Thoughts on the Looming Group Project

With our second lab scheduled for later this afternoon, I can't help but keep thinking about our in-depth, semester-long project. It's a large reason why I was anxious to take the J198 plunge as a senior; the idea of putting together a group reporting project with Web components is incredibly challenging but oh-so-enticing. My group and I haven't even begun to discuss what our main topic will be yet, but I've been thinking about some points of interest since last semester. Can't wait to dive in...

For my Online Journalism class, I've been doing quite a bit of reading (in the comfort of my bedroom, of course) on the foundations of online news, and whether or not it's reached its potential yet. In this 2005 article, Paul looked back at a 1995 forum at the Poynter Institute that outlined some of the things that newspapers were not providing then that they thought online papers would be able to provide in the future. In the 2005 ten-year retrospective, Paul looked back at some those "promises" (including hyperlinking, interactivity, the 'limitless newshole' and new relationships between words and graphics) and weighed in on how well she thought the news media had taken advantage of them.

I've made it a habit to think about both of these classes simultaneously. I wanted to blog about some of the realizations of these promises, and how they apply to the big group reporting project. I drew inspiration from an executive producer of Web content, Teresa Moore, for a Tampa Bay station, who said in '05 that the station streams "unedited videos along with stories that ran on our air with shorter soundbites. For example, we'll post whole interviews online or show whole press conferences live that won't make it on air." This is much more common on news sites today than it was five years ago, and it's something I envision for our group project's Web site.

Why not give readers as much complementary material as we can? If I were interested in a particular topic -- let's say, poverty and homelessness in the South Side, for example -- I'd be inclined to watch full interviews with the homeless in addition to reading the main feature story. Of course I realize that there's only so much bandwidth allotted for us, and too much information might verge on overkill, but there are so many options to work with here - with video, and social networking, and picture slideshows, to name but a few -- that I'm getting excited for all we can do.