Beyond Business

Putting a stake in the multimedia-ground

nycendrillon — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 18:41:57 +0000

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.”

It wasn’t the Mormons

nycendrillon — Wed, 05 May 2010 18:59:33 +0000

The recent release of the Obamas’ tax returns revealed a level of charitable contributions that New York Times’ readers have found noteworthy. Their comments inspired business columnist Ron Lieber to think about common standards of charitable giving.

“… the Bush 2007 tax returns shows income of $642,905 – and charitable contributions of $78,100 – or 12.1 per cent. The Obama’s 2009 return, on income of $5.5 million, shows charitable contributions of $329,100, or 5.9 percent. The Obamas never took possession of the Nobel Prize money, so it is neither income nor a contribution on their return. … So, on far less income, The Bushes donated a percentage that was more than twice that of the Obama’s.” Carol Penskar CA

Tithing, an ancient practice of giving 10 percent of our income to our religious community, is not a fair method, Lieber figures, as yearly incomes do not reflect one’s true wealth. Why should a chef with a $180,000 annual salary but without savings give more than a land baron of $10 million in land but no income, asks Ben Kessler, financial planner in Lieber’s article.

Once on the topic, Lieber “offers” almost 10 percent of his article on the origins of tithing, and for some reason he introduces it as a Mormon tradition.

“Perhaps the best-known prescription for giving is the Mormon practice of tithing, where members give 10 percent of their income to the church each year.”

Given that the New York Times’ journalist was not lazy and checked that tithing appears first in the Book of Genesis, one wonders what was the goal of the Mormon detour. What is the “Mormon-practice” of tithing? How is it different from the Jewish or Christian tithing mentioned in religious texts thousands of years before Joseph Smith made an appearance?

And Melchizedek king of Salem brought forth bread and wine: and he was the priest of the most high God.

And he blessed him, and said, Blessed be Abram of the most high God, possessor of heaven and earth:

And blessed be the most high God, which hath delivered thine enemies into thy hand. And he gave him tithes of all. (Genesis 14:18-20)

Tithing comes from the Old Testament, was picked up by the New Testament and ended up in the Book of Mormons. These three sacred books offer no various formulas for how much to give, given that tithing means 10 percent in each of them. But while Lieber’s article gives a clear distinction between tithing and the Muslim Zakat — where 2.5 percent of one’s wealth, not income, must be offered to donation each year — there is no way for the reader to understand why would tithing be a Mormon specialty.

“Bring ye all the tithes… [and the Lord will] open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it.” Malachi 3:10

Mormons take tigthing the strictest and most literal way, but if this was Lieber’s reason for introducing the tighting tradition through their example, God Knows. Without an explanation, however, the Times’ bolded abstract that says “formulas from the Bible, the Koran and the Book of Mormon” remains only a cool teaser of an inaccurate article.

Heaven through a mirror of other people’s beliefs

nycendrillon — Sun, 02 May 2010 06:01:45 +0000

It’s Mark Oppenheimer’s review on Heaven I suggest you read.

The piece scrutinizes both the new book of Lisa Miller, Newsweek’s religion editor and Oppenheimer’s own thoughts on the afterlife. While I am not sure about the book, the article will certainly give you a smile or two, which might have something to do with Oppenheimer being tipsy while writing it, but more about that in a second.

The review is killing, in the sense that by the time you finish it you feel you actually have read the book in question or at least you know all the interesting parts.

“[It's] a book that might guide people through the thicket of their own views about heaven by holding up a mirror of other people’s beliefs, both current and past.” Lisa Miller on Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination With the Afterlife

Oppenheimer cherry picks through Miller’s interviewees. He tells us the argument of the American archeologist (Rachel Hallote works on ancient Israelite burial sites) that the absence of afterlife in the Hebrew Bible was an effort by the religious authorities to suppress the cult of the dead among the Hebrews. He also talks about the Swedish mystic (Emanuel Swedenborg lived in the 18th century) who believed that marriages on earth continued in heaven, an idea that was later picked up by the Mormons.

We understand that Heaven is not exactly the book of the year. Oppenheimer needed to invent a drinking game to survive the magazine journalism cliches Miller had too often applied in her book.

“do a shot every time Miller describes the interviwee’s eyes, two shots for the weather, three shots for the meal.”

The drinks might have helped Oppenheimer to keep his review hilarious with jokes I don’t intend to kill here.

But the Times’ religion columnist also takes the time to think about the question his colleague kept asking: What’s heaven like to you?

“I discovered,” Oppenheimer says, “that my heaven is a mix of:

and a song I’ve lately playing on my iPod:

Monks off-duty

nycendrillon — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 00:16:29 +0000

I wonder if following 9/11, it occurred to any officials to ask the chaplains of various clergies working at ground zero, to leave the work to specialists. What a bizarre move that would have been.

Yet, Buddhist monks claim something similar is happening to them in Quinghai, in Central China’s highlands, following a deadly earthquake on April 14.

“Our job was to figure out how to respect the rules of the authorities without jeopardizing the law of religion,” said Rabbi Jack Meyer of Misaskim — a Jewish organization, which provides recovery services for mourners – to Beyond Business.

While Rabbi Meyer and his team, along with diverse members of the clergy, spent several months at ground zero working along in team effort with the Port Authority Police Department and the New York City Police Department, the Chinese central government thanked the monks’ rescue efforts a week after the disaster.

“It would bring more difficulties to disaster relief work if lots of unprofessional personnel were at the scene,” the Chinese State Council said.

What makes a professional at a scene where more than 2,000 people died and 12,000 injured, is a good question. But it was the thousands of monks who ran most of the early rescue operations following the catastrophe. And at a disaster scene there are certainly more to reconstruct than the infrastructure.

Under Jewish law, a recovered body must be quickly brought to burial. This also made the presence of Misaskim so important for religious Jewish families at ground zero back in 2001.

“There was no body removed from the site without a chaplain being there to pray for them. We offered spiritual guidance to anybody,” Rabbi Meyer said.

The same way, the monks in China have supervised mass cremations and mandatory three day period of mourning, until now.

Whether the underlying motives of asking the monks to leave are political — some suspect that the Chinese government may want to present the rescue work as a Chinese effort to the region’s Tibetan population — or simply organizational, the act, both politically and practically, seems highly irresponsible.

Sarkozy in a niqab without the slits for the eye

nycendrillon — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 21:24:37 +0000

Fining the demeaned. That’s what the ban French President Nicolas Sarkozy plans to implement, does, by punishing women for wearing a veil that covers their faces.

Wearing the niqab, the Islamic veil, is a tradition that divides even the Islamic community. Is it obligatory or is it recommended for someone who wishes to please Allah?

By Roger Latham

“I would like you to judge me based on who I am and what I do, and not based on the way how I look.” Sumayyah Hussein, 24

“As a Muslim, you are a missionary at heart, you are supposed to attract people around you, not repell them. It [the niqab] excludes people from your world.” Sonia Khan, 32

“It enables me to go through this path of a spiritual discovery. I understand your concern and I thank you for your concern, if anybody is concerned, but I’m fine.” Sheikha El-Kathiri, 20

In cases, women might put the niqab on to please male relatives rather than God, and French policy makers want to attack exactly that. Instead, they attack the “victims.”

O Prophet, tell your wives and daughters, and the women of the faithful, to draw their wraps over them. They will thus be recognised and no harm will come to them. God is forgiving and kind. Qu’ran 33:59

Put yourself, Monsieur Sarkozy, into the niqab of the woman, whom the police stopped in Nantes. You get a fine of $29 because your niqab posed a “safety risk” to your driving. If you consider wearing the veil “an attack on women’s dignity” and you still had the mask on despite all the sunshine above the Atlantic coast, would you think the fine is a solution to your problem?

It is also very much possible that you are a proud veil-owner who, as you said — being the woman in the car — would appeal the decision. Try to punish someone against her beliefs and you’ll find yourself in the role of the oppressor.

In Bruges?

nycendrillon — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 17:05:05 +0000

Bishop Roger Vangheluwe, 73, stepped down over abuse scandal. In Bruges.

“Where’s that?”

“It’s in Begium.”

In Bruges, the Oscar nominated movie by Martin McDonagh, the playwright of dark comedies, is funny. What happened in Bruges is not.

Vangheluwe is the first Belgian bishop to resign amid a new wave of disclosures of clergy sexual abuse in Europe. On Friday, the bishop, who has had the title for 25 years, admitted to sexually abusing a boy in the past.

“When I was still just a priest, and for a certain period at the beginning of my episcopate, I sexually abused a minor from my immediate environment. The victim is still marked by what happened. Over the course of these decades I have repeatedly recognised my guilt towards him and his family, and I have asked forgiveness; but this did not pacify him, as it did not pacify me,” Vangheluwe said in his statement.

He is following Bishop Walter Mixa in Germany, Bishop James Moriarty in Ireland (the third Irish bishop to step down over the scandal), Bishop Georg Mueller in Norway, Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer in Austria, and several American bishops who committed or covered up abuses in their parishes.

“Don’t know any Belgium jokes, and if I did I think I’d have the good sense not to… hang on. Is Belgium with all those child abuse murders lately? I do know a Belgium joke. What’s Belgium famous for? Chocolates and child abuse, and they only invented the chocolates to get to the kids.”

Abuse scandals and lawsuits have cost the Roman Catholic Church an estimated $3 billion in settlements in the United States only in the last 20 years, the AFP reported. What are the costs in Europe?

Former owner’s bones: asset or liability?

nycendrillon — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 04:42:02 +0000

On sale: $3 million property with a family cemetery that is about a size of a tennis court.

If the mansion with the attached graveyard was fashion designer Diane Von Furstenberg’s, it would not be that difficult to sell even if she forgot herself in the garden. Some buyers would even look at the newly-bought graves as unique decorations of a house with a showcased past.

Yet, realtors frown about the possibility that people would follow her path and want to get buried in their own gardens.

Furstenberg had recently told the Times about her idea of adding a family cemetery and a meditation garden to her Litchfield County farm, news that made another cutsy piece of a long-existing natural desire of humanity:

having the loved ones as close as possible even when they left us for good, and being buried at a beloved place.

Ramsey Creek, South Carolina

It was not the Meatpacking but Hegymagas, a village in Western Hungary, where I was introduced to the idea of the private grave a couple of years ago.

Matyas Donath, another designer (he designs gardens) proudly showed a massive piece of a cliff in the back of his garden.

G-d only knows how he had transported the rock there, but it surely was beautiful. He dug a smaller hole right next to it, in the size of an urn.

“My wife and I are gonna be buried here,”

Donath said. He looked happy.

Apart from emotions there are certain advantages to a home grave. It is convenient — no travel to the outskirts of the city to visit our dead — and private, more than any public cemetery.

But the dream of the grandfather might be the burden of the grandchild.

What if the family needs to sell the property?

As long as the grave looks like a rock, buyers will not be scared away.

But. Would you sell your grandparents graves?

And would you deny access from people to the grave? That is too high a price for the idea.

Easter Sunday needs to happen

nycendrillon — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 03:17:13 +0000

“The times are tough but Easter needs to happen”

encouraged The Right Reverend Mark S. Sisk his parishioners to make offerings on the Easter Sunday mass in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

Sisk was installed as the Bishop of New York in the Cathedral on September 29, 2001.

The Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine

Consecrated hand in his small pants. What’s the price?

nycendrillon — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 01:22:00 +0000

For a teacher from Wisconsin it is $25,000.

The man, who wrote a letter to the bishop in the Diocese Superior some 40 years after Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy had sexually abused him, asked a compensation of $25,000 from the Church:

“so I can forgive you and not be angry when I see the church.”

The man served as an alter boy at a church in Boulder Junction, in the Northwoods of Wisconsin when he encountered Father Murphy. He wrote the letter at age 52, in 2002, four years after the death of Murphy.

Only governments and laywers try to convert pain (emotional or physical) to dollar, but they do it and the amount is in any way bigger than nothing.

The $25,000 that the teacher asked for is nearly half of what the crime victim compensation program of Wisconsin offers to victims. The program pays up to $40,000 for expenses for out-of-pocket costs resulting from a violent crime including:

♦ Medical expenses
♦ Lost wages/support
♦ Mental health counseling
♦ Replacement services: homemaker and childcare services
♦ Attorney fees: up to 10 percent of award

Bringing a civil lawsuit against the institution responsible for the criminal is a costly and riskier way to proceed but in the world of money risk always equals to better earnings. In the case of the Diocese of Wilmington that serves about 230,000 Catholics in Delaware and the Eastern Shore of Maryland, a sex abuse case meant bankruptcy in October 2009.

Since 2002, the Diocese of Wilmington has settled eight cases for an average of about $780,000 each.

So God created LEGO

nycendrillon — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 16:09:06 +0000

Brand-building at its best:

When Ericcson makes Swedish “fact-tanker”, Hans Rosling, tell his take on the drivers for the future, and he turns dry numbers into animations, two intangible assets increase their values. That of the Ericcson brand, and that of Rosling’s Gapminder. And at least for three minutes or so, one feels as if statistics make sense of the world.

Then you ask: At what speed is the number of the poorest one billion people increasing?