When journalists are working on a really “big” story that deserves the best possible presentation, newspapers push the limits of their system capabilities and find new ways to work together.

Ten years ago, this might have meant increased use of color in printing or customized graphics. Now, it also means considering how multimedia presentation with sound, video and animation can best tell the story on the newspaper’s Web site and other electronic delivery forms.

To find out how newspapers treat significant stories in print and on the Web, we interviewed some dailies involved with producing a couple of recent award-winning articles.

What did it take to produce the stories? For both papers, their usual tools or techniques did not achieve the results. Instead, newsrooms and online teams worked together in different ways to achieve stunning results and change the expectations for what they can do in the future.

Honduran journey

“Enrique’s Journey” was first published in the Los Angeles Times as a six-part series, produced between Sept. 29 and Oct. 7, 2002.

This series, about a boy’s quest to leave Honduras and reunite with his mother who had migrated to the United States, won for staff writer Sonia Nazario the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing.

The online version of the story is a finalist for the Online News Association’s 2003 Online Journalism award for Enterprise Journalism, affiliated division.

Diane Swartz, a Times content producer who designed the story for LATimes.com, said the story presented several challenges.

To give it a dramatic front page on the Web, the team decided to go beyond the normal capabilities of the daily’s proprietary content management application, Oxygen.

Pushing limits

“We were pushing the limits of the tools,” said Swartz. “We wanted video, audio, everything.”

To that end, the series used a variety of authoring apps, including the site’s inaugural use of Flash 6 to handle animation for video content.

Flash was used for the front page and for slide shows narrated by the photographer of the series, Dan Bartletti.

To create a separate look, the first page of the story was “hand coded” outside of Oxygen, thanks to a feature, called a “blurb,” that gives users greater flexibility by including any HTML within it.

That tool is usually only earmarked for a portion of a page, but the entire front page of Enrique’s Journey was coded as one blurb for greater design freedom.

Eleven days before the six-day series was published, the team learned that it would publish in both English and Spanish every day.

A team of five translators worked on the translation of each day’s stories from English to Spanish. The content was published to Web first in English, then Spanish. The Spanish version ran on LATimes.com, but not in the Times’ print edition.

The techniques developed in the online presentation of Enrique’s Journey have been applied to other major features as well.

A story, for example, about Harrier jet accidents used similar tools, but relied more upon the template system of the Oxygen software.

Options for smaller papers

Smaller newspapers are also presenting important stories that push beyond the limits of their content management systems.

Case in point: The Winston-Salem (N.C.) Journal, which won a first place award from the National Association of Black Journalists for its series entitled “Against Their Will: North Carolina’s Sterilization Program.”

The article is also a finalist in the Online Journalism awards and the story won the 2002 Investigative Reporters and Editors award for investigative reporting for its writers.

Jennifer Falor, a producer at the Journal’s journalnow.com Web site, said that for a variety of reasons, the story was produced with different tools than contained within the Divine Software Inc. content management app the paper usually uses when designing the site.

“We decided we’d have so much content and so much that print couldn’t handle, like Flash animation” that the story demanded more design flexibility than they had with Divine’s template-based approach.

Other tools

Instead, the article was created using Macromedia Inc.’s HomeSite editor and Flash animation software as well as Adobe Photoshop.

Permanence was a deciding factor for building the story outside the control of the usual site tools, Falor said.

“We knew it would be something that people outside our circulation area would be interested in. Our content management system drops stories after a few months and we wanted [to make] this more permanent.

“Another big reason we did ‘Against Their Will’ outside (our content management app) was that we wanted no advertising to run with it,” she said - something the Journal’s management software wasn’t engineered to support.

The workflow for the project was unusual as well.

“The story was a big secret. We could not discuss it, could not plan as easily as we might because we could not see content very early. We talked to the journalists about what types of features we might be able to provide,” Falor said.

Although the specifics of the story had to be kept under wraps, the two groups worked closely on planning the presentation. According to State Editor Scott Sexton, the newsroom was thinking about the online presentation from the very beginning.

“From the onset of the project, the online producers at JournalNow  - Jennifer Falor, Katherine Elkins and their supervisor Mark Anderson  - were included in all of our meetings,” Sexton said. “Not being particularly visual, I felt like it was important to hear what they could do with the material we were gathering. When they saw the material the reporters had gathered, the JNOW folks grabbed the ball and ran.

“‘Interactive timeline? We can do that. Flash combined with audio? Yeah, we can do that.’ “

Other work

Falor said that the Journal is working on another significant feature now, but in this case, “we have drafts now, we have images now and we already know what’s going to run in print.”

The upcoming feature will be presented within the newspaper’s content management system so Falor won’t have to cut and paste.

“By doing this in the (content management software) it will make the workflow simpler. But there is a huge space constraint because the content area is only 480 pixels wide so we have to be creative” with the design, she said.

Award-winning and compelling stories like these stretch the limits of what newspapers do in their day-to-day presentation. And when they do, the limits and expectations move.

“This was a very high-profile project and it brought a lot of attention to the editorial [capabilities] of the Web sites É readers loved it,” said LATimes.com’s Swartz.

Now, she said, reporters, photographers and editors are asking for similar treatment of other stories, using techniques they first saw on “Enrique’s Journey.”

At the Journal, the creation of “Against Their Will” has changed some thinking in the newsroom.

“Before ‘ATW,’ I would never have thought about gathering sound, for example,” Sexton said. “In many cases, we [now] check to see what can be done. Do we need to gather sound? Should photo shoot extra frames? What can we give JNOW? I’m an old-school editor. Before the series, what I knew about online presentations - and what it takes to get them done right - you could fit in a thimble. It was educational to learn what is possible and where we’re headed in the industry.”

Tom Arnold is a partner of Summit Media Partners LLC (www.summitmediapartners.com). He has worked extensively with newspapers in the areas of process improvement, activity-based costing, cost of quality, operational measurements, IT systems, and cross-functional teams. He can be contacted at tarnold@smpllc.com.