With the decline of print newspapers, what will happen to the still images that formed the bedrock of visual storytelling? Veteran photographers, television producers and filmmakers discussed the issue last month in New York during a one-day look at the future of visual narratives.

Ed Kashi, who has done award-winning work in both photography and documentary video, expressed concern that the dominance of video might crowd out a vital storytelling role for still photography. Travis Fox, who worked for The Washington Post for 10 years on still photography and video projects, also wondered about the future, asking, “Are we just becoming short-form documentary people, or are we still photographers? What’s the difference?” Other attendees speculated about the potential loss of the public’s ability to parse still images.

But Brian Storm, president of MediaStorm, doesn’t think that’s likely to happen. After showing “Jumping Rock,” a segment from Danny Wilcox Frazier’s project Driftless (which contains some nudity), Storm said,

“In print, in newspaper, the average newspaper reader looks at a photograph for 0.2 seconds. 0.2 seconds [see *note at end of post—Ed.]. And in this piece, I’ve got a still picture on the screen for five seconds. I own your attention span. I dictate that you’re going to look at it longer in this format.”

According to Storm, photographer Frazier had been focused on a book of images as the central vehicle for Driftless—a book Frazier had guessed might sell 4,000 copies. Ten times that many people watched the project the day it posted on the MediaStorm site, and Storm estimated that as many as 150,000 – 200,000 people have seen Driftless all told. He described the changes in access and distribution as “a revolution,” making it possible to reach more people with long-form stories—stories that might never have gotten told in prior decades. (Storm talks more about these ideas in a recent interview on our sister site.)

Despite the revolution in viewing, Storm said that the only new elements are the tools and distribution. “I don’t feel like we’re trying to reinvent storytelling,” he said. “We’re really focused on doing linear stories… powered by still photography in a video format.”

Talking about the future of more experimental narrative, Storm noted the interactive work of Ashley Wells at MSNBC and Zach Wise at The New York Times, saying  “I think it’s cool, resource-wise that we have a few people really pushing and experimenting there. But let’s not get wowed and off-track on what we are. We are storytellers.”  

Some participants were more interested in these new approaches, as explored in the work of attendee Jen Gilomen. Others had altogether different concerns about the sea change in visual narratives. Fox noted that previous technological revolutions like the moon landing involved millions in research and development funding, but that in the brave new world of digital narrative, “There’s no R&D money.” As a result, Fox says that “I think one of the things that we’re living today is a grand experiment in storytelling.”

Frontline executive producer David Fanning suggested that with so many tools available to the public at low cost, the public itself is conducting the R&D on this experiment. Magnum Photos director Mark Lubell voiced a similar idea about the current state of visual storytelling:

“The R&D right now is 450 million people on Facebook. It’s four million pictures coming in Flickr a day. I don’t know how many YouTube videos are coming in. That’s the R&D that’s actually happening. That’s the audience. That’s actually where this conversation is taking place.”

All told, still imagery seems likely to continue to play a strong role in visual storytelling, though more and more, that role may exist as just one element of video or interactive projects. And the power to choose how and when those images get seen seems to be shifting farther and farther away from traditional news outlets.

[*We have a request in to MediaStorm to get the source for this number, and they're in the process of getting back to us. We'll add it once we have it. In the meantime, Poynter's 2004 Eyetrack III study listed the following stats for photos on news site homepages: small photo, 0.6 seconds; medium photo, 1.5 seconds; large photo, 2.3 seconds.]

Now Minneapolis Star Tribune investigative reporter James Shiffer and multimedia freelancer McKenna Ewen have teamed up to tell the story of the slain journalist. Their project, “Rubbed Out,” has its own site, with a short video, print pieces, interactive maps, police reports, and even a poll inviting visitors to pick who they think is the killer.

The journalists partnered with the Star Tribune, which posted a story from Shiffer online and ran a print piece on Saturday about the murder.

We saw the project on the Online News Association’s Interactive Narratives site this week and called Ewen up to discuss it. “Rubbed Out” turns out to be part of Ewen’s senior thesis—he graduated in December with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and political science from the University of Minnesota. His resume lists internships with the Star Tribune and Bloomberg News, and he has recently launched his own company, Ewen Media.

Ewen described the project as an experiment:

Instead of telling people the story of Arthur Kasherman, we wanted to make it interactive. We wanted people to engage on the site, and we did that by presenting the information as we knew it. We still don’t know who actually killed Arthur Kasherman, but based on the information, we have a fairly good idea. What we wanted to do was to open it up and see what other people thought, and let them go through the same journalistic process that we went through—but with less noise.

Kasherman’s life and death make a compelling story—the killing was the third in a series targeting independent reporters, who sometimes went to jail themselves for their own dubious tactics. (Kasherman spent three years behind bars for blackmail.) 

“Rubbed Out” reminds us of “L.A. Noir,” which ran in the Los Angeles Times in 2008. Both use music and images from the era to evoke a Raymond Chandler-meets-the-Mob atmosphere, but where the Times project was epic and tentacled, the Kasherman story is smaller and more focused.

The average time on the site thus far is a whopping eight minutes, which Ewen struggles to explain. “I have no idea how we got those numbers,” he said, “because I’ve done a few of these sites where we’re lucky if we can hit two.”

Ewen notes that in addition to working with the Star Tribune, creating their own site, and posting video to Vimeo and YouTube, they promoted the project on public television. “The idea is that it’s a really good story,” he says. “We want people to get it whatever way they want.”

“Wells Fargo, You Never Knew What Hit You” stars Ali, if use of such a deliberately awkward voice counts as starring. Other characters include a California couple (“the Lipkins”) and Wells Fargo Bank, which threatens foreclosure on  the Lipkins’ house.  

Ali’s tale, which has the tone and pacing of an improbable sitcom, relates his first effort as a solo practitioner of California law. He makes us squirm in fear along with him as worries about failing clients whose trust he has inexplicably gained.

Invoking icons from American pop culture in his crusade (Rocky, Bigfoot, a Jedi Knight), Ali portays Wells Fargo as a “feces-covered bear” with whom he has a protracted wrestling match. The story follows Ali’s struggle to find the right person to talk to and the right thing to say to the disembodied telephone voices controlling the Lipkins’ future.

It’s a comic piece, but the tragedy of millions of all-too-real homeowners in foreclosure around the country undergirds the humor with substance. The dozens of unreturned phone calls and Ali’s random discovery of the magic words that get Wells Fargo to respond make it clear just how steeply the system is stacked against the Lipkins in a way that a non-narrative piece never could.

Ali bears watching, as he’s more than a lawyer who has written an interesting first-person story. He blogs and referees submissions at Goatmilk, writes regularly on Muslim communities and issues for The Guardian, and scripted a play about Muslims in post 9/11 America.

Christy wrote us in response to our Friday issue of the Narrative Digest, which featured coverage of a zoo, a history of animal experimentation, and an essay on a vet in Sierra Leone, among other articles. He added another a item to the list of issues raised by animal narratives, expressing his frustration that when it comes to stories about humans’ illegal interaction with wildlife, a “focus on animals (and their suffering) tends to give the criminals a bye.”

A high school-era Bryan Christy with pet Socrates

While most of the stories we featured didn’t involve illegal trafficking, it’s an interesting storytelling issue. In a January Huffington Post essay (“Wildlife Smuggling: Why Does Wildlife Crime Reporting Suck?”) Christy argues that “too often wildlife crime stories are little more than eco-tourism pieces with sad endings” and claims that that sloppy reporting for these kinds of narratives has real costs.

He notes a 2007 report from the Secretariat of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, which suggests that widespread “gross exaggeration” from the media (along with other groups) doesn’t help the cause of getting more attention to and support for protecting wild animals. (And in fact, the inflated and inexact numbers Christy points to do show up in some major news outlets via Google search.)

But Christy isn’t arguing against a narrative approach to trafficking stories. In “The Kingpin,” from January’s National Geographic, he presents Anson Wong, one of the world’s major smugglers of endangered animals. While there are plenty of gripping details about victimized creatures in Christy’s story, the tale unfolds more as an expose of one man’s willingness to deliver any animal for money and a global system hard pressed to keep him from doing it.

While the lure of safari-style visuals might be hard to editors to resist, shifting coverage to the bigger picture could make for a more accurate story. Christy suggests that treating the issue with the same kind of rigorous reporting applied to other criminal enterprises might be the answer: “More time should be spent on paper and money trails, less on jungle adventures.”

Living in London after having grown up in Sierra Leone, Forna is in many ways perfectly placed to tell Jalloh’s story, although it is also her story and the story of the dogs of this small West African country. She gives us charming images, such as newly neutered patients sleeping off anesthesia (“the paw of one lies across another, strange babies sharing a bed”), but she challenges the reader’s expectations time and again.

A childhood dog returns after a disappearance with “his hind quarters split open to the bone by an axe wound”—a wound that turns out to be less a result of malice than a reader might think. Forna elegantly shows how deeply material circumstances and history have affected the lives of Jalloh, his country and his charges.

By incorporating her debates with Jalloh on the treatment of animals in Sierra Leone and in England, Forna considers an idea they both reject: that helping animals in the midst of human suffering is somehow frivolous. As she weaves the presence of international activists and the staff of the British High Commission into her story, her essay becomes a meditation on empire and colony and an argument that what seems like sentimentality in Jalloh and his compatriots may be something else altogether.

“I knew Roger was writing about the story,” Jones told us via email, confessing his hands had trembled when he clicked on the link to see what Ebert had written about his piece. “I mean, he’s a critic, right? And I really enjoyed spending time with him, and I hope he enjoyed spending time with me. I didn’t want him to feel regret for having let me in.

“So, when I read what he posted, I felt like 1,000 pounds had been lifted off my shoulders. I could have received a million letters from other people saying they liked the story, but if Roger Ebert had hated it, I would have felt bad about that, literally for the rest of my life.”

Jones’ moving profile of the film critic drew praise from Ebert, and also garnered a mention by Jim Romenesko and a post from the Cronkite School’s Tim McGuire, who portrayed the article as a call to the journalistic ramparts. And it’s true that the Ebert article is beautifully written, and that Jones is a national continental treasure (it turns out that the Canadians get credit for him, along with Sidney Crosby and Celine Dion).

But the thing that struck me about the story is how its online existence has transformed it. If it had come out as a print piece only, the profile of Ebert would have been read and praised, then perhaps used in some classes or maybe eventually, it would have found its way into a collection of Jones work. But what has emerged instead is a larger, living thing—a dialog of stories, if you will, between Ebert and Jones, and Ebert and Esquire.

The online version referenced Ebert’s journal on the Chicago Sun-Times site and described the movie expert expounding there on the “existence of an afterlife, the beauty of a full bookshelf, his liberalism and atheism and alcoholism, the health-care debate, Darwin, memories of departed friends and fights won and lost.”

So we have an Esquire piece that points to nearly two years of entries in Ebert’s online journal, followed by Ebert using his online journal to comment on the Esquire piece. But the story doesn’t stop there. Ebert talks about his work with Esquire decades ago and mentions “the best interview I ever wrote” for the magazine. And that interview, “Saturday at Lee —-ing Marvin’s,” is now posted on Esquire’s site as well, linking back to Ebert’s response and the original profile. Jones explains how the Marvin interview came up:

“In the course of my research for the story, Tim Heffernan at Esquire photocopied a bunch of Roger’s stories for me out of the paper archives. One of those stories was the Lee Marvin story. I brought them to Roger to show him—there was also one on Groucho Marx, and one of Hugh Hefner’s daughter—and he lit up and said that the Lee Marvin story was the best story he ever wrote.

“I mentioned them in the article and told my editor, Peter Griffin—you talked to him about the helicopter piece—what Roger thought of the Lee Marvin story. A little while ago—maybe two weeks ago—Peter asked if I thought Roger would mind if the story was posted. Roger was fine with it, and someone at Esquire typed it into the system. Voila. A piece that’s nearly 40 years old is suddenly given new life and a new audience.”

These posts and stories work particularly well together because of the talent possessed by both writers. But their connection also illustrates how a standalone story can evolve into a larger narrative by picking up prologues and codas as it finds echoes and responses in the world.

The discussion wasn’t aimed at forming a consensus on the future of story. Instead, participants highlighted a number of narratives that made the most of new technologies or represented novel approaches.

We’ll cover more of the roundtable in March, but for now, I’ll highlight a few of the projects that were discussed.

“Thirst in the Mojave,” from Zach Wise, ran in the Las Vegas Sun (Wise is now at The New York Times). At the top of the homepage, a panic-inducing counter runs off the remaining days until Lake Mead will (possibly) run dry–which is only one small part of a dazzling array of information available for visitors to the site. The video follows a traditional, linear approach, but additional elements supply context in unusual ways. To read an explanation of each feature, see this post at digitalartwork.net.

“Digital Nation,” from Frontline, combines a documentary with a Web site. The site offers viewers a chance to share their own stories of digital encounters, to see longer interviews with experts and to participate in roundtables. According to director and producer Rachel Dretzin, one unforeseen consequence of creating a dedicated Web site for the project has been the difficulty of deciding how and whether to update it now that the documentary has aired.

“Law & Disorder,” a collaboration among ProPublica, Frontline, and New Orleans’ own Times-Picayune newspaper, is billed as “an online investigation into questionable shootings by the New Orleans Police Department in the wake of Katrina.” Frontline Senior Producer Raney Aronson-Rath and Executive Producer David Fanning talked about the open-ended nature of this project, noting that they still haven’t decided on the final form it will take. Transparency and ongoing rollout of new information make for particularly challenging storytelling when the focus is a series of shootings that could turn out to be murders.

Living Stories from Google Labs, the least narrative of the projects from the symposium, aggregates all the content on a site related to a particular story. A brief summary and a timeline cover the broad sweep of events to date. Google Senior Business Product Manager Josh Cohen distinguished a topic from a story, with a story representing evolving events. Since the Google source code is now available to people wanting to use it on their own Web sites, it’s worth considering how Living Stories might incorporate more crafted storytelling approaches in the future.

Some of the most experimental and interactive projects had relatively small audiences, even those projects produced by established organizations. It remains to be seen whether viewers will be more hesitant to welcome new approaches from sources they associate with very specific kinds of storytelling, or if it’s just a matter of experimenting with innovative storytelling until viewers and storytellers click.

Looking a little more at the article, it seems like Raeburn’s critique about organization has a point. The story moves back and forth between 2007, 2004, the present, last week, and the future in a way that makes it hard to know where to stand to get a view of events. Which, in turn makes it harder to understand what the news, or even the story, is.

While the Times piece is only quasi-narrative, knowing what your story is and how to organize it go to the heart of narrative nonfiction. Randy Olson, a scientist turned filmmaker who writes at TheBenshi.com, had an interesting post on this idea this week. He interviewed Tom Hollihan of the USC Annenberg School for Communication about science and storytelling. While the interview focuses on scientists rather than journalists, Hollihan’s thoughts are universally applicable.

When it comes to your audience, says Hollihan, “You want to pique their interest, and you want to satisfy that interest that you’ve piqued. And if you fail in either regard, you haven’t had an effective message.” He goes on to say that without a coherent story to knit them together, facts sometimes have a hard time conveying an argument.

Ira Glass’ YouTube storytelling segments address some of the same issues more directly for journalists. In his first video, Glass introduces two building blocks of story: anecdotes and moments of reflection. He demonstrates how even boring events can gain momentum through anecdotal storytelling and explains the need to offer insight on why the story matters.

“Often, it’s your job to be kind of ruthless and to understand that either you don’t have a sequence of actions—you don’t have the story part that works—or you don’t have a moment of reflection that works,” says Glass. “You’re going to need both. And in a good story, you’re going to flip back and forth between the two.”

Even veteran storytellers have to keep these issues in mind. It’s easy to get so carried away with the narrative in your head, the one you know backward and forward, that you forget to leave a path for the reader to get through the story.

[*To be fair to the Times, we should note that Science Tracker gave kudos to two other health stories from the paper this week, including a interesting multi-part narrative by Amy Harmon on an experimental cancer drug.]

The Society of Professional Journalists is hosting one-day workshops with Tom Hallman, who will address not just long-form narrative but also how to “apply narrative techniques to your daily reporting.” (For a sample of his thinking on story, check out our Storyboard post by Hallman.) He’ll be at the University of Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C., on April 3 and at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, Calif., on May 8.

Boston will host two events in close succession. “The Power of Narrative: Timeless Art in an Urgent Age,” will take place April 23 – 24 at the Boston University Photonics Center and will include veteran storytellers Gay Talese, Adam Hochschild, Buzz Bissinger and Isabel Wilkerson, among many others. As of this morning, online registration was not yet in place, but a list of presenters and conference fees is available.

Grub Street will host “The Muse and the Marketplace 2010” conference May 1-2 at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel. Listed sessions embrace a mixed group of writing styles and genres but will offer writers Jennifer 8. Lee, Michael Downing, and Pablo Medina, as well as a discussion of the current nonfiction market.

Lastly, this summer, you can head south for the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference taking place July 23 – 25 in Grapevine, Texas. Conference keynoters include memoirist Mary Karr, sports writer Gary Smith and journalist Mark Bowden. See this year’s conference schedule, and read our wrapup of last year’s sessions. Registration will open later this month.

All of the above, excepting the Boston University event, list participatory sessions and opportunities to get feedback on your work as part of their schedules. So if you’re interested in classic storytelling, have a look.

The McKerrow Brothers

The title evokes a tradition in which sideshow oddities and wonders are used to titillate readers and draw them in, a tradition not entirely unfamiliar to journalists. Novelist and blogger Moody slides elegantly into his story, using “us” in the first paragraph to join the crowd of readers watching what will happen as Kimberly Reed meets up with Paul McKerrow, her high school identity.

Moody later cuts to the first person (“let me pause to observe”) when recording his personal reaction to Reed’s beauty. This clever move offers a hint that we might want to check our own responses.

It turns out that two McKerrow children graduated in the class of 1985—Paul (now Kimberly) and her brother, Marc, who was adopted. Adding another layer of tension to the upcoming reunion, Moody relates that early challenges and a later accident have made Marc’s life even more complicated than Kimberly’s. Combining surprise links to Hollywood royalty with Mark’s ongoing efforts to handle everyday life, Moody shows us how identity is both changing and fixed, and how the boundary between the very strange and the absolutely normal may not exist.

As the story turns back to the high school reunion, Moody manages to draw all his elements together and make each part relevant. The piece reveals a different kind of spectacle than readers might have tuned in for, yet more of a reunion in every sense of the word: a meeting, an encounter with the past, a family gathering, a making whole of the self.

[Prodigal Sons, Kimberly Reed's award-winning film about her family life, will be shown in a number of U.S. cities in the coming months.]