Designing "Top Secret America"
BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, July 20 2010
Politico's Keach Hagey has some really useful insight into something we mentioned yesterday, about the online presentation of the Washington Post's big "Top Secret America" series. Hagey writes that Dana Priest co-author's William Arkin background as a blogger and database creator drove the way the investigation was constructed:
The “lighting strike” came when they realized that, although they couldn’t get inside these secret sites, they could physically represent them through databases and mapping.
Arkin did the bulk of his reporting on the two-year project from that same barn in Vermont, she said, though he did come to Washington for a few scouting trips when the project neared its final stages. Priest’s reporting is responsible for most of the interview and physical descriptions that appear in today’s story, while Arkin built the database. Arkin also took the lead in shaping the story to be consumed on the web.
And:
“They were so interested in the concept, they said, ‘OK, what are you thinking?’ Every time we came up with an answer, they said they liked it, and we said, ‘we’re going to have to have a designer, a programmer,’ they just said ‘OK.’ We weren’t just conceiving of the stories. We really wanted to conceive of a way to make journalism different.”
Lauren Keane, the web editor for the Post’s investigative, foreign and national security desks, led a team of eight people – including a cartographer, two interactive designers, a researcher, a project editor, a page designer and database developer -- over the course of 18 months to get the web portion of the story into shape.
“We have never really attempted anything of this scale before,” she said.
Fascinating stuff, really, about the future of online news. And the next question is how well this whole experience will work out for the Post. On that point, True/Slant's Michael Roston wonders whether the news organization will manage to make any money off the investigation, given that there are few advertisements woven throughout the story's user interface.