Jassim Ahmad’s job is to experiment with different ways of storytelling. As Reuters’ Global Head of Multimedia and Interactive Innovation the enthusiastic young Ahmad directed three anniversary multimedia projects over the last three years, each of which are winners of several multimedia prizes. Ready to learn more about how to mix the latest technology with high quality content, I met Jassim in New York this week equipped with a tape recorder, a pen and a notebook. But he asked the first question.
„Are you recording audio for production or … ?
„…for myself.”
„Oh, ok,” Jassim sighed with relief, „then I don’t need to say perfect sentences.” Clearly, he thinks in multimedia.
But even with a multimedia mindset storytelling can get tricky when your main character is an abstraction: money.
„I really wanted to do a project on the financial crisis,” remembered Jassim the genesis of his most recent project, „but I recognized that finance is not something easy to do with pictures. Times of Crisis is probably the most interesting project for this organization [Reuters] because of what we did with connecting photography with deeper information.”
Telling a global story with a global language
„So [for the one year anniversary of Lehman Brothers] we have the obvious idea, but how can we make something that was distinct and characteristic? And one of the characteristic is that we are a global organisation so we could really tell a global story. Imagine that you take the experience of someone in Los Angeles with someone in Tokio with someone in London and show how connected those exeriences are. And also imagine what would happen if you took all of that photography, information and data and somehow distill it and rather than having the pretension that say we have the answer, put that information in front of people and let them find their answers within that corpus of information.”
HOW MANY PEOPLE DID YOU WORK WITH ON „TIMES OF CRISIS”?
„Me and my colleague Ayperi Ecer in Paris very much led the project. On the one hand we were working with our own team within Reuters where we had people doing pictures and video research going back to the archives, we had the editorial team to produce special reporting, we had someone who specifically edited photography for the timeline, we had people who were experts in finance… But it wasn’t like these people working full time, everyone was giving a little bit of their time to advise. Then we also worked with a production company to evolve the interface so everything happened at the same time.”
COULDN’T YOU DO IT YOURSELF WITH YOUR COMPUTER SCIENCE DEGREE?
„I wouldn’t be able to do it by myself, no. It is a really specialist thing. It was the interactive timline which is the really heart of this [project] that I entirely conceived. I knew exactly how I wanted it and I defined the interface with interactive designer Tim Klimowicz but couldn’t build it alone. So we worked with a team who built the database and we populated it with content.”
Interactive timeline: the heart of the project
HOW DID IT ALL COME TOGETHER?
„Times of Crisis contains two pieces. There is a narrative introduction and there is an interactive timeline. So one is passive as an experience the other is interactive. The passive experience, the introduction is about hooking you, it is about telling you what we are going to give you in this experience, why is it important for you to stick with us and to deliver the information with emotion. For this piece we sliced together the very best of the assignements which we had commissioned for the project and the very best archive material.”
WHAT WERE YOUR CHALLENGES WITH THE INTRODUCTION VIDEO?
„It can be counterproductive. If it is too long, you really lose people, so you have to keep it very tight. It’s also really hard to show money in a way which is not boring and not a bunch of banknotes so we used all kind of social conflicts which had been born from the criris as the opening. I had the idea of starting the piece with this mix of lots of difference impact around the world which kind of sets the scene. Then we take you into small vignettes of stories.”
THE FIRST THING IS TO FIND INTERESTING STORIES.
„For example in Los Angeles we worked with our colleague Lucy Nicholson who is actually a good sport photographer and she understood how to go out and do reporting on a multimedia story. We all set the stories she was aware of that related to the crisis in Los Angeles. I think we were in June 2009 and she proposed the theme of evictions that were still happening. So she went and followed two deputy sheriffs in Orange County for a number of days and she was doing it all — she did the video, she did the pictures, she did the audio, she knew what kind of pieces we needed to collect to do narrative multimedia.”
WHAT IS THAT?
„The narrative multimedia of Times of Crisis is like a passive experience. You are sitting there over 5 -10 -20 minutes, and someone is taking you through an experience of their story. So it’s not the voice of Reuters saying this thing happened. It’s actually someone saying this thing happened to me.”
HOW DID THE REPORTER DECIDE WHICH MEDIA TO DO AT A TIME? CAN YOU DO MORE AT THE SAME TIME?
„It is impossible to use everything at the same time, not least because one thing makes the other one not work: if you are taking pictures and the same time you are recording audio, you can hear the clicking of the pictures on the audio. It can also be really distructing for the subject. The idea is to getting close to someone and find their a story and make them feel comfortable with you and you cannot be in their face doing three things at the same time. I think the best thing is to look at the situation and see what is the best medium to convey it.
In an ideal situation you have time to talk to your subject in a controlled interview situation, then you go back look at your notes and ask them to reflect on it. Then you think, ok, maybe i have really good pictures for something but I dont have him talking about the situation and I know that when it comes to producing this project I cannot use the pictures without the audio, the audio without the pictures, so what’s the gap that I need to fill. Then I need to collect ambient audio, the humming of the car, the doors clicking, all of those real things that help the reader get closer to the situation.
SO YOU COLLECTED THE CONTENT, WHAT WAS NEXT?
„For the timeline it was the question of editing. I really knew that I wanted to do a timeline because somehow there was no piece of information in this project that was giving you the context. Timeline is normally done as text, it’s a sequence of events — on this day this thing happened — and what we wanted to do was to combine that information with the power of photography. When you skim through this timeline you see the immediacy you get from it, you are reading so much information before you even look at the text.
Combining information with the power of photography
In our previous project we had text, picture and video in our timeline and in this one I wanted 15 different type of information. So you have facts, milestones, graphs, charts, articles and quotes… all kinds of informations at all different kinds of levels, all integrated together and organized by chronology.
But Reuters must have produced hundreds of thousands of data so how do you decide what’s important? And in order to make this valuable, how to connect them?
How do you make sure that you are sufficiently comprehensive and that you do not miss anything important? It has a lot to do with working with experts of this particluar field, which we were lucky to have within Reuters – for example we could ask the features desk what their best stories were which relate to the average person. We would also constantly looking back at everything we had together to see what was too much and what was too little.
We didn’t seek to give all the answers but we wanted to give you all these fragments from all over the world in many dfferent media and just to create this rich massive experience.
HOW MUCH TIME DID IT TAKE TO PRODUCE THE PROJECT?
We spent like 3 months on the project from conception to launch with me as the only person working on it full time at Reuters.
IF YOU COULD DO ANYTHING DIFFERENT WHAT WOULD YOU CHANGE IN IT?
Sharing Times of Crisis: comes on a project level
One of the key things I wanted people to be able to do was to deep link directly into items in the timeline. So instead of linking to the project you’d link to one particular story which you would care about or to one particular picture that you want your friends to know about. I think people would have discovered the story in a very different way because the way people share Times of Crisis today is „I like Times of Crisis, check this out, its amazing, and this comes on a project level. But if you can go to a single piece of content, the type of comment, we can imagine, would change to „this picture reminds me of… But this was an anniversary story and we had a hard deadline so we had to draw a line and lose some of our ideas.
So much content is produced at Reuters where it’s always about what’s next and the value of what has been produced degrades very quickly. But if you look back what is there, there is gold,” Jassim concluded. „So doing projects like this is also to put a stake in the ground and say this picture, this text, these events are important for history.”
