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Pulitzer prizes recognize multimedia storytelling; Traumatic brain injury project is a finalist

April 19, 2011

The first Pulitzer Prize was awarded in 1917. For most of its 94-year history, its journalism awards have gone solely to print reporters and photographers. In December, the Pulitzer Prize Board made a significant change to its rulebook, allowing multimedia journalism to be considered. As a result, The Washington Post entered a military medicine package that included the multimedia report “Coming home a different person”into the Explanatory Reporting category.

The project leverages video, photography, motion graphics, interactive audio graphics and design tools to tell a complex and compelling set of stories about military service members who have sustained traumatic brain injuries. We knew that watching a man rub the missing half of his skull, which was blown out by a rocket-propelled grenade, would connect viewers to him in a deeply emotional way.

We wanted the story to come alive through the voices and the images of the survivors. Christian Davenport did a spectacular job with the article, but the story didn’t end there. The project was a success because of its use of so many different storytelling tools – video, photography, graphics, text and audio. And while the Pulitzer Board didn’t choose the package as a winner, it was selected as a finalist.

When we began the project, we knew it had a lot of moving parts. It was a war story about soldiers and their wounds, a science story about traumatic brain injury and its aftermath, and, ultimately, a deeply personal story about what it means to be human. What part of your brain is your personality? What’s left when half of it gets blown away?

To explore this further, we decided to tell most of the stories through video, supplementing the personal stories of each man with graphics explaining the science of their wounds. The drastic impact of traumatic brain injury is something that is most evident when seen and heard, especially when the stories come directly from the people who are experiencing it. Our viewers could hear John Barnes say that people who don’t know he has a TBI probably think he is a “rude dumb-ass” and then boorishly demand “next question” from the interviewer – and then watch an improvised explosive device go off, immediately conveying the link between Barnes’s traumatic brain injury and an IED blast.

Watching Robert Warren struggle with what to call a rose as he looks at one is heartbreaking. The people in these stories literally speak and act for themselves, showing the breadth of the problems they face in a way that words cannot explain. The five men profiled let Post reporters into their lives: their relationships, their fears, and their triumphs. Through their stories, we were able to bring our readers to the table to participate in the conversation about how the military handles traumatic brain injury and how soldiers live their lives after it happens.

All of the media formats in the project served a specific purpose – to inform the reader in the most effective way and to personalize the complex issue of traumatic brain injury. The project is divided into the five individual stories and a general intro, as well as a section on the brain. The segmentation allows readers to watch one piece at a time if they like, or go through the stories in order. We know that it can be a challenge to watch long web videos, so we wanted to make the stories as easy to consume as possible. Keeping the videos short and making the navigation of the package simple were important to making sure that people stuck around to watch these amazing stories.

Just before publishing the piece, we talked about how we would promote it in the paper and on the Web. In a roundtable discussion with print and Web editors, we came up with the phrase “Multimedia series,” which was a perfect fit for our project. It had an article, five videos and an interactive graphic, all of which told different parts of a complex story. True digital storytelling doesn’t have to be defined as an “article” or a “video” or a “graphic” – it can, and should, stem from and combine the strengths of all our digital tools. We didn’t just throw up a bunch of unrelated content for this project – we found a way to make it all work together. We were thrilled to not just coin a new phrase in our newsroom, but to demonstrate that collaboration produces the best content.

Some winning projects also featured multimedia, including the explanatory reporting entry by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that beat our TBI project. That report, “One In A Billion: A boy’s life, a medical mystery” includes several videos, photo galleries and graphics. On the Pulitzer Prize Web site, the board noted the use of multimedia as part of the project’s win. They said the award was given “for their lucid examination of an epic effort to use genetic technology to save a 4-year-old boy imperiled by a mysterious disease, told with words, graphics, videos and other images.” The multimedia counted. It was part of their win.

ProPublica also won a Pulitzer for National Reporting for their exposure of questionable practices on Wall Street. It was the first Pulitzer awarded to a group of stories not published in print, as noted by ProPublica’s editor-in-chief, Paul Steiger. We hope that there are more digital and multimedia winners in the future as we explore new ways of telling stories with technology.

We believe in multimedia storytelling. We’re proud that its power is being cultivated by what was once just a newspaper, and its strength is being recognized by what was once just a newspaper contest.

- Kat Downs/Innovations Editor for Graphics and Whitney Shefte/Videojournalist