Participants in Painting the News spent the first day as cybertourists, visiting about a dozen different Web sites for ideas and inspiration and sharing their insights. Then they worked in small groups to re-invent existing journalism projects for the Web. Take the opening day tour yourself by following the links below.

Art for Art’s Sake: What Digital Art Can Teach Us About Story
Multimedia/digital artists and graphic designers whose pieces are not overtly about telling a story but contain story elements.

Colette Gaiter: Unofficial Communication
Colette says her work doesn't tell you anything you don't know. It invites you to think about it differently.

Tennessee Rice Dixon: Interactive Media & Moving Pictures
Tennessee says all of her projects start with text. She adds art, and creates narratives. The environment around the viewer, including sounds, light, and time of day, steers the images, mood and text.

Vivian Selbo: Open Source
Vivian believes in the need for redundant navigation to engage both active and passive viewers.

Steven McCarthy: Episodic Design
Steven controls the navigation on his sites because "I want people to experience certain things."

Multimedia Stories: Fiction and Non-Fiction
Story-tellers, both fiction and non-fiction, who are exploring new forms for the presentation of and navigation through their story packages.

Brooke Burgess: Broken Saints
An online graphic novel that fuses music, still pictures and text. "Content has always been the key to keeping my interest," Brooke says.

Bart Marable: Terra Incognita
Bart says his visitors want guidance and a compelling experience. "Text and still photos by themselves are not going to cut it... there is an innate human desire to be told a story, to be entertained."

Sue Johnson: Picture Projects
The Web is not just an alternative publishing venue, Sue says. "You have to hook a visitor in the first three screens. If you do, they will keep going to the end."

New Forms for News
Interactive story designers who are doing news content, developing new ways of taking linear stories and providing interactive elements or totally new packages for the story.

Lawrence Bricker, Popular Front: American High
Lawrence gives users a feeling of ownership by including user-created content like a yearbook into which they can insert a customized picture.

Tuomo Valiaho, Helsinki Sanomat: Webortage (bottom of page, left side)
Tuomo produced Webortage features for the newspaper site. The idea was to provide "content that tells about important issues in more visual, interactive, and entertaining ways." Read more of Tuomo's multimedia views.

Ashley Wells, MSNBC: Driving Through the Ages, Pearl Harbor
Ashley says he wants people to forget the mouse, at first. "When I want them to use it, I'll tell them why and show them where. Why take the focus away from your content, even for a second?" Read Ashley's theory of interactive stortelling.

Conclusions: Big Ideas

Tom Regan, Christian Science Monitor online: "We live by the tyranny of 24/7 these days in online news. We are constantly updating. Sometimes you don't have time to take the time to sit around and brainstorm concepts. The lesson from this workshop is you have to fight against that, take that 15 minute break. If we are going to do it the right way, we have to change the way we see the world."

Bart Marable: "Only ten percent of news is actually new content. If you can use the procedural power of technology to archive that it will free up journalists from just re-hashing."

Jean Trumbo, University of Missouri: "We're missing the boat if all we use the medium for is for breaking news. If we have all this material that doesn't get published in the original news venue, why not make it available for the public to use?"

Sue Johnson: "The first question really does need to be, 'Why do this online?'"

Steven McCarthy: "Things used to be about either / or. Now it is both / and. We want convergence and divergence. In the 20th century we were about taking things apart. In this century it is about putting things back together."

Jean Trumbo: "What is interactivity? It is more than a function of the technology. It is about a dialogue. We continue an industry to subvert the tendency towards interaction. As long as we exert control over the products in the name of objectivity, we will continue to create projects that are just one way."

Tennessee Rice Dixon: "The media is all delivering the same thing. Fear driven by commerce ends up with us thinking we have to please everyone. This is a big mistake. I wish people would stick with their passion."

Tuomo Valiaho: "We are concentrating too much on the device. We shouldn't be thinking in terms of pure content. Content is not king - the user is king."

Rex Sorgast, Internet Broadcast Systems: "I see a small disagreement. We've gone from content is king to user is king and we need to talk about community is king. It is easy to create me. How do we get to we?"

David Schechter, WCCO-TV: "I will try to find a way to have the story that was on the TV and get the community into conversation."