pulling from real election databases and creating accurate country-by-county maps that would evolve as time and votes elapsed); box-office revenues; and a face of a a solider that was composed of other pictures – each with data behind a clickable thumbnail.
3. News-driven / breaking news – Here the multimedia evolved over time. Templates were his team’s secret weapon. And being ok with publishing news as it unfolded, not needing to wait for perfection and finality, but having a solid foundation from which they could continue to hang new information off of and develop. He used examples of the recent plane crash in the Hudson River and a shooting incident where facts were unfolding rapidly.
4. User engagement – An area for the NYT where much experimentation is still on-going and admitting they hadn’t yet dived fully into this part of the pool. But where the readers are the story tellers – adding their own content to compose the story. Example was the Inauguration day. Where people were encouraged to upload their own photos from the event – a plan that quickly evolved to a scope much larger than the DC audience and became a global audience with photo stories pouring in from unexpected places and delivering a story virtually impossible for the  NYT to tell otherwise.

The How
The mulitmedia desk is not involved in every story. There is a cost of production and a cost of time involved, so naturally like any big company, there were process and rules of engagement. He listed a few: when there’s news value, power of the medium lends or user experience lends a new aspect of the story.

He relied on 3 things to execute: A strong team with the knowledge and skills to execute, A collaborative environment across their whole organization to create, and Templates. No department wants to reuse — everyone wants something unique. But templates allow them to get news out quickly, in a way that works. He said he always tries to create templates and reusable elements — otherwise they don’t do the piece.

On templates, he said it important to think about:
- XML
- Design pattern libraries with style-sheets for Flash elements
- Editorial scale to allow series or ribbons over time (see #3 above)
- Search engine optimization – in the case of the NYT, they keep as much information as possible out of flash – including headlines, descriptive text, etc.

… And to the gentleman I met in the coat-check line, I hope your getting good use out of that mouse-pad giveaway … I’m still scratching my brain over the infuriatingly complicated Bloomberg Rubik’s cube.

More information
InteractiveNarratives.org
Netvibes.com/InteractiveNarratives
Twitter: drewvigal