I’m presenting at WAN IFRA in Berlin tomorrow, which meant
that I had a little time to listen in to some of the presentations going on
around the event. Since it’s fair to say the news industry is still
experimenting with digital, I thought some case studies might be interesting. I
was particularly taken with the work of Espen Egil, from VG Norway, a newspaper
group that’s been very innovative in its use of new digital formats. A few
examples:
One. The fire truck scandal
A Norwegian district was campaigning to get a new fire truck
as there’s was very old. VG turned this into a social campaign in which people submitted
photos of their old fire trucks. VG put them onto an interactive map so that
readers could compare different districts. 40% of districts had a profile in
the first week and, of course, the fire departments started posting pictures of
their shiny new trucks, so both ends of the spectrum were covered.
Two. Kindergarten care compared
This was a more traditional piece of investigative
reporting, in which the paper sent half a dozen reporters to write reports on
the state of kindergarten care across Norway. They generated 4,700 reports,
which were, again set up behind an interactive map that enabled people to see
how their area performed. VG also took submissions from citizens to add to the
knowledgebase. An impressive project and check out the front cover of the paper
on the day of its release. Brilliant.
Three. The world’s longest interview
I love this, because it shows how newspapers and online
publishers can use online video in a more innovative way than the TV stations. The
basic premise is that VG discovered that the world record for the longest
single interview was 26 hours and set out to break it. They found a (very
impressive) poly-math and set out on a 30 hour interview marathon that 1.8m
people ended up watching. Amazing for such a small country… The interview is
pretty interesting too J.
Extract (one of many) on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5YcPcB2gYk
Four. The 100 year old package
In 1912 a Norwegian man wrapped up a package with
instructions not to open it for 100 years. A VG journalist discovered this and
set out to create a multimedia project charting it’s story and unwrapping. Somewhat
ironically, it basically contained old newspapers!
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