The visual history of Vegas - Rob Curley did it again

Whenever people ask me how the digital future of local journalism and regional newspapers might look like I refer to Rob Curley. It is really impressive what Rob and his team have achieved on their way to prove the enormous potential of local story telling on the web.

Rob started his career at the Lawrence Journal in Kansas, where he managed to create new forms of cross media community services around local sports teams. He then moved to the Washington post, where he launched the Local Explorer, a unique map mashup displaying local crime news, real estate offers, and school and Point of interest information. He caused national debates among media experts when he started Loudonextra.com, a sublocal website for a Washington suburb.

Now Rob and his creative pack have moved to the Las Vegas Sun. And this time, I have to confess, Rob and his folks have topped themselves. The way they compiled the history of sin city is a milestone in local journalism and envisioning local story telling. Why so euphoric?

The Flash designed combination of historic pictures, videos, timeline, geocontext and personalisation is extremely cool and represents the best of newspaper core values. Check the section Construction deaths a complete multimedia monument for the forgotten victims of the Vegas construction boom. I guess there is no place on the web where you could learn more about the Vegas fascination. Could a regional newspaper achieve more?

What is missing? I'm still waiting for the integration of user content (amateur pictures and video) and the voices of authentic witnesses. It must be exciting to listen to the old croupier talking about the black jack nights with the rat pack.

Local history is a perfect web proposition for local newspapers since they have always been a crucial and reliable part of it. They can leverage their archive content, they can team up with users and local experts and they can perfectly play local history stories over all their crossmedia channels - from print to web, from radio to mobile. The Stuttgarter Zeitung recently launched "Von Zeit zu Zeit" (From time to time). It is not as visual and spectacular as the Vegas Sun but already adresses the full potential of local history.

If you want to keep track with Rob Curley and his experiences as a
self proclaimed internet punk in the local newspaper scene (including tops and flops) follow his blog.

A closer look at Spiegel Online's time machine

Some time ago, Spiegel Online, Germany's leading news website, launched its ambitious portal on contemporary history, einestages.de. The idea was welcomed everywhere, although the navigation was considered to be too complicated. The masses of photos are difficult to access (why isn't there a real slide show functionality?), and beside (sometimes too) sophisticated texts, I miss some short catchy statements.

The latest innovation on einestages.de is the „einestage.de-Zeitmaschine“. This time machine application shows how historic content can be accessed visually: Imagine you rush in a space shuttle through the universe: the years fly by, and masses of photos that stand for contemporary events pass your way. Technically, the flash solutions works quite well – in case you have a fast computer and the latest flash version. Of course you can set your starting time – either you start the flight nowadays or 100 years ago. The speed can be controlled by the track wheel.

So far so good. This time machine seems to be a smart idea to arrange historic content via expressive photos, giving inspiration to events you haven't known so far, satisfying a certain play instinct.

It really sounds perfect at first thought, but obviously it is not so easy to handle. To be improved: the link between the photos flying by and the real content: If you find a photo of interest, you can only click on it. A new site opens that shows the photo and provides some basic information such as location, date and relevant tags. But: neither title nor explanation what it's about. To access a short description, you have to click once more. But by getting into details, e.g. clicking through the slide show or reading the related article on einestages.de you leave the time machine. So if you want to continue your flight, you have to restart the application. You can't go on the point where you had left the time machine.

In brief: the time machine is a fascinating idea which picks up a human dream. The application is visually attractive, playful and full of inspiring content. But: Once more we get aware of a central challenge of visual journalism: to provide a close link from the attention-catching photo and the real content. One photo may not always suffice to immerse users into meaningful contemporary events.

For me, however, flying through the times with the einestages.de time machine would be even greater if some brief content snippets would be provided just one click away. Of course, everyone wants to maximize page impressions. But in this case, I fear the einestages.de time machine would be reduced to a playful gimmick and not to an inspiring way to discover contemporary history.

Short review on the latest german website relaunches

Maybe you remember the large blogosphere among media blogs about the latest website relaunches, such as Holtzbrincks' youngster news site Zoomer.de, News-TV N24.de or the yellow press website Bild.de.

Despite we note that there is much difference between these sites, one attribute is common: the shift to a visual presentation of news.

N24 focuses on video which seems very logic for a news tv channel (but which has been a novum anyway). Bild and Zoomer use appealing flash effects to present their slide shows and video news, or newsmaps to enhance the selection of regional news.

But both Bild and Zoomer not only use visual features. They establish also a 'visual layout': The top news section on the first screen is dominated by large photos, teaser texts are skipped. Scrolling down, we find a more conventional design, nevertheless focused on big images and photo slide shows.

Compared to this visual oriented website design, relauches such as netzeitung or FAZ.net seem rather conventional. We are looking forward to further relaunch projects to find out if there is a news site design concept which is different from the spiegel-sueddeutsche-focus-faz-netzeitung-scheme.

The mojo men - watch out for the visual reporters

The standards of visual journalism have to be defined yet. But the tools are already available. At the World economic summit in Davos Nokia provided a couple of VIPs with it's N82 mojo phone and - in co operation with Reuters - asked them to provide photos and videos - real time news coverage by high class citizen journalists.

One of the test candidates was Jeff Jarvis, who now via blog shares his remarkable experiences. The people he interviewed didn't take the Nokia serious as they would have taken a video camera plus a complete TV team. So they behaved less nervous and were more open in their statements. Neverteheless the quality of footage (including audio) was quite good. Jeff's conlusion: Tools like the N82 "may change the job of the journalist in ways more radical than I could have imagined until I started reporting with one".

Map it! Geocoding opens new visual access to information

Google's Marissa Mayer this week at the DLD conference in Munich announced new features to come for Google maps and Google earth. The triumph march of Google's geo concept all over the web is incredible.

Many people in the traditional media, especially from the Offline Taliban faction (still convinced that the internet nightmare could be over one day), still renounce the relevance of map like mash ups as some sort of unserious triviality. Even web experts like Mattias Kretschmer express their scepticism.

I'm pretty sure that displaying information in a geo context will become indispensable. The geographical context uncovers hidden dimensions of facts and data.

One of the most impressive examples is the Local Explorer of the Washington Post . The team of Rob Curely developed a mash up concept which combines data for crime, home sales, schools and places to a unique tool of local orientation.

Last week EveryBlock was launched by Adrian Holovaty, a pioneer in geo mapping for information scenarios. It provides relevant local data and information for San Francisco, New York and Chicago. It's promise: "The easiest way to keep track of what’s happening on your block, in your neighborhood and all over your city."

In Germany various community sites and point of interest portals have started to use Google maps as an additional layer for providing context and orientation. In 2007 the first newspaper applications went online like Saarbrücker Zeitung or Der Westen/ Westdeutsche Allgemeine , the largest regional paper in Germany. The basic intention is to display local news from the editors in a geographical context. People can easily check what is going on in their local neighbourhood by access the news via maps as the quickest and most logical of all entries. With maps as a visual access they no longer need to waste their time by browsing through long lists of text stories.

The next step will be that private users and citizen journalists can upload their content including the geo reference. Publishers plan to add local classified ads or sponsored information by local shop owners, public services or cinemas, clubs, bars and restaurants. I guess it is one of the most convincing approaches to revitalise the real strength of regional newspapers - their local competence and credibility.

At dpa-infocom we just launched a gecoded version of our regional multimedia wire services (dpa-RegioLine). Bild.de has based the beta version of it's Berlin navigator on this feed. So far we add an official geo co ordinate for towns and cities. In the cases of Berlin and Hamburg, the largest German cities we provide the data for the city districts. Gerd Kamp, head of our application development and Mr. Geonews, gives some technical background.

In late spring we plan to attach the complete address to the regional dpa news wherever useful. Besides we intend to geocode our main world newswire dpa-InfoLine. Users should be allowed to follow news via news maps from the local to the world level - simply by zooming in and out.

By defining standards and workflows we hope to motivate more and more publishers and editors to go for the geo option and add geographic metadata to their content. Map it! Another task visual journalists and story tellers will have to embrace.

The eyeblogger manifesto: visual journalism and visual story telling

Eye bloggers believe in the „iconic turn“ as it describes the medial shift of paradigm from text towards image.

In the past the image followed and supported the text content. In the convergent media worlds text will follow more and more the visual content message (even print will continue to become more and more visual).

Related to the iconic turn is the term „visual literacy“ , defining the intellectual human capability to decode and interpret images.

The visual shift, the growing media dominance of picture, video, info graphic or other visual forms of content vs. text will accelerate in the upcoming years. The arguments are apparent:

1. Text is an inconvenient and highly demanding access to information. It will become more and more a tool of the information elite. Mass media on the other hand will attract users more and more via a more emotional and less complicated visual access.

2. Within the next five years TV and web will converge. IPTV and video streaming on internet portals will replace classic broadcast TV. Video will become a strong third visual format besides photo and info graphics.

3. The convergence of TV and web will resolve the divide in user experience between lean back (TV) and lean forward (web) scenarios. The hybrid combination of TV and web requires graphical interfaces to navigate from the couch.

4. Advertisement is shifting from the established media to the web. The new tools to measure reach and justify ad spendings are changing. Clicks and page impressions will be replaced by view time. A pre condition for this new criteria are visual and interactive contents with high stickiness, which attract people and keep them on the site as long as possible.

5. Technically VDSL broadband allows complex and data rich visualisations. User who can afford these high speed accesses, expect a new user experience. New combinations of visuality, interactivity and multimediality will in their potential beat all established media formats (e.g. world of warcraft).

6. All media platforms converge. Within a couple of years users will hardly be able to distinguish the web portals of print-, TV- or internet only providers since they will all offer the same elements of text, picture, info graphic, audio and of course video.

7. Visualisation still seems to be a theoretical subject for information scientists and digital artists. Now it is time to use the new opportunities for professional visual story telling and develop a visual journalism. This is especially true since images and visualisation can easily be manipulated or be misinterpreted. Linking the emotionality of images to the preciseness of the word is a highly journalistic duty and profession.

8. The convergence of digital platforms will lead to a convergence of journalistic job profiles. The basic competence of print and broadcast editors will get more and more similar. Focus and joint fundament will be visual web formats.

9. Visual journalism will pose new requirements to editorial training. A new profile of visual editors will unite classical journalistic abilities with the competence for visuality, interactivity and mulimediality.

10. Visual content can easily inform and entertain a global audience, regardless what language they speak. It thus ideally meets the requirements of the web as the only truly global medium.

11. Even in e-learning visual story telling provides new opportunities for handicapped people suffering from dyslexia and illiteracy.