Changing the way you develop stories

Matt Waite writes about the way a story was developed about the wetlands for the St. Petersburg Times. Here’s the story, and here’s his weblog post.

Here’s the way he describes the traditional story development process:

1. Find, develop, report story.
2. Somewhere during the writing of it, start talking about photo and graphics.
3. Oh yeah, crap, we should invite web to some of these meetings we keep having.
4. Take print graphic ideas, try and mold them into graphics that work online.
5. Publish.

Yep. That sounds about right, at least from what I hear in lots of college media operations as well.

But Waite and his team used a different template on this story:

1. Find and develop story.
2. Decide what is needed to tell the story in the most complete way.
3. While reporting, be thinking about the end product.
4. Develop and plan web graphics, like this interactive Google map, first, then adapt them to print.
5. Publish.

Notice that the planning for interactivity is pushed up farther in the process. He calls this “working backwards,” but I’d argue it’s among the most forward-thinking things a newspaper can do.

Most college media don’t publish or broadcast over the Christmas break, so now might be a good time to think about how you can re-engineer your story development process to move the interactive element forward. Perhaps in that dead week between Christmas and the big bowl games. Future generations of journalists will thank you.

Waite has some additional comments on those steps that are worth reading. My favorite is this: “It’s much easier to go from interactive to static than it is to make static interactive.” Indeed.

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