CIRCLE TIME
NEWSPAPERS SPIN YARNS ON THE INTERNET
by Rosalind C. Truitt, Presstime Staff Writer
Harry Brown Bear, a representative of the Oneida Tribe near Green Bay, had asked to pray for the spirit of [Dave] Heider's bull buffalo that died earlier in the day. The bull sired the first white buffalo calf in nearly 50 years, which is regarded by Native American culture as a "modern day miracle." Walking to the carcass that lay in the pen, Brown Bear knelt down and began a silent prayer.
Finishing, he stood and began offering prayers to the four directions of the universe. As he prayed the herd began to form a semi-circle around the carcass, similar to a human family paying its last respects. Silhouetted in the darkness, the large animals snorted and grunted but otherwise stood motionless as Brown Bear called out to them.
Tears streaming down his cheeks, the elder lifted his hands to the sky before kneeling again in prayer. Finishing his prayers, he turned to the Heider family standing nearby. "Each living thing has a spirit and should be acknowledged and respected. Today we pray for the four-legged spirit who brought us the white buffalo calf...."
Much as small children settle around a storyteller, anyone with an interest in the prophecy of the white buffalo and a computer that has Internet access can join the circle of bison watchers at the Beloit (Wis.) Daily News World Wide Web site, where former staff writer Neal White began to chronicle the birth and life of a rare white bison in 1994.
Users visiting the BDN Connection (www.beloitdailynews.com/page16.htm) find a simple chronological list of hotlinks to every story the Daily News has published on Miracle, whose arrival transformed David, Val and Corey Heider's 45-acre Janesville, Wis., farm into an international tourist destination. Thousands have commented via e-mail.
From natural disasters to big courtroom trials to investigative pieces, newspapers find that the Internet offers opportunities to make available vast amounts of information that simply doesn't fit on a printed page. A Web site can give longer life to important stories of continuing interest. Most are funneled from the print side, but some newspaper online services employ their own reporters to produce copy.
Examples multiply daily. The News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash. (www.tribnet.com/news/projects/volcano/),explains why long-slumbering Mount Rainier is "The Country's Most Dangerous Volcano" and could someday soon produce a deadly river of mud and debris.
Want to walk in the shoes of Zapatista rebels and peasant farmers in Mexico or crouch to study rare plants in the Hupitec cloud forest in that country? Angelica Pence takes you there. She writes for Dispatches, an electronic magazine produced by StarNet, the online service of The Arizona Daily Star in Tucson (www.dispatches.azstarnet.com/Chiapas/).
Shaping all this data into coherent online stories remains an evolving art form. Some papers take the simple route that Beloit finds successful. Others producemultimedia extravaganzas exploiting the Internet's ability to function as a newspaper, a slide projector, a radio broadcast or a television program. One common result emerges: Tell a story well, and readers will visit online.
Presstime explored dozens of online storytelling examples and settled on four different types to highlight: a history lesson, a feature profile, disaster coverage and an ongoing news story. To read and, in some cases, see and hear the whole story, visit the Web sites whose addresses are listed.
BATTLE-SCARRED
Perhaps the mother of all recent examples is "Blackhawk Down," a 30-part text, still-photo, audio and video series that ran in the Philadelphia Inquirer last November and can be found in philadelphia online (home.phillynews.com/packages/somalia/nov16/default16.asp).
Conceived, researched and written by Mark Bowden, a staff writer at The Philadelphia Inquirer, "Blackhawk Down: An American War Story" tells the tale of the October 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, a relief mission that turned deadly. U.S. soldiers fought Somalian rebels in the biggest firefight since the Vietnam War.
Eighteen Americans and more than 500 Somalis died; 73 Americans and at least 1,000 Somalis were wounded.
Bowden is publishing a book based on his research, most of it previously unreported. The project also spawned a television program that appeared on a Philadelphia Public Broadcasting Service station in December 1997.
Cable News Network will run a "Blackhawk Down" documentary next spring.
The Web site version is so dense that Jennifer L. Musser, philadelphia online editor, says she took special care to ensure that users could navigate easily through the pages, studded with numerous links to text, audio, Pentagon videos, Inquirer photos, U.S. Army Radio broadcasts, map segments and other information.
"This series shows how effective a medium the Internet is. You get to hear tapes of battle radio, the fear in the soldier's voices, and get an idea of what it is like to hide behind a three-inch pipe during a fire fight," Musser says
When the series ran in print and online last November and December, she says, it generated 40,000 page-views a day. Nearly a year later, it earns about 2,000 views daily.
WELCOME TO THE GOLD RUSH!
It was quite literally a rush. More than 90,000 people made their way to California in the two years following [James] Marshall's discovery, and more than 300,000 by 1854--or one of about every 90 people then living in the United States.
The stampede of humanity ripped families apart and stripped towns of a large percentage of their young men. It changed the country's view of the relationship between wealth and labor. And it ensured that California would always be a different kind of place in America....
Described by Steve Wiegand, a staff writer at The Sacramento Bee, as a "dour, paranoid carpenter from New Jersey," Marshall discovered gold in a sawmill ditch Jan. 24, 1848, making this year the Gold Rush Sesquicentennial, a seminal event in Sacramento and for California. The Bee was the official Web site for the Second Great Gold Rush, a living-history festival held Labor Day weekend in restored Old Sacramento that commemorated the occasion.
In an effort to recount the era's rich history, the Bee published four special sections in the newspaper last January and simultaneouslyonline (www.calgoldrush.com/), where the stories can still be found. The online package is divided into five primary sections and 36 subsections, with numerous links to Bee-generated line art, text, maps and graphics.
"We saw the newspaper inserts as something history buffs or classroom teachers would use, but the online version is useful for lots of different people, including tourists," notes Rusty Coats, online-content manager. "It gives a voice to a lot of different groups. You learn how [African Americans] came West, the role women played."
The series explores the psyche of the '49ers in great detail, and uses maps to show how they came and from where. Topics include culture; religion; the press; food; ethnic groups including Latinos, Chinese and Native Americans; and freewheeling moguls who made their fortune in California and spread throughout the country to put down roots and build businesses that evolved into empires.
Did you know, for example, that Phillip Armour, a New York butcher, walked to California during the height of the gold rush, set up a butcher shop in Placerville, and earned (in Wild West lingo) a "grub stake" that he used to start a meat-packing plant in Milwaukee?
Coats says the online presentation uses some material that was not printed in the newspaper, primarily because the Web site has more room for pictures, additional pull-quotes and audio capability. The format also looks different from the print version because double-truck pages don't translate well online.
He disagrees with the "technology for technology's sake" concept of doing something online just because you can. Still, the site has some nifty features, such as a logbook that lets users keep track of sections they've already read. "We know people don't start at the top and work their way down. They jump around," he explains.
The Bee has numerous special projects online, but the content manager's favorite is an exhaustive package created last year as the Unabomber trial approached in Sacramento. Anticipating a lengthy proceeding instead of the plea bargain that Theodore J. Kaczynski accepted shortly after the trial opened in January 1998, the Bee created a site that includes stories back to the 1970s, when no one actually knew that a serial bomber was beginning his work.
"It was really fun working on that," Coats says of searching for early stories in the newspaper archives. "It felt like being an archeologist." User suggestions led him to add a section with pertinent court documents to the Unabomber package. Coats says that online journalists still figuring out what works for online readers should "listen to the people who use your site. Just because we have tools doesn't mean we have to use them. Being online shouldn't override your common sense."
A DIFFERENT DANCE
It's the early hours of a Wednesday morning at Chicago's premier Latin dance club. The salsa music swells, an announcer calls out commands, and a crowd of nearly 1,000 men and women scream and pound the floor with fists and feet.
Their eyes are on one man, Nicaraguan-born Henry Francisco "Frankie" Cruz Jr., a bleached blond dressed in red, white and blue silks. He's a skilled dancer. But he's not twirling a partner to the intricate rhythm. He's avoiding a left hook to the body.
Every week at the Tropicana d'Cache, located on the Near Northwest Side, Cruz, the 26-year-old "Tazmanian Devil," steps off the dance floor and into the boxing ring to defend his title as club champion....
Ask Kelly McEvers about her dance club-boxingdocumentary,which appeared in the Chicago Tribune and on Internet Tribune in September 1997, and she groans. "A year on the Internet is like seven years of real time," she says. "That seems so long ago."
McEvers still likes the story, but she sees it as rudimentary compared with what the online service currently offers. For example, Internet Tribune now has an online story about older trailblazers who embrace new technologies (chicago.tribune.com/go/visionaries).
When "A Different Dance" appeared online in 1997, McEvers decided to tell the story with photographs and audio. Users can hear her conducting interviews and the sounds of the dance club. The text she wrote for the newspaper (chicago.tribune.com/ws/front/0,1413,22,00.html) did not appear online initially.
When McEvers asked for feedback on the project, however, some users complained the photos didn't link smoothly with her narrative. Others wondered, why not put the text online? She added the words. In January, her epilogue following Cruz and his fortunes as he tries to become a serious boxer rather than dance-club entertainment was posted online as well.
"I wanted to tell the story differently, without the text, push the limits of storytelling online; but since people wanted to see it, I didn't mind putting it up later," she says.
McEvers, who works not for the daily paper but for Internet Tribune, describes herself and her online colleagues as "passionate" about their work and the potential the medium offers. During her undergraduate days at the University of Illinois in Champagne, "birthplace of the Internet," she spent a lot of time online doing research and communicating. Then McEvers earned a master's degree in journalism from Northwestern University, where some people didn't understand how a "techie" and a journalist could be the same person. Now, two years after graduation, fewer people see the combination as odd.
McEvers, who is working on a project that involved an extensive study of female gang members, says online storytellers, like their print counterparts, must provide a clear message for users. "If there is too much interactivity, people get lost."
THE STORM
They began showing up early Saturday morning. From where the tornado hit less than three weeks ago, their parked cars formed a solid line that by 10 a.m. stretched a mile and a half along County Road 305 all the way back to the interstate. They'd heard people here needed help, so they came.
They did not, most of them, know any of the people whose lives changed forever on May 27. But they came anyway.
Michelle French, a slender woman, tugged mightily at a matted knot of cables, sticks and ruined clothing twisted around a heavy metal beam. "I just wish, the people of this community, I just wish I could take away some of their pain ," she said. "It would probably be more beneficial to them than this, but this is all I can do...."
That story, written by Mike Kelley of the Austin American-Statesman, ran in the paper June 15, 1997, one of dozens of tornado-related stories that also appear online at www.Austin360.com/news/tornado/tornadotop.htm. The site features numerous links to newspaper text, photos and other graphics, and to other sites such as those of the National Climatic Data Center and KVUE, a non-Cox television station that offers additional information that was available during the height of the storm.
In the aftermath of the Force 5 tornado that killed 27 people and wiped out about 10 percent of the houses in tiny Jarrell, Texas, in May 1997, Stephanie Fuqua says she most remembers a sense of community fostered online by continual updating of storm stories from the Austin American-Statesman.
Fuqua is content manager for Austin 360, the Internet site owned by Cox Interactive Media. Cox also owns the Austin daily. On the May day the twister blew into town, Fuqua updated the Austin 360 Web coverage even as the storm raged. "Our servers started to overload," Fuqua recalls. Austin 360 also loaded video updates from KVUE for people who didn't have access to TV.
The Web site tracked the dead and injured as well as survivors, posting information online for out-of-town relatives. Staffers printed the information periodically and took it to relief centers to share with evacuees. When survivors began picking up the pieces, Austin 360 gave them a place to post stories of heroism and offer condolences to victims. "The condolence messages were very moving," Fuqua says.
A follow-up series in May 1998 updated stories of survivors.
Anna Gilson, online news editor, says the majority of the users who surf into Austin 360 are locals and "local, local, local" is the staff motto. "There was a lot of interest around the country when the tornado hit, but our job is to help foster a sense of community here, and I believe we are doing that." Her site includes continually updated news, weather, features and entertainment news, as well as an archive.
At present, Austin 360 maintains more than 40 different special projects, with more than 24,000 pages online. "I like the Web because it is immediate, but it also allows you to add relevant material later," Gilson says. Often, American-Statesman journalists call in Austin 360 editors as stories, particularly big projects, are being planned. That gives Gilson and other staffers time to decide how to use the material online.
"We pick up where the Statesman leaves off," she says.
A CHRONOLOGY OF THE WHITE BUFFALO
In Beloit, the first white-bison story appeared in the Daily News 10 months before BDN, Wisconsin's first newspaper Web site, was up and running. Editor William R. Barth says the newspaper's executives decided to give Miracle a permanent residence on the BDN home page. New stories, such as the May birth of Millennium, Miracle's first calf, are posted there.
"Initially, the interest this generated took us by surprise, but once we realized the significance, we wanted to make it easy for everyone with an interest to find the stories easily," Barth says.
In addition to a chronological list of Daily News stories, the site offers links to other relevant Web sites, including that of the Heider family. On Aug. 20, they celebrated the now-blonde Miracle's fourth birthday.
Four years ago, after word of Miracle's birth spread, 500 to 1,000 visitors per day visited Heider's farm. Many Native Americans believe a white buffalo such as Miracle signals a new era of cooperation between different races. More than 30 different tribes have performed religious ceremonies at the farm.
A registry on the BDN home page reveals lengthy discussions about Miracle, primarily by local residents, but involving far-flung Internet denizens as well.
Don Behling, the newspaper's production manager, designed the Web site and keeps it running. He also answers e-mail, including hundreds of messages about Miracle. As of late August, the Miracle site had drawn more than 25,000 visitors.
"I've had more than 1,000 e-mails--from Native Americans, college students, teachers, little kids--from all over the country and overseas. It is very gratifying to know this information means so much to so many people," Behling says.
As newspapers explore how to use their Web sites to tell tales, whether via text, audio, video or any combination thereof, online storytelling pioneers remain uncertain of where their extremely flexible medium is headed. However, these pioneers, and others, will be there.
"I don't think our [online] readers would be very happy if we just posted stories," says Austin's Gilson. "They expect more from us."