Innovative Individuals

Innovative Individuals: Paige West

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If the name Paige West does not ring a bell, you definitely need to keep reading. Director of MSNBC’s Interactive Studio, Paige leads 11 online producers to develop all of the interactive multimedia for the “top global news site.” Talk about a big role to fill! We are honored to select Paige for this week’s “Innovative Individual” for all of her innovative work at MSNBC, as well as her other multimedia contributions at Second Story and NewsU.

Paige received her doctorate in Neurobiology from UNC Chapel Hill before becoming interested in multimedia and interactivity. After much thought, she decided to make a professional career change and began producing interactives for science education before coming back to obtain her master’s in journalism. Paige advises others who are considering a career change (or are forced to make one) to take small steps. “Try to find something that is slightly different rather than doing something completely different”, she said.

Q) How do you drive innovation in your work?

A) I just try to always let the content guide me. In other words, instead of trying to fit content into either the formats we have on hand or into the technologies that I’m comfortable with, I try to focus on the objective of the end user: what would they really want to get out of a particular content set and how can I help them do that in a quick and intuitive way? I have to admit that there’s always a voice in the back of my head that is saying, “and how can you do it in a way that no one has ever seen before?” One thing I’ve learned in the past few years is not to let that voice influence me to the same extent that it did awhile ago. For one, it’s time consuming to come up with something from scratch for every new project. With the maturation of online news, there’s a greater demand for interesting visual presentation of information on increasingly shorter timelines, so you have to find efficiencies wherever you can. Secondly, the more you veer from standard user interface practices and visual metaphors, the more work your user is going to have to do and the less successful your project may be. So it comes back to the content rather than the presentation itself – how can you enable access to the content in a way that the user hasn’t had before or how can you improve on the presentation of information that the user is already very familiar with.

It’s definitely getting more difficult to be innovative than it was a couple of years ago for a few reasons. For one, there are just more people out there with the skills to create interesting stuff. In addition, there’s immense pressure to develop templates so that every project isn’t a one-off that takes a lot of time to create. I wholeheartedly support the use of templates because they enable the creation of more interactive and multimedia presentations than we’d have otherwise, but ultimately, they’re the antithesis of innovation – they are the same presentation over and over again. To some extent, it’s my responsibility to push as much of our content into existing templates as possible in order to maximize our production efficiency. However, instead of looking at templates as the death of innovation – which I did for many years – I view templates as a way to free us from doing the same thing over and over again. Really – how many different slideshows or photo galleries are really necessary? With a good set of templates, our daily needs are handled pretty well and we can focus on innovation.

Q) What piece in your portfolio are you most proud of and why?

A) The Bridge Tracker – which was a project developed by Phil Zepeda using data obtained by investigative reporter Bill Dedman, both at msnbc.com. Bill came to my team for help visualizing the data he’d obtained on the status of our nation’s bridges after I-35W collapsed in Minneapolis. He obtained the data from the National Bridge Inventory via a FOIA request. The data showed that thousands of bridges in our country were in need of repairs or were seriously overdue for inspection. The initial idea was to select a particular route that a lot of people might travel – over the Golden Gate bridge in California, for example – and show the inspection status and schedule of all the bridges that would be crossed during that particular journey. In other words, a basic map interactive with geo-located pins representing bridges that revealed more specific information on rollOver. While thinking about this, the first question that popped into my head was, “what about all the bridges I go over every day?” The danger of crossing bridges on a route I’d never travelled didn’t phase me, but I was SHOCKED by the data on the bridges I crossed every day. I figured it was unlikely that anyone would connect with data about an abstract route, so for users to really grasp the magnitude of the problem that Bill was trying to explain, we had to make it personally relevant to them. Phil then did an amazing job creating an interactive application that enabled users to search the database of bridge data based on a route that they defined.

I’ve just never seen the reaction to the Bridge Tracker from any other interactive application I’ve ever been involved in creating. People actually learned something actionable from it – if they couldn’t get a bad bridge inspected or fixed by putting pressure on their local authorities, then at least they could avoid it!

NOTE: Bing maps (formerly Virtual Earth) updated their API recently, causing turn by turn directions to be visualized on the Bridge Tracker as little, numbered, red dots. This was not an intended element on the map, and we’re trying to determine how to remove them.

Q) Please provide a brief educational and professional history.

A)

• PhD in Neurobiology from UNC @ Chapel Hill – I loved studying science, but I didn’t like doing science because it took years to obtain a result (positive or negative). I’m just not that patient.
• I spent a year as a postdoc creating innovative science curriculum using distance learning and interactive applications (in 1999)!
• I then spent two years programming Shockwave games for a little Chapel Hill firm called Adveractive (games are an amazing way to learn how to program).
• I returned to school for a Masters in Journalism – specializing in Multimedia with Rich Beckman.
• I spent two years producing online learning content for working journalists at News University, the online component of the Poynter Institute. My favorite course = Language of the Image.
• I spent about a year as a producer for Second Story – an interactive design agency that specializes in museum exhibits and sites.
• I’ve been at msnbc.com for three years. I currently lead the Interactive Studio which is an 11 person team of interactive designers and developers.

Q) Where do you believe multimedia fits into today’s society and how will that role change over time?

A) Really good question! The proliferation of mobile and touchscreen devices will allow for access to multimedia and interactive content in a huge variety of ways. There’s a huge and growing market for that kind of content, and the more people are exposed to it, the greater the demand will be. I think eventually multimedia and interactivity will be the standard way of presenting information in the same way either text or video has been for a long time. What device that will be on – I have no idea! If I thought I knew, I’m sure I’d be wrong. I look forward to the day when we can create something once and have it distributed to a variety of destinations – the web, your mobile, your iPad – with very little overhead on our part. But at the same time, that calls for an increasingly sophisticated journalist who doesn’t think in just one format; the story should drive the storytelling format, not the limitations of the device or the person who is producing the story.

Q) What is one thing on your “To-Do” list?

A) I’m really excited about the potential of the touchscreen – less about the actual technology and more about all the new places people will have access to news and information. Changing the context of when and where people interact with content will provide some interesting opportunities. I’ve also realized it’s time to move away from Flash as a primary multimedia/interactive tool. There are other promising technologies out there that may be compatible across a larger number of devices, so I’m starting to investigate that too!

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Want to nominate a deserving colleague, friend or inspirational figure to be highlighted in this series? Confidential nominations can be emailed to innovativeinteractivity@gmail.com on an ongoing basis. Self nominations are also welcome. A person will be featured every Friday, so look for the next “innovative individual” Friday, March 5th!

Other posts that might interest you:

• Innovative Individuals: Ashley Wells
• Innovative Individuals: Meredith Birkett
• Innovative Individuals: Gabriel Dance

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