On Innovation

This week we launched the Better/Worse Life Project, which looks at population growth, unemployment and median income across the country over the past 30 years and uses that data as a background to frame the very simple, open question ‘Is life in your state getting better or worse?’

It uses your IP address to automatically detect your county and state so that we can ask you about the area that’s most relevant to you at the moment.

After we have your vote, we ask for a couple of simple demographics – age and race – and display a visualization that shows where your state falls on the scale from better to worse based on the votes we’ve gathered. You can then filter the responses based on race and age, or sort the states based on unemployment, median income or population growth, to see if there is trending based on these metrics.

This is one of the first projects to take users opinions and mash them up with actual data to see whether perceptions match up with reality.  It’s a fascinating window into how people feel about the places where they live and a forum for a conversation around how things are changing.

There are already some patterns emerging.  We are starting to see that, in general, more states with high unemployment are being rated ‘worse’ by users, and more places with low unemployment are being rated ‘better’. 

D.C. stands out – though unemployment is high, 83 percent of users (as of publication of this post) ranked it better. One left a comment after rating it ‘better’: “DC is better due to a higher number of permanent residents, community activism, and better stewardship. Welcome to the 21st century!” The comments on why people voted the way they did have been some of the most interesting results of the project we’ve seen so far.

This kind of presentation can be risky. It’s so dependent on user feedback that if no one participates, there will be nothing interesting to look at. But it’s worth the chance – the kind of fascinating information we can gather once it does get going is possible only when you open the doors to participation from users. We’re collecting information on counties in addition to states so that, if we get a lot of responses, we can display a profile of the state that shows whether residents think counties are getting better or worse. It is going to take a lot of responses to get feedback for over 3,000 counties, but it might be possible with your help.

Right now, we have about 4,000 responses, but we need many more. Rate your state here: http://wapo.st/betterworselife

- Kat Downs / Innovations Editor for Graphics

Social sharing, via QR

This Sunday, The Washington Post did a twist on the old QR codes we’ve been putting in the paper. Instead of sending our weekend readers to more Web content or features from a quick QR scan, we sent them straight to a Facebook sharing link. The idea was to pick a story that we thought readers of the Sunday printed product would want to share in the moment. We used Eli Saslow’s piece on a Somali American man whose nephew joined the extremist al-Shabab group, and who now tries to keep others from the lure of jihad. Our logic in launching this was simple: It’s Sunday, we know you’re busy and might never get to your desktop computer to share this. But perhaps you’ve got your smartphone handy to scan a QR code. 

Cory Haik / Deputy editor, Universal News 

“Our lives are being driven by data, and the presentation of that data is an opportunity for us to make some amazing interfaces that tell great stories,” says Aaron Koblin in this TED talk. He covers lots of interesting projects that are great food for thought as we think about how to bring readers into the storytelling process.

futurejournalismproject:

Data can be a great storytelling tool, as Google’s Aaron Koblin explains in his 2011 TED Talk. However, it’s the interface, and how we get to comprehend and massage the data that determines how useful it can be.

19th century culture was defined by the novel, 20th century culture by cinema, 21st century culture will be defined by the interface. 

(Source: brainpickings.org, via futurejournalismproject)

NPR’s Andy Carvin (@acarvin) and Foreign Policy’s Marc Lynch (@abuaardvark), facilitate a world-wide conversation on Twitter hashtag #MEspeech that will include participants from the Middle East and North Africa.  As Andy explains:

Rather than come up with all the questions ourselves, we’d like to invite you to help us craft the questions. If you’re on Twitter and want to submit a question, please post a tweet with your question and include the hashtag #MEspeech in the tweet. You can pose your question before or during the speech. We won’t be able to get to every question, of course, so we encourage everyone to follow the #MEspeech hashtag and join the broader conversation about the speech on Twitter.

(Source: whitehouse.gov)

The launch of YouTube Town Hall was announced this morning on the YouTube blog.  They write, “YouTube Town Hall is an online platform for members of Congress to virtually debate and discuss the most important issues of the day.”  On the Town Hall channel, viewers can select an issue that is important to them and then watch two different members of Congress expressing their opinions on the issue.  After you watch, click ‘Support’ to choose the one that you like best. 

(via @socialtimes)

ProPublica has teamed up with NYU’s Studio 20 to create an explainer music video with their ongoing investigation into gas drilling. “My Water’s on Fire Tonight” uses catchy lyrics and animation to explain hydraulic fracturing (fracking), a type of natural gas drilling that has been linked to water contamination, according to a report by ProPublica’s Abraham Lustgarten. 

As NYU’s Studio 20 team explains, the video doesn’t replace the investigation:

 It’s impossible to sum up a massive, immersive experience like “Buried Secrets” in a two-and-a-half minute song. Instead, the intent is to bring people in, to create an easily digestible package that compels news consumers to dig into the real meat of the story.

Seems like a fun way to get into a serious story, and had some of us here (@bankonjustin) thinking back to the series of rap explainers from EconStories featuring economists Hayek and Keynes.

Who else is doing a good job of using video animation to engage people in complex stories? 

Amanda Zamora / social and engagement editor

The Hunt: A different sort of story requires a new set of tactics

When Osama news broke, the Internet got moving and all good news organizations did the lightening-fast work that has come to be standard. The Post did their bit: news alerts and curated tweets, stories and analysis, photo galleries and videos … all with a big homepage presence. It was, and is, live news that keeps moving.

So as soon as I saw a story budgeted to be the definitive narrative of the decade-long hunt for Osama, I knew it demanded a digital-first structure in a way that would be engaging, meaningful and lasting. To my luck, Steven King, video editor, had the same reaction. And so off we got to enterprising with a core group of digital creatives on making that happen (full credits are on the story).

What came to be five days later was a great combination of motion graphics and news video, design that offered the user all the key visual elements needed to explore the story, and the best Osama bin Laden media from the last decade — all in a way that was useful. It should be noted, the print version of the story isn’t on our site at all. The digital version went live Friday at 7 a.m. to lead the homepage. So start with the video and then engage chapter by chapter. 

Cory Haik / Deputy Editor, Universal News

The Chernobyl nuclear disaster took on a new significance this year, in light of the ongoing nuclear crisis at the Fukushima reactor in Japan. And The Post’s foreign editor Tiffany Harness wanted to do something for the 25th anniversary of Chernobyl that would draw parallels between the two events.

On the web, world web editor Anup Kaphle, producer Sam Sanders and designer Grace Koerber built a robust package with links to the best Japan and Chernobyl coverage, photographs by the Post’s Nikki Kahn, a video interview with Gary Lee, who was reporting for the Post during the peak of the Chernobyl fallout. Perhaps one of the most interesting (and simple) comparisons is evident in front page images of The Washington Post from both events (seen above). Find more front pages and full coverage here, or view other interesting work from around the web on the anniversary: 

• New York Times photo coverage on their Lens blog 
• CS Monitor on how Chernobyl still has an effect
• Guardian photo gallery
• Spiegel online

Cory Haik / Deputy Editor, Universal News

Sam Sanders / World producer 

The Gitmo leaks

The Washington Post, McClatchy, the New York Times and National Public Radio all published stories today on the Guantanamo Bay detainees. The Post disclosed new details on the whereabouts of al-Qaeda leaders on 9/11 and in the months immediately afterward. McClatchy focused on the government’s creation of a largely ineffective “human intelligence laboratory.”

NYT and NPR’s stories and digital presentations take a broad look at the information revealed in the documents and create useful digital interactives to show patterns. (The Post sourced its documents from Wikileaks, while the NYT and NPR have said they obtained the same documents from a different source.) 

From an innovations perspective, the idea of a NYT-NPR cooperative effort itself is intriguing. It looks as though both organizations built separate interactives that point to the same set of documents. Those documents are hosted on a co-branded NYT project site and make good use of the DocumentCloud viewer. In times of fast news and limited resources, that kind of cooperation makes a lot of sense. It’s an efficiency newsrooms might have never considered several years ago, especially with a competitive story such as this. Each of these four news organization’s different approaches offer different angles into the stories behind the data. In the end, that’s great for journalism. 

Cory Haik / Deputy Editor, Universal News 

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.