For Veterans Day, a video package brings together veterans from America's past and present

From our AME visuals Brad Jennings this morning:

If you're growing weary of Penn State stories, here's something a little different you can check out. For Veterans Day, Kate Penn profiled veterans from the current wars, all the way back to World War II, and conducted video interviews with them.
Sam Dellinger created an interactive presentation that you can see here.
This is a great example of multimedia storytelling. You'll notice few printed words, and short video clips. But if you watch them all, you'll come away learning a lot about a diverse group of local people.
You can see George Eyler get emotional as he remembers getting shot at in Korea. You can hear Michael Janis talk about having blood and excrement thrown at him when he returned home from Vietnam. And you can listen to Dawn Hicks describe how woman in Saudi Arabia must eat in a separate room at their local KFC so they can uncover their faces to eat.
I'm glad we were able to meet these veterans and let them share their stories in this way.

Really cool effort by Kate and definitely worth your time to watch the videos and meet these people.

Laughs & more

I've touted this blog -- called Hyperbole and a Half -- to a couple people in the office, because it's funny as hell. But I figured I'd note it here as well, because it's really a form of storytelling.

 Check out, for example, this post. It's a straight-up narrative that reads like a graphic novel or comic. At a couple points, art alone picks up the narrative. It has dialogue. Conflict-resolution (although the resolution is less a dramatic conclusion than it is a gentle letting-you-come-down-from-laughing-so-hard ending).

 There has to be a story or two out there to approach this way, whether with art or photos. Be on the lookout.

Katrina 5 years later: Great multimedia from USAToday

USAToday used a lot of cool ways to tell the story of Katrina 5 years later -- virtual neighborhood tours and computer-animated explanatory videos of what's been done to the levees and waterways, for example. You can spend a lot of time on this, but it's worth it.

Pictures spawn stories

 I started looking through these pictures -- color photos of Depression/war-era America, from a photo blog at denverpost.com -- and with each one, my mind started racing to fill in a story.

Who was this person? What's happening here? How did these people come to be in this situation in this place? What happens in the next frame, and the one after that?

It's a great mental exercise to start to fill in the blanks, and then think about the interviewing you'd want to do to get the facts to tell the real story that's behind each photo.

Congrats

YDR staffers are all over the 2010 Keystone Awards, and the honors include some of the best written-word and visual storytelling we did last year:

• Melissa Nann Burke's narrative of a man who lost his voice to a stroke but got it back;
  
• Jeff Frantz's narrative about a woman who waited decades to find out what really happened to her brother in World War II;
  
• Frantz's profile of a boy who lost parts of four limbs to an infection and who now lobbies on behalf of amputees;
• Paul Kuehnel's photo story of that boy;
• Kate Penn's Gettysburg soldier portraits;
  
• Jim Seip's tale of a great William Penn swimmer; and
• Tom Joyce's story about how Lyme disease and its diagnosis -- or misdiagnosis -- is a growing problem.
  

Congrats to all of them, as well as to all those whose strong writing efforts weren't recognized by PNA but still stood and, and help push us to be better storytellers.

The Keystones also recognized YDR people for investigative reporting, online reporting and features, editorials, design, graphic/photo illustration, headline writing, niche publications, special projects and series. So much so that, by my count, 22 staffers' names appear on the list.

I think that's fantastic -- maybe the best news coming out of the awards. Congratulations to all.

Best of the decade

In case you hadn't seen or weren't aware, the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University has a list of the 80 best works of journalism in the U.S. this decade. They are the nominees that will be culled to a top 10.

There are print stories, books, radio stories, visual stories, and so on. Click on the title and it gives you a description and a link. It's really interesting, especially to go back and see what you may have missed -- like a "60 Minutes" report in 2000 about Pakistan's instability and Islamic militants that ended up being "prophetic," in the judge's words, when applied to Afghanistan.

Maybe a new form of narrative ...

... could be the investigative-slideshow-narrative.

Sue J. pointed this out -- it's from MSNBC.com's Bill Dedman, who is a major public records/investigative reporting kind of guy, who, instead of writing what would've had to have been a longish narrative, turned it into a slideshow and wrote the story in the form of long cutlines.

In a talk with Poynter, Dedman said he set out to answer the question, "Why are the mansions of one of America's richest women sitting vacant?" William Andrews Clark (pictured at right), amassed a fortune in money and property and left it to his family when he died. The only surviving direct descendant is a daughter -- the woman Dedman refers to in his question above.

I think the slideshow/narrative idea might lose a little in terms of transitions, and thus cohesiveness, but I think what Dedman did works and has a lot going for it as a narrative form. Obviously it would be better suited to some stories rather than others. Anyone have an idea for a story using this form?

Do you see what you're writing about?

At first glance this site might seem photography-hostile -- after all, it's called Unphotographable. And each entry begins, "This is a picture I did not take of ..."

But it's produced by a guy who describes himself as a photographer and writer. What he's doing, he says, is recording what he sees when he doesn't have his camera, wishes he'd taken a shot, or "had been brave enough to click the shutter."

And what he comes up with is an exercise in attention to detail and descriptive writing -- something well worth focusing on as you're out in the field. His entries are short, vivid passages on what he's looking at. Like a picture in words. It's pretty cool.

An airplane rises from the waters

Time-lapse photography storytelling of the plane that landed in the Hudson, sank, an re-emerged:

Exclusive unseen video footage of the Miracle on the Hudson, flight 1549 New York City from David Martin on Vimeo.

Writing so sharp it hurts

Every now and then I read an essay or opinion piece that tells me more about who we can be a society than I think I want to know. Philip Kennicott, the culture critic at The Washington Post, has such a piece about the National Enquirer's (apparent) photos of Tiger Woods outside a Mississippi sexual rehab clinic.

Obviously, feel free to disagree, with me or with the piece. But as Kennicott dissects and analyzes the images -- and pretty much puts the Enquirer in his crosshairs -- I think he nails the cultural significance of those photos, the people who took them, the public's curiosity that drives that kind of news coverage, and of Tiger Woods' future.

39 steps, 10,000 words

Some pretty cool thoughts on what you can learn about storytelling -- mainly visual, but print too -- from Alfred Hitchcock films, courtesy of a blog called 10,000 Words. It touches on everything from dialogue to foreshadowing to streamlining your storytelling.

And there are video clips, too.

Here's another writer's take on Hitchcock and storytelling.

See a 'broken narrative' structure unfold

Watch this Frontline video and see what Jacqui called a "broken narrative" structure as it works in a video documentary.

The first few minutes put you in the middle of the most important part of the narrative, the moment when something big is going to happen. Then the story shifts from narrative to exposition -- of characters, of the conflict, of the how-we-got-here background -- and back to narrative. It's fascinating to watch how well-constructed it is.

And what I always think about when I watch this is: Through deep reporting and excellent visual storytelling skills, Frontline has turned a story about pieces of paper and computer screens and people in meetings into an edge-of-your-seat drama. And it's all true.

Now see this

Couple neat examples of visual storytelling, one on an unusual subject, one on a subject we all know and love (though no one loves it more than Jason):

• Here's a Washington Post slideshow on a girl born with dwarfism who undergoes a procedure to lengthen her legs.
  
• And here's Jason's take on overnight Black Friday. He spent the night out there, had tons of video, and edited down to this sharp piece. I'll ask Jason how he did that and have his thoughts in a future post:

The (multimedia) future

This is some fascinating documentary-type multimedia work. It's called MediaStorm, run by a guy (Brian Storm) who used to be multimedia director at MSNBC. Its mission, it says, is to "usher in the next generation of multimedia storytelling by publishing social documentary projects incorporating photojournalism, interactivity, animation, audio and video for distribution across multiple media."

Pretty ambitious, but this clearly seems to be where the best audio/visual storytelling is headed. Check out what they're doing. For example, a sound-slide called "The Ninth Floor" is introduced like this:

"In 2004, anywhere from 20 to 30 young addicts lived on the ninth floor of an elegant narrow building overlooking Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The squatters had turned the sprawling apartment into a dark, desperate and chaotic place."

Once you click on it, it will hook you like a strong narrative does.

Stephen King graphic short story

25 episodes, one a day beginning July 28. Watch them all here and deconstruct the storytelling techniques and framework of King's story, 'N,' and the techniques used in the visual telling of it.

Spectacular online multimedia storytelling

"13 seconds in August" -- the Minneapolis paper's interactive project on the bridge collapse and its victims. Don't skip the intro. It's good.

Also, Zoo story: Life. Death. The Paradox of Freedom, Tom French's latest effort in the St. Petersburg Times. Maybe the best online presentation of a project I've ever seen.

A 1A treatment

For those of you who might have missed Sunday's 1A treatment of Melissa Burke's story, "Inside, wanting out," make sure you check it out.

For starters, we began this passage with a sentence 23 words long. As the passage continues, the sentences become shorter and shorter until there is a one-word sentence followed by a four-word sentence.

This was on purpose. Our intent was to have the reader feel as though their world, too, was getting smaller and smaller through using shorter and shorter sentences, ending with the one-word sentence "Alone." Notice, too, that this single-word sentence is followed by a four-word one indicating hope and change.

We also achieved this feeling by design. Notice how the sentences, while descending in word length, are laid out in such a way that they create an arrow of sorts, pointing to the word "alone." Below is the passage written without the typographical treatment to show you how each sentence was written with fewer words than the one before.

We also were very cognizant of the rhythm in this passage, and I think the end result was amazing!

So, if you haven't seen this, please check it out.


For nearly five years, Melissa Straub didn't go a mile beyond her tidy, cocoa-brown home in the suburban hills of North Codorus Township.
Gripped by panic attacks, she'd stopped working and traveling, grocery shopping and driving by herself.
She avoided appointments, dropped out of the Bible study down her block.
Her world got smaller, the attacks more terrifying.
Family and friends were bewildered.
They came, they went.
And she stayed.
At home.
Alone.
Hoping for a way out.

"I am a storyteller"

The Times-Picayune has posted a 25-minute video on its photographers and their work post-Katrina.

In the first few seconds one of the photographers says, "Deep down, I am a storyteller. And the skill set that I have to tell those stories is a camera. That's why I do what I do."

I'll bet that line hits home with our photographers. And it's a great reminder to all of us about what we're here to do -- tell our community's stories. And that we're best at telling those stories when the words and the visuals come together in full force.

Great visual storytelling

If you have not seen Jason's video on Shawna Weil, the brain-damaged girl whose family hopes a new stem-cell treatment will help her in some way, take five minutes for this excellent piece of visual storytelling.

Of note: The video opens with the mother's words, "Shawna was coming home from work ..." And she (and the visuals) begin to tell a story. If you didn't know the story ahead of time and/or had not read the accompanying story, you wouldn't know right away what's going to happen. But I think the mother's re-telling compels you to stick around to find out. And once you do, you're in until the end, I think.

The video ends plaintively, and open-endedly, which is entirely appropriate for this story.

Great work, Jason.

Perhaps the ultimate narrative non-fiction

From "Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets" by David Simon:

Pulling one hand from the warmth of a pocket, Jay Landsman squats down to grab the dead man's chin, pushing the head to one side until the wound becomes visible as a small, ovate hole, oozing red and white.
"Here's your problem," he said. "He's got a slow leak."
"A leak?" says Pellegrini, picking up on it.
"A slow one."
"You can fix those."
"Sure you can," Landsman agrees.
"They got these home repair kits now. . . "
"Like with tires."
"Just like with tires," Landsman says. "Comes with a patch and everything else you need. Now a bigger wound, like from a thirty-eight, you're gonna have to get a new head. This one you could fix."
Landsman looks up, his face the very picture of earnest concern.
Sweet Jesus, thinks Tom Pellegrini, nothing like working murders with a mental case.

That's just to whet your appetite.

Join us noon Wednesday, Sept. 5, to eat lunch and watch an episode of "Homicide," based on Simon's book, after which we'll talk about how character development and dialogue can be used to develop conflict in a story and lead us to the story's resolution.

The episode is about 45 minutes and we'll leave about a half-hour for
discussion, so we should be done in a little over an hour.

See you there.