NOTE: The following is my final paper for my class in business media at UNC Chapel Hill. A big thank you to WSJ’s Alan Murray, Rahul Chopra and Luke Miller for speaking with me for this article!

Alan Murray, Deputy Managing Editor and Online Executive Editor at The Wall Street Journal, in 2012 stated that “media now becomes popular by consumer choice, not lack of choice.” With low barriers to entry and non-existent switching costs, digital consumers today are not only less loyal to any one news organization, but less willing to pay for content that they have, up until now, assumed was free.

Thus is the root cause for why newspaper organizations are now strategically reshuffling their business models in order to adopt and adapt to the changing digital landscape. Wall Street Journal, on the other hand, continues to enjoy the strong revenue flow from its tried-and-true digital subscription model and has become the de-facto standard from which all other print news organizations benchmark their latest digital strategies.

Wall Street Journal Protects Its Nest Egg

According to NewsCorp’s 2011 annual review, both print and online circulations have risen every quarter since NewsCorp acquired Dow Jones in 2007. More specifically, print and digital circulations were up 12 percent in 2011 compared to 2010, and print and digital advertising revenue increased 11 percent over the year prior.

Murray disclosed that in 2011 the digital business made half as much as the print business and that print still garnered 85 percent of the total advertising revenue. Digital revenues were split almost evenly between advertising and subscription.

Murray said that there are approximately 1.3 million subscribers and if a print subscriber was worth $1, then a digital subscriber is only worth $0.25. Called “digital quarters,” Murray said that the value falls by at least 75 percent when moving subscribers from print to digital, and that in some cases it could be called “digital dimes.”

“There is no way you can command the same kind of value for the advertiser,” Murray said. “In order to make the digital transition you have to invest and NewsCorp has the resources to make those needed investments.”

General Manager Alisa Bowen told Beet.TV in a 2011 video interview that more than 200,000 people digitally subscribed to Wall Street Journal on their iPads and Android tablets and eReaders in 2011. In addition to the flagship English app, they have also deployed versions in multiple languages, including Japanese and Chinese.

Bowen noted that the Wall Street Journal tablet application user spends approximately twice as long on their app and views roughly twice as much content versus an online PC user. Moreover, new subscribers who begin viewing Wall Street Journal content on an app more often switch over to also read content online and in print than vice-versa. This suggests that mobile technologies is driving loyalty back to the flagship paper and website and creating additional value for its subscribers.

On the revenue side, Bowen acknowledged that they still have a long ways to go in integrating advertising into mobile technologies but that they are starting to offer cross-platform advertising packages for its advertisers.

News Sites Clamor for Online Advertising Revenue

According to Nielsen, digital news consumption has increased by double-digit percentages since 2009, most recently up 17 percent from 2010 to 2011. This increased readership helped account for a 23 percent online revenue increase during this period.

While online revenue continues to increase at an impressive rate, however, the opposite is true for print advertising revenue. According to the Pew Research Center:

“In 2011, losses in print advertising dollars outpaced gains in digital revenue by a factor of roughly 10 to 1, a ratio even worse than in 2010. When circulation and advertising revenue are combined, the newspaper industry has shrunk 43% since 2000.”

Thus, news sites scramble to monetize their Web properties to offset the dwindling print revenue. By 2012 approximately one in ten daily newspapers have erected a digital paywall or subscription plan. More than 150 papers are using a similar metered-usage model that the New York Times enacted in 2011 and another 100 are expected to do so in 2012.

Google Ad Network still rules the online advertising industry according to comScore, with 205.4 million unique visitors in March 2012. This equals 91.7 percent reach, with an estimated total U.S. Internet audience of approximately 224 million visitors. In comparison, Facebook saw 70.9 percent penetration, and Microsoft’s Bing network garnered a mere 40.1 percent reach. Google may not be the foreseeable strong hold in online advertising, though. According to the Pew Research Center, Facebook is projected to garner one out of every five display ads sold in 2015.

Regardless of the advertising source, display ads continue to be the dominant advertising medium, generating $12.4 billion in revenue in 2011, a 24 percent increase from the year before. Banner advertisements make up the largest share of display ads, seeing a 21 percent increase from 2010 to 2011, according to the Pew Research Center.

Display ads also make up a large percentage of the mobile ad sector, but significant revenue is also attributed to text and search-based ads, which online news sites have yet to fully optimize. Search ads on mobile devices brought in $653 million in revenue in 2011 according to eMarketer.

Optimizing Video Advertising Potential at WSJ

Rahul Chopra, Director of Video for Wall Street Journal Digital Network, said that they recently began partnering with YouTube to produce a daily 30-minute show based on their lifestyle and culture content called “Off Duty.”

As of May 1st, 2012, the YouTube channel has attracted more than 20,000 subscribers with more than 18 million views to its 45 videos.

“It is an experiment for both of us,” Chopra said, referring to both Wall Street Journal and YouTube. He is assessing the ‘experiment’ on a daily basis before deciding whether or not to roll out other versions.

When asked how advertising revenue differed between hosting the video on Wall Street Journal’s servers and capturing 100 percent of the ad revenue versus hosting the video on YouTube’s servers and splitting the revenue with Google, Chopra said that the partnership gives them “significantly higher CPMs than average for the media industry” and on other video sites, such as Hulu.

Although sources vary, a conservative range for average CPM in the online media industry is $3-$10, with targeted content sites and media-rich content ranging anywhere from $10-$20. While not disclosing an exact CPM for YouTube videos, Murray said that a $50 CPM for video advertising was not impossible.

According to eMarketer, video ads are expected to double in the next three years, to a projected $8 billion.

In order to fully monetize video on WallStreetJournal.com, Chopra said that all video is stored in front of the paywall in order to develop a strong brand and attract new users. However, Murray acknowledged that this may change:

“All videos are free for now because of high demand,” he said, “ but we may move some behind the paywall in the near future.”

Murray said that currently the YouTube partnership is not as profitable as in-house video, but that there is great potential. Moreover, he stated that they have sold more video ads on their site than they currently have space for, thus resources is currently their limiting factor.

Chopra said that there are currently 16 full-time video producers for Wall Street Journal. In addition, Murray said that there are 2,000 full-time reporters around the world and that in the near future there will not be a difference between its journalists.

“Over time the difference between newspaper and TV will disappear and the tv reporter role will go away,” he said. “Everyone will be journalists who can both report and produce” all types of stories for various channels.

While Chopra said that they use a combination of pre-roll, mid-roll, post-roll and display advertising to monetize their videos, he said that pre-roll ads are their fastest growing ad unit.

Murray disclosed that its new program “WSJ Live” viewable by TV using Xbox and Apple TV is 100 percent monetized by these various advertising options. After stating this fact, Murray acknowledged that this makes him wish that there was an online version of a cable subscription in which Wall Street Journal could take part, presumably in order to diversify its revenue more evenly between advertising and subscription.

On the other hand, rather than envisioning a new technology or revenue model, Chopra said that he expects video advertising revenue to still be the dominating force into the foreseeable future due to the ability to better target advertising to its viewers. Specifically, they currently do not use demographic data collected from its subscriber base, but consider using publicly available viewing history and patterns to detect user interest and tailor ads accordingly.

The SoLoMo Craze (Social, Local, Mobile)

According to the Pew Research Center, nearly four in five U.S. adults own a computer, two in five own a smartphone and one in five own a tablet in 2012. Moreover, more than half of mobile owners use their devices to consume news, and a quarter use more than one device for their news intake.

Luke Miller, Lead Mobile UX Designer at Wall Street Journal, said that his team prioritizes revenue prospects in their mobile designs from the beginning. For example, he said that a premium paid mobile channel would be designed to better optimize traffic more so than free versions.

Since mobile has on average 80 percent less content than an online news site, Miller noted that, in his opinion, the traditional “above and below the fold” ad placements is not relevant in mobile design. However, he still has to battle with “banner blindness” where users get accustomed to typical ad positions and tend to overlook them on future visits.

When asked how to fix this issue, Miller noted that tension arises when advertisers want to design standard ads that can be used across organizations, whereas his team would ideally like to design custom ad spots to fit more strategically into their UX framework.

Miller acknowledged that his team did not design different interfaces for free versus paying subscribers — likely due to budget constraints — and that all users see the same number of ads on iPad devices regardless of their subscription. If they had the resources to develop two distinct mobile apps for these two segmented groups, he noted that advertising potential could increase since they could then better target ads depending on customers’ willingness to pay.

An increasing number of U.S. consumers are turning to social, with more than 133 million active users on Facebook and 24 million on Twitter. However, according to a Pew Research Center survey, only 10 percent of those surveyed state that they frequently visit news links recommended from their social networks.

Regardless, news organizations are continuing to flock to social sites to establish presences and join the B2C conversation. For example, Yahoo recently stated that its social reader has more than 25 million users and saw a 600 percent increase in traffic coming from Facebook. According to the blog AllFacebook.com, The Washington Post recently launched a social reader app on Facebook with more than 3.5 million monthly users.

Google also launched a social reader, called Google Currents, in December of 2011. The mobile app provides content from 150 news organizations and expanded to include international availability in April of 2012. Example partners include Forbes with 1.3 million subscribers, The Huffington Post with nearly 230,000 subscribers and Wall Street Journal’s AllThingsD with more than 170,000 subscribers.

Other News Sites’ Attempt at Pricing Users and Assessing Loyalty

New York Times Company’s freemium model allows free access to a limited portion of its articles, and then moves to a tiered subscription model for more loyal readers. According to comScore, New York Times Digital saw 75.7 million unique visitors in March 2012, making it the 14th most visited website. The Times’ now boasts more than 390,000 digital paying subscribers and, in April 2012, reduced the number of free articles for non-paying consumers from 20 to 10 a month. Thus, so far only .5 percent of its monthly visitors are paying for access to its content. It is still to be determined whether the reduced number of free articles will convert more readers to paying subscribers.

According to PaidContent, Gannett will implement a paywall on all 80 of its community papers by the end of 2012. The paywall, not to include its flagship paper USA Today, will be customized in terms of bundling and pricing for each market. Gannett community newspaper chief Bob Dickey told Poynter that he expects these paywalls to be worth $100 million by 2013. Gannett sites garnered 50.3 million unique visitors in March 2012, placing it as the 22nd most visited website according to comScore.

The Washington Post Company, in contrast, has publicly announced that it does not intend to enact a paywall until two events occur: The Post attracts more loyal viewers to its site and it has improved its information technology, including both hardware and software.

Approximately 26.1 million unique visitors trafficked sites owned by the Washington Post Company in March 2012 according to comScore, making it the 41st most visited online property. Traffic to WashingtonPost.com was not disclosed.

In defense of its free access, Washington Post op-ed writer Patrick Pexton wrote on the site in March of 2012, “The other thing to consider is that if everyone else is putting up paywalls, and The Post doesn’t, it has a huge opportunity.”

Which Way is Up?

Whether or not remaining a free resource can be viewed as a financially-savvy “huge opportunity,” the four distinct actions — subscription model by Wall Street Journal, metered-usage plan by the New York Times, paywall by Gannett, and free access for The Washington Post — prove that there is no set strategy for news organizations on how to attain digital financial independence.

Regardless of the organization and situation, everyone is faced with Murray’s “digital dimes” and “digital quarters” reality and must invest accordingly in order to strategically shift its consumers to digital while monetizing it sufficiently in order to offset its dwindling print revenue.

In 2011 The Hinterlands held their first residential photofilm workshop in Devon, UK with the wonderful duckrabbit and it was a brilliant experience. So this year we decided to do it all over again and we will we be working alongside duckrabbit for the photofilm workshop from 27th May – June 1st 2012. We made a little film of last year’s event to give people a taste of what to expect and you can watch it here.

We are also organising another residential week which will focus on developing your photographic style and finding your voice as a documentary photographer and storyteller. The Photographic Immersion workshop with Brooklyn based photographer and documentarian Brenda Ann Kenneally will run from 24th-29th June 2012. It’s a small residential workshop, with only 10 places and will be held at Blackdown Yurts in Devon, UK. Participants will stay in yurts, eat tasty home cooked food and get one-to-one support from Brenda about their work.

Brenda has photographed and reported on American families over the past two decades. She has been recognised and supported by the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography, the Mother Jones Documentary Fund, the Alicia Patterson Foundation and the Soros Criminal Justice Fellowship and her book Money, Power, Respect won the Best Photojournalism Book at Pictures of The Year in 2006.

In the past five years her work has looked at the coming of age in post-industrial America and work from her Upstate girls project won a 2009 World Press Photo Award and her multimedia reporting on the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina won her a Webby Award.

It’s Brenda’s first workshop in the UK and it promises to be a really special week. If you would like to read a little more about the workshop take a look at our website at www.thehinterlands.co.uk. You can keep in touch with us on twitter at @the_hinterlands or on facebook.

Instructor at Ohio University in Athens, OH

This professional practice or post-graduate position in the School of Visual Communication is designed to bring a fresh teaching experience to the interactive design and multimedia sequence in the school. This one year appointment is a renewable for up to five years. Evaluations and funding reviews will be conducted annually. The position was created to bring additional tool and practical education to the rapidly changing areas of online, mobile and responsive design. The candidate is expected to have a strong background in front end development, solid coding skills, CMS tools, and creative UX/AI design, for responsive and mobile development driven by visual communication and visual narrative practice.

Learn more about this opportunity.

News Digital Project Manager at The Roanoke Times in Roanoke, VA

The Roanoke Times/roanoke.com seeks an enterprising and collaborative journalist to help us dream big and build our digital future. The news digital project manager will play a key role as we redesign our site, install a new content management system and reorient our workflow into a digital-first, highly engaged model.

On a daily basis, the news digital project manager will initiate, lead and manage news projects for roanoke.com and other digital platforms. This non-supervisory position requires skills in successful peer-to-peer direction as well as clear communication with the editor, managing editor and director of digital media.

Our ideal candidate is a self-learner who thrives on change, experimentation and a journalistic mission to serve the community. Our newsroom wants to build on the special recognition we received recently from the Society for News Design, which noted that we don’t let our relative size limit our creativity. Roanoke.com is “deep within their community,” the SND judges said. “The multimedia storytelling explores highly personal issues and forces viewers to confront issues that rarely surface in their daily lives.”

Learn more about this opportunity.

Design Editor/Assistant Professor at University of Missouri-Columbia in Columbia, MI

In an industry excited about innovation online, what’s the role of a print newspaper? As an analytical, long-read magazine? As a quick-hit digest? Something else? And how does the tablet reading experience compare?

The Columbia Missourian and the Missouri School of Journalism are looking for a designer with vision. We don’t want you to put out the newspaper of today. We want you to envision the reading experience of the future, in print and on devices. And we’ll give you incredible freedom and room to experiment. You’ll teach news design in the classroom and supervise designers in the newsroom. You’ll also have the chance to teach a class in multimedia design, so experience with that (or being a proven quick, enthusiastic learner) is needed.

We have given over most of the print decision-making and creative process to the design team. Can you take our design students and publications to new and interesting places? We have also invented an Interactive Copy Desk that is the hub of our digital newsroom.

Learn more about this opportunity.

Director of Photography at MSNBC in New York, NY

The msnbc Digital Network is a portfolio of innovative and powerful news brands that deliver the most compelling, diverse and engaging stories on your platform of choice. The world-class brands featured in the digital network include msnbc.com, TODAY, NBC Nightly News, msnbc TV, NBC Sports, Newsvine, EveryBlock and BreakingNews.com. At the msnbc digital network, employees not only have the opportunity for fulfilling their career ambitions, they touch and communicate the events that shape our world, everyday.

We seek an experienced, passionate photojournalism leader to direct our still photography report. As a member of msnbc.com’s editorial leadership team, you will lead in the creative production, acquisition, editing and presentation of news photographs.

The ideal candidate will merge the highest journalistic and ethical standards with the digital imperative for open-minded, innovative adaptability. You will be accountable for the quality and quantity of the 10-10-person photo team’s output, for collaboratively defining and executing site standards for photo usage, and for mentoring a newsroom spread across 8 time zones in four locations on best practices in picture editing. You will have demonstrated success in industry-leading storytelling, staff development and multi-platform photojournalism. Your love for great pictures is broad-ranging, and you will be as comfortable editing pictures from a war zone as you are telling visual stories about business trends, health news and entertainment events. Writing and verbal communication, enthusiastic team-work, organization and work-ethic are essential qualities for a successful candidate.

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Executive Producer for Multimedia at Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication in Phoenix, AK

The Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University is seeking an energetic leader who can help lead ongoing school-wide efforts to develop and advance the creation and production of daily, in-depth and interactive multimedia content across platforms.

The Executive Producer for Multimedia will work with students, faculty and staff throughout Cronkite to encourage the advancement of innovative approaches to multimedia storytelling. Duties include responsibility for the daily production and management of multimedia content for the Cronkite News website, supervising student producers and teaching advanced multimedia storytelling and interactive techniques and skills in a newsroom setting. The executive producer will manage daily workflow for the Cronkite News site, integrating multi-platform content produced in multiple classrooms and professional programs, including Cronkite News Service bureaus in Phoenix and Washington, D.C., and a daily television newscast, Cronkite NewsWatch, which airs statewide on Arizona PBS. The executive producer also will manage Cronkite News Service social media promotion and interactivity as well as special multimedia projects, including those produced as part of the national Carnegie-Knight News21 program and Cronkite reporting projects abroad.

Learn more about this opportunity.

Multimedia Producer at Dow Jones in San Francisco, CA

Dow Jones is looking for a freelance Multimedia Producer at our San Francisco, CA office.

This producer works hands on with Journal & MarketWatch reporters and editors to create packaged videos in key coverage areas. The producer assists reporters and editors in developing concepts, shots and scripting video segments, edits footage into finished pieces. The producer will also be assisting in live shows, Skype and live hits.
Experience shooting, producing and editing video is required. Operating and managing a video studio is necessary – audio mixing, video switching, lighting and floor setting is needed.
Basic understanding of back-end web video publishing, interface, user experience and promotion. This candidate works well under time restraints and in a fast-paced environment, manages his/her time well, understands the importance of clear communication, transparency and awareness of the measurement of success based on videos’ metrics which will be implemented and must be met.

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Newsroom Developer/Data Visualization Programmer at The Boston Globe in Boston, MA

The Boston Globe is looking for a creative programmer/developer to tell interactive stories on its digital properties, Boston.com and BostonGlobe.com. You should be driven to create maps, charts and tools for data display. You will be immersed in a fast-paced newsroom collaborating with reporters, editors, newsroom programmers, infographic specialists, digital designers, and site producers to build ambitious story presentations at one of the oldest, yet most forward-thinking, news organizations in the country.

The Boston Globe, BostonGlobe.com, and Boston.com are the dominant news sources in New England. The Globe, founded in 1872, has a daily circulation of 232,000 copies and has won 20 Pulitzer Prizes. BostonGlobe.com, launched in October, was named the Best Daily Newspaper Website in the country. Boston.com is among the most visited newspaper website in the country, with nearly 200 million page views and 5 million unique users each month. Since its inception in 1995, it has won many awards for its journalism, including the Jesse Laventhol Prize for online storytelling from the American Society of Newspaper Editors, EPpys, and New England Emmys for video production.

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Multimedia Designer at Interactive Data in New York, NY

The Multimedia Designer is responsible for conceptualizing and creating global and strategic marketing materials in electronic and print multimedia. This individual will work with the global marketing team and others throughout the organization and is responsible for managing projects from concept to execution. The Multimedia Designer will ensure that all communications, whether print or electronic, follow the Interactive Data brand guidelines and support the organizations business goals.

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Mobile Software Engineer at The New York Times in New York, NY

We are looking to add a few new members to the NYTimes mobile team to help bring our award-winning media to new platforms and technologies* As a software engineer on the team responsible for our notable iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and mobile web applications, you’ll be responsible for pushing the envelope of technical innovation within our mobile products. Be a part of the same team that was onstage at the Apple iPad product announcement keynote, blazing a trail within the mobile media ecosystem.

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Production Manager at PBS Newshour in Arlington, VA

The Production Manager is responsible for the organizational, logistical and technical aspects of production for the PBS NewsHour broadcast, including associated contributing elements and special events. Candidate will liaise closely with all Department Heads, Executive and Deputy Producers, Senior Editors, Producer/Reporters, Assignment Editors, Broadcast Directors and co-production companies. The Production Manager ensures that production runs smoothly and deadlines are met in accordance with budgetary and union constraints. Candidate will deal with any contingencies during production and prepares workable alternative plans for unforeseen problems in a deadline driven environment.

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Tenure-track Assistant Professor – Multimedia at Washington Lee University in Lexington, VA

Washington and Lee University seeks a tenure-track assistant professor to teach multimedia reporting, visual storytelling and other courses in the Department of Journalism and Mass Communications. Our new colleague will become one of a close-knit eight-person faculty supported by a full-time manager of technical operations in a facility designed for digital multi-platform journalism. We are dedicated to teaching undergraduates in a liberal arts university the practice of sound journalism and its crucial function in a democratic society. Our students follow one of three sequences – journalism, business journalism, or mass communications. All learn to use multi-media information-gathering and storytelling tools to create public awareness of events and issues. We are seeking a candidate with substantial reporting experience, with television newsroom experience desirable, and a demonstrated commitment to new media platforms, including social media, as well as the ability to teach more general mass media survey and seminar courses in a rigorous liberal arts environment. An appropriate advanced degree is required, with the Ph.D. preferred but not essential. The position will be available July 1, 2013.

Learn more about this opportunity.

Digital Platform Editors at The New York Times in New York, NY

The New York Times is looking for two editors to work on a variety of exciting Web and mobile projects. The ideal candidates will have a well-rounded mix of journalism experience, Web production know-how, creativity and a love of technology. We want to find people who have a lot of ideas, both big and small, about what The Times can be doing better, especially on phones and tablets.

The assistant editors’ primary mandate is to help ensure that our news report is vibrant and innovative across all digital platforms, with a specific focus on mobile. They will be expected to carry out this mandate while also making sure that our production processes are as efficient as possible. We expect them to accomplish this by making smart use of the latest technology and inventing, and then implementing, new workflows along the way.

Editors in this role will be expected to oversee projects that shape the way our news report is published on all platforms. Doing so will involve working closely with developers, designers, product managers and colleagues across the newsroom, so collegiality and excellent communication skills are key.

Learn more about this opportunity.

Multimedia Designer at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI

Design, create and develop strategic communications (print, web, multimedia) that visually and contextually communicate organization and unit messages. Create and present original concepts and designs for high-end print and multimedia projects and campaigns, including view-books, case statements, annual reports, brochures, websites and mobile devices. Create digital illustrations of surgical procedures, anatomical and biological specimens, and medical conditions.

Learn more about this opportunity.

Advanced Multimedia Designer at Horizon Productions in Durham, NC

We are currently seeking a high level Multimedia Designer to join our Horizon Productions team. Extensive experience using a variety of design tools is required. You should be comfortable with the entire design process from concept to completion. A high attention to detail is a must, as well as an excellent understanding of flow, pacing and composition.

Learn more about this opportunity.

Multimedia Journalist at Tribune Company in Sacramento, CA

Do you live and breathe news? Do you find story ideas by just walking down the street? Do you love shooting, writing, editing, and social media? Do you think a 3-part standup is considered a “simple standup”?
We’re looking for a wildly creative person who wants to bring a powerful presence to the news scene in market 20. You should have at least 2 years’ experience reporting and shooting.

Learn more about this opportunity.

Senior Backend Developer at Juice Analytics in Atlanta, GA

We build great looking web applications that make exploring data fast and easy. We need help developing middleware, deployment, and monitoring solutions that power apps that people love. If the idea of designing and building elegant data APIs excites you, you might be the developer we’re looking for.

Juice was founded in 2005 to take the pain out of understanding data for everyday business folks. We want developers who are unafraid of SQL but can speak knowledgeably about the limitations of RDMS. Juice employees have a good deal of autonomy and should be comfortable working independently. Our developers must be comfortable with changing requirements and use good design practices to react to change.

Learn more about this opportunity.

Design Director at POLITICO in Arlington, VA

POLITICO is seeking a Design Director for our publications. The ideal candidate will be a strong print designer with a keen interest in politics, and someone who is able to inspire a team to create striking pages for our newspaper, glossy magazines and special sections. Qualifications The Design Director must have at least five years’ experience in print journalism design, be an excellent communicator and be eager to work in a fast-paced environment. Proficiency in Adobe InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop are required. Experience in Web design and interactive graphics is a plus. This position will include some Sunday shifts.

Learn more about this opportunity.

News App Developer at The Wall Street Journal in New York, NY

The Wall Street Journal is looking for a visual journalist/ news app developer. Candidates would be assigned to work on WSJ.com’s long-term investigative pieces, real time news coverage, and the online components of data-centric packages.

Persons applying should be skilled in the field of data visualization and well-schooled in the narrative presentation of complex topics.

Learn more about this opportunity.

Graphic Artist at The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in Pittsburgh, PA

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review seeks a talented and experienced graphic artist to produce in-depth infographics, maps and charts for print and online. Illustration skills are a plus. Candidate should have an eye for clear, concise presentation of simple and complex concepts. A strong curiosity and skill at grasping new ideas quickly are necessary, as well as speed on deadline. Thorough knowledge of Illustrator, Photoshop and Indesign are required.

Learn more about this opportunity.

Senior Product Manager at NPR in Boston, MA

Digital Services Product Managers guide the product definition, creation, and improvement process by collecting and synthesizing knowledge and leading collaborative work teams to ensure product success. Our Product Managers serve simultaneously as market analysts, user group champions, product evangelists, analytics junkies and visionary team leaders. This senior position will be responsible for guiding one of our three multi-disciplinary product development teams with an emphasis on our emergent mobile and online media product initiatives. This is a unique opportunity to get in on the ground floor and help guide forward-looking product development from the earliest stage.

Learn more about this opportunity.

Also make sure to scan through our listing of April job opportunities to see if there are other openings that may be of interest to you.

Are you an employer and want to feature a job opening? Feel free to email me your listing at innovativeinteractivity@gmail.com and I’ll include it in next month’s post.

We recently launched a visual storytelling business, StoryMineMedia, with the release of our first independent project. “The Council” is a series of short, quirky webisodes about a middle school student council election. We wanted to tell a different election story and to conduct a bit of an experiment by producing a web-based documentary series in three short episodes.

We knew it was a risk. And frankly, we’re not sure yet if it paid off. But it allowed us to ask (and maybe even answer) some interesting questions about web-based visual storytelling.

Catherine, age 9, and her mom wearing one of
Catherine’s early works of art.

How do we get people (other than our moms) to see our work?

As a visual storytelling startup, by far our biggest challenge is finding ways for people to see our work. The new media landscape affords us (and all storytellers, bloggers, inventors, and DIY-ers) the opportunity to self-publish and self-distribute our work. This is awesome. But believe it or not, there’s a lot of stuff on the Internet. And competing for clicks in a world full of excellent content, and surprisingly terrible content (real life Barbie, anyone?) is incredibly daunting.

Let the story tell itself….however long it takes

While we were working on “The Council,” we had distribution in the backs of our minds. But we come from a place where the unofficial Hippocratic Oath for storytellers is “first, do good work.” Clicks, plays, and views don’t matter if what you’re producing isn’t any good. And while conventional wisdom tells us that people are more likely to watch a 3-minute online video than a 10-minute one, we firmly believe that the story should dictate the length and structure of a video, not the other way around.

One evening, while showing Catherine’s family a 10-minute rough cut of the project, her brother-in-law said, “So, are these going to be episodes?” Before that moment, the thought of splitting up “The Council” hadn’t crossed our minds. We realized he had a point, the story did indeed lend itself to a multi-part structure. We meet the candidates, we see the election and we learn the results. What if we released it like this? It would maintain the integrity of the story and give us a chance to build a little anticipation before the release. We re-visited the cut (which still needed some tightening) and began experimenting with edits that would work as stand-alone episodes, or one full piece. Once we had the final webisodes cut, we started promoting the web-series and our launch. Then we sat back, crossed our fingers, and hoped someone other than our moms would watch them.

Elena (right) and her cousin reenacting a scene
from Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa.

If you build it, will they come?

When Elena was twelve years old, she didn’t make a trip to the Field of Dreams because she was looking for a baseball field on a farm. She went because she was in love with Kevin Costner. In our industry, shooting, editing, and posting a video is not enough to guarantee an audience. Because StoryMineMedia is brand new, our first challenge is letting people know that we exist.

Cut a trailer….and send it to people

A few weeks before our launch, we sent a trailer to several movers and shakers in our field. A week later, we found out that we were being featured on a couple prominent blogs. This was a key factor in getting our work seen by people outside of our small network of followers (read: our Facebook friends).

Make it easy on the viewer

An added challenge with our launch strategy was getting people to watch three videos instead of just one. When we designed our webisode launch, our hope was that people would get hooked on our student council story, love the characters as much as we did, and go to our website for the second two webisodes. In reality, the first webisode was viewed seven times more than the other two.That hurt. But what we can deduce from this is that people are more inclined to watch a video that is placed where they were already looking. For the most part, the blogs that picked up our story only embedded the first webisode. Just because we posted the second two webisodes on our website, doesn’t mean that people were going to come looking for them. That’s just a lot to ask.

Thanks mom

Despite all the challenges we faced with our risky launch strategy, we stand by our decision to release “The Council” in webisodes. What we don’t know is if we had only released the full eight-minute version, would people have watched more than three minutes anyway? Would blogs have picked us up if we didn’t have a unique hook to set us apart?

What we do know is that our moms watched the whole thing.

Elena Rue is a multimedia storyteller who uses the camera as a tool for exploration and learning. As a Lewis Hine Documentary Fellow in 2006, she spent ten months working with a nongovernmental organization, Hope for Children, in Ethiopia. For three years she coordinated the Literacy Through Photography program at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. She is a 2011 graduate of the master’s program at the UNC–Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication, where she was a 2010 Carnegie-Knight News21 Fellow and a 2010–11 Reese Felts Digital Newsroom Fellow. Rue teaches photography and multimedia courses and is part-time Director of the Lewis Hine Documentary Fellowship program at the Center for Documentary Studies.

Catherine Orr is a documentary journalists specializing in visual storytelling. She received her master’s degree from the University of North Carolina School of Journalism and Mass Communication where she was a Roy H. Park Fellow. Catherine was the editor-in-chief of Coal: A Love Story, winner of the 2012 SXSW interactive student award. She was also a contributing multimedia producer for the award-winning project “Now What, Argentina?” and a multimedia producer and project manager for the acclaimed “CPJW-Little Switzerland Stories.”

Note from Editor: Guest blogger Tricia Fulks gives II readers an inside look into “Hollow,” an interactive film and HTML5 website set to launch in May of 2013, which they are currently in the funding stage using Kickstarter. As of May 1st, they have secured nearly $15,000 of their $25,000 goal with 12 days left. I encourage you to learn more about this project and help fund it if you see fit!

Growing up in West Virginia, I’ve had stereotypes hurled at me throughout my life. I’ve been asked if all my teeth are mine, whether my family and I wear shoes and own a television and if we date our cousins.

It’s embarrassing — and not true.

Anyone else who’s native to the state knows what I’m talking about. They’ve likely experienced it, too.

But a new interactive documentary, being produced by seven West Virginia natives this summer, will allow a community, where the hardships are many, to take the storytelling in its own hands.

“Hollow” is an immersive online experience that will allow users to enter into the environment of McDowell County and understand the issues rural America and Southern West Virginia faces through data visualizations, documentary portraits, balloon maps and captivating soundscapes. The HTML5 website, which will launch in May 2013, aims to spark participation and encourages users to fully engage with the narrative to create their own experience.

The project is the brainchild of Elaine McMillion, a documentary filmmaker and MFA candidate and adjunct faculty member at Emerson College in Boston, who believes that interactive storytelling—both offline and online—can increase the local knowledge, develop engagement and build trust in a community.

Fifty profiles will be produced of community members in the county. Of those profiles, residents themselves will do 20 of them. We will hold three community workshops throughout the summer to teach community members storytelling concepts and participatory mapping. With the community taking part in the experience they will begin to create a new identity for themselves. With this new perspective of “self” and environment, the goal is that residents will begin to work together to make positive changes in their local community.

We’re currently in the midst of a fundraising campaign on the crowdfunding site, Kickstarter, and we have the goal to raise $25,000 to cover production costs for the summer, including lodging, travel, workshop fees and cameras for the community.

But why should you care about this project and donate a dollar or two?

Because McDowell County’s story isn’t specific to that area.

At one time, McDowell County, booming from activity coming to the area from opportunities in coal, had 100,000 people inhabiting the place. Now, just over 20,000. Demographers see the area just years away from extinction.

But boom and bust situations don’t discriminate by geographic area. This is happening all over America. What the Hollow team produces in McDowell County will just be a snapshot of what is happening in other areas across the country.

So far, we have seen endorsements from a U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller; acclaimed documentary filmmaker and West Virginia native, Morgan Spurlock; and author and NASA engineer, Homer Hickam. We hope you throw your support behind Hollow, as well.

Tricia Fulks currently is city editor at The Journal newspaper in Martinsburg, W.Va., and a freelance multimedia journalist. She is story director for “Hollow” and will go to live in the community for the summer after she completes American University’s M.A. program in interactive journalism in mid-May.

(Photo taken by Chris Jackson.)

“Inside the Story” by Adam Westbrook and contributors

I always love seeing what British blogger and entrepreneur Adam Westbrook is up to — one day he’s making motion graphic videos detailing his media predictions for the upcoming year … another day he’s making an e-book on entrepreneurial journalism. His latest initiative is making an e-book for philanthropy called “Inside the Story” that gives multimedia designers and developers quick hits of inspiration from the best of the best, all for $5 and available for a limited time only so grab one while you can!

The e-book contains one-page journal entries from 24 inspirational and motivational figures in the multimedia world. It’s beautifully designed and makes me almost want to print it out and frame them! (Not a bad idea for that bare wall staring you in the face, eh?)

I was lucky and got a sneak peek in order to properly promote the initiative, so here are some of my favorite quotes:

“Deadlines are good in that they force you to finish, but they also time box the quality of a story.” – Brian Storm

“When you’re building a digital story, the best hack/shortcut to greatness is simple: put your best bit first.” – Amy O’Leary

“If you don’t take your audience by the hand and move them – either physically in time and space or emotionally – chances are they will leave you.” – Bombay Flying Club

“Great stories connect the specific to the universal, connecting all of us to the story.” – Bob Sacha

“Focus your user’s attention on one element at any given time.” – Monica Ulmanu

“You have to invest the time and energy into yourself, by yourself, for yourself. Hurry up because the person next to you started yesterday.” – Richard ‘Koci’ Hernandez

Alright, that’s enough spoilers for one blog post – pay the $5 (totally worth it as 100% goes to Kiva and you can forgo that coffee one day) and read it in its entirety! And, learn more by liking Inside The Story on Facebook and peruse #insidethestory on Twitter.

“The notion of ‘home’ has shifting significance for Ed Kashi, a photojournalist who travels the world documenting social and political issues. For the past 30 years, Kashi has lived a life of intense engagement mixed with danger, anticipation, and loneliness. Encompassing nearly 20 years of photographs and journal entries to his wife, Julie, “Photojournalisms” (a supplement to Ed Kashi’s new book by the same title) is a short, experimental film by Talking Eyes Media that provides a glimpse into the life and mind of an intrepid photographer. It is a complex collage defined by sensation, tension, and passion.”

To learn more about Ed Kashi, check out their “Innovative Individuals” Q&A back in 2009.

Homepage photo credit: Ed Kashi

“When I first heard about Amendment One, which will constitutionally define marriage between one man and one woman as the only domestic legal union valid and recognized in North Carolina, I scratched my head in disbelief. With all the other problems we face as a society today, I could not understand why codifying a restrictive marriage definition was relevant to our local political dialogue. In North Carolina unemployment is high, children are fat, dogs don’t have homes, veterans are losing their minds after war, people are being shot to death on the other side of the tracks and same-sex marriage is already banned under NC law. I worried about our political priorities.

Most of all I worried about how this legislation would affect my family.

My aunt Molly is gay and she and her partner are two of the most important women in my life. They have been together for almost a decade and are committed to each other but can’t get married. I am getting married to the woman I love at the end of April after being together for over a year and to think that they can’t enjoy the legal benefits and protections I am afforded makes me sick to my stomach. Molly and Susanne have to pay thousands of dollars in legal fees to jerry-rig some unstable paperwork that in theory might allow them to make legal decisions for each other, visit each other in the hospital and decide what to do with each other’s remains after death. Most of all the state sends them the message that they are not a couple.

After some thought, I sent Molly an email and told her about my idea. I wanted to do portraits of longterm, committed same sex couples in their homes, with their kids, their pets, etc to show the public that their commitment to each other and their dedication to family was real. I wanted to interview each one and write their story as a narrative or witness and write about a scene in their daily life that any parent could relate to: playing baseball with your son, bathing your baby or other things that seem mundane and ordinary to us.

Originally I wanted to photograph couples who had been together for 10 years or more, that way there was a thread through the project but that bar lowered to 5 years once I discovered and understood some of their remarkable stories.

Molly sent out an email to the “gayborhood” (her circle of friends, community, as she calls it) and the response was instant and overwhelming. I think I had 50 emails from all sorts of couples who wanted to volunteer.

I decided to do portraits because I had just come off my first year of freelance and had been overwhelmed to a degree by the amount of video I was doing. Work had become formulaic and I wanted to slow down and do what I loved – make carefully composed still pictures that had something to say. I wanted to slow down and engage my subjects one on one and establish a relationship with them, through conversation, dinner, interviews and basic human interaction. I wanted to write, and use my voice to give them a voice. I wanted to do something simple and well crafted. I wanted to hold each family in the light, to portray them with a sense of grace and dignity when others would not. I had been pouring over Annie Leibowitz’s portraits in a book that my brother had brought to my attention. She’s a master at the portrait and I wanted to experiment with her approach. I never reached her mastery and never will, but her work inspired me and pushed me in the direction I needed to go.

But when I met Kelli Evans and Karen Wade and their triplets, I found an obvious multimedia story. Kelli and Karen are tender and fierce – ideal mothers who have deliberately wanted a family since they decided to commit to each other for life. Their love is real and they have made every preparation to make sure their children grow up in a safe, nurturing and fiscally sound home. If they are allowed to have multiple babies with the help of science, why should they not be able to get married and have the protections it legally affords? Why should they not be recognized as a family?

So far the response has been great! There are the usual trolls on the Internet who don’t like anything and would argue with the wall, but I have received a lot of positive feedback and constructive criticism. I hope to do a few more portraits, particularly of a couple struggling with AIDS, cancer or another severe illness to illustrate the healthcare implications of Amendment One, and an individual whose partner has just passed away after being together for decades. I would like to photograph them at their grave as a bookend to the project. I would also like to photograph some more racially diverse couples but first some would have to volunteer for that to happen.

Beyond the site being an educational tool, my hope is that the images and stories can be a lasting tribute to these families beyond May 8, 2012. I hope they can be celebrated for what they are instead of being scorned for what they are not.”

Editor’s Note: As a disclaimer, Justin and I both graduated from UNC Chapel Hill and worked at The Roanoke Times. I also strongly disagree with Amendment One and will do everything in my power to ensure it is opposed on May 8th. I hope other North Carolinians will join me. When educating myself about the amendment I came across Justin’s work and was astounded by both the quality of work and the intimacy of his stories. To see Justin’s photos from the project, visit CNN’s photo blog.

To see more of Justin’s work, check out his portfolio site and his Facebook page.

To learn more about Amendment One, go to Commitment NC and ProtectNCFamilies.org.

HT: Evelio Contreras.

I recently learned about “Moneyocracy,” a multimedia initiative consisting of a documentary, i-doc, and comic book by French photographers Gerald Holubowicz and Jean Nicholas Guillo.

They are trying to raise $48,000 to fund the project via KickStarter, and currently only have a little more than $3,000 with one week left. Check out their project and if you think it warrants support, I encourage you to spread the word and/or donate.

I am always happy to promote entrepreneurial initiatives in the multimedia community, so I hope these two can get the necessary funding and pursue this project!

Also, I think they’ve done an excellent job marketing their initiative, which others can learn from for your own crowdfunded projects. In addition to an extensive online presence with a website, blog and social media presence, they reached out to bloggers like myself with an extensive press kit (which makes my job helping them extremely easy).

“This is a transmedia documentary taking place during the 2012 U.S Presidential race. Its goal is to look at how campaign funding is affecting the democratic process. The project will be composed a documentary, an interactive documentary (i-doc) and a comic book.

The story focuses on the rise of new political groups called Super PACS and 501c4 and the consequences of the 2010 Citizens United vs F.E.C Supreme Court decision. … We’re definitely committed to raise awareness about this issue which – we think – threatened U.S democracy and seriously undermine people’s voice during the elections.

In the i-doc, the ‘spectactors’ play a fictional 501c4 board member. They get to decide how to market a fictional presidential candidate called Bill O’Maney and how to finance his campaign. This interactive experience allows the end-user to make a number of strategic campaign decisions for the candidate. The outcome of the campaign depends entirely on where the campaign’s money comes from (corporate money and super PAC, grassroot campaign donations, public option funding) and decisions made by the user.”

The producers will build the i-doc using HTML5 and make it compatible for PCs, tablets and mobile phones. Both the i-doc and video documentary are slated to launch by February 2013.

To learn more about the project, check out their KickStarter page, subscribe to their blog, follow them on Twitter, and/or fan them on Facebook.

About the producers:

Gerald Holubowicz: Gerald has been a photojournalist for nearly 10 years and lived in New York since 2006. He has worked with several agencies: Abaca, Gamma and Polaris. He is now distributed by the German agency LAIF. His work has been published in France and in the U.S in major magazines. Gerald has covered the U.S. presidential campaign that led to the election of Barack Obama, the election night in Harlem and the inauguration of January 20, 2009 in Washington.

Jean-Nicholas Guillo: Like the “digital natives” who were born with digital and social networks, Jean-Nicholas does not limit himself only to photography to express his creativity, he is also a videographer, a director and an editor. Beyond his work published in Telerama, Le Monde and other regional magazines, his POM (Small Multimedia Works, shorts photo-movies) are projected at festivals such as Visa pour l’image, or the festival Circulations and alternative cultural venues in Paris. It is with “The Ninth Floor” a multimedia documentary by Jessica Dimmock produced by the multimedia production studio MediaStorm in New York that he discovered a new form of narration. Since then he has continued to explore the potential of these new type of storytelling.

Inside the Haiti Earthquake is one of three components of the multi-platform documentary project, Inside Disaster.

Inside Disaster (release: January 2011) is a three-part documentary series that follows the Red Cross humanitarian response to the January 2010 Haiti earthquake from the inside.

InsideDisaster.com is an interactive website that combines content and themes from the documentary series with original photo, video and research created by the 16-person web team. InsideDisaster.com is the definitive online resource about the Haiti earthquake and humanitarian work.

Inside the Haiti Earthquake is a first-person simulation that combines footage and stories from the Inside Disaster documentary with original video, photos, and music recorded by Nicolas Jolliet in Haiti. The result is a genre-bending interactive experience that lets users step inside life on the ground in the chaotic aftermath of the Haiti earthquake.

1. How long did it take to produce this site, both in-the-field and post-production? How many people were involved?

Michael Gibson (writer / co-director), Nicolas Jolliet (Co-­‐Director, Cinematographer, Sound Recordist, Editor, Composer, Music Supervisor) and I (producer) began developing the idea of an interactive experience set within a humanitarian emergency in the Fall of 2009, before we knew the crew would end up shooting in Haiti.

The web and documentary crew were in Haiti for four weeks after the earthquake, and returned several times afterwards for additional material. It was about a year from concept (October 2009) to launch (October 2010), with about eight months of full-on production.

Over twenty different people contributed to the project, including the PTV Productions team, Michael, Nico and I, the documentary crew, the designers, programmers and testers, and our colleagues in Haiti (fixers, drivers, musicians).

2. How many steps can users choose from in each of the three paths?

Each character follows a simple branching narrative, choose-your-own-adventure style, with dozens of choices along the way that eventually lead to about five possible endings per character.

“I wanted to create an interweaving storyline that connected the three main characters, and also revealed the conflict between them” says the simulation’s Writer and Co-Director, Michael Gibson.

“Rather than offering the user solutions and opinions, we let people experience the doubt, chaos, and shock that most of us felt in Haiti,” says Co-Director Nicolas Jolliet, who spent six weeks in the country as part of the Inside Disaster project.

3. How did you come up with this type of storytelling and storyboard the interaction?

Nicolas Jolliet and the documentary crew returned from Haiti in February 2010 with over 200 hours of film and 1500+ photographs between them.

To create the first draft of the the script, Gibson and Jolliet spent hours looking through footage for storylines, while Gibson interviewed Nadine Pequeneza, the director of the Inside Disaster documentary series, about what she witnessed in the country while filming survivors, and the Red Cross.

Gibson probed for stories about how survivors, media, and relief workers interacted after the disaster, focusing on the challenges, conflicts, and moments of human empathy that arose that arose between them.

“From the beginning, all three of us were committed to the idea of the simulation unfolding through the eyes of the three main players in any disaster relief operation — the survivors, the aid workers, and the media,” says Katie McKenna.

“I was attracted to the challenge of the material itself,” says Michael Gibson. “How do we create a first-person role play simulation of a monumental event, using raw documentary footage, from three different points of view?”

For the project leads, the final product has been difficult to define, lying somewhere between the new media worlds of “serious games,” “newsgames,” and interactive documentary.

“We don’t call it a game,” says Michael Gibson. “With few exceptions, everything you see onscreen is documentary material from the first days after the earthquake in Haiti. These are real people living real experiences; it’s certainly not a game for them, and we want the user to feel that way too.”

4. What kind of traffic has this site received? Time spent on site?

About 60,000 unique visitors since launch, steady traffic even since Haiti fell out of headlines. Our Flash server provider doesn’t track time on site, unfortunately.

5. If you could go back and do anything differently, what would it be and why?

I’d want to make the experience more interactive — show the branching narrative along the bottom as the user progress, to make it easier for them to explore ‘the path not taken’, and also leave opportunities for comments and feedback throughout the site.

6. Who sponsored the site?

The site was produced by PTV Productions, with funding from TVOntario, the Canada Media Fund (CMF-FMC) and Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund, and the Government of Canada provided through the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).

7. What was your role in the project and how can readers learn more about you?

I was the site’s Interactive Producer. I’m now independent and can be found at katiemckenna.ca or on twitter @ktmckenna.