RETHINKING ONLINE STORYTELLING

What does an online TV story look like? Most of the time, it looks a lot like it did on the air only smaller. There's nothing innovative or interactive about video that's just shoveled to the Web.

But what if you found a way to give Web users more control over how they experience a story? What if you took it apart, and let the user put it back together?

Those are the questions the "Married at the Mall" project was designed to address. "Married at the Mall" is an hour-long documentary by Minnesota filmmaker Melody Gilbert. She brought it to the Painting the News workshop NewsLab co-sponsored with the University of Minnesota's Institute for New Media Studies to see how the film might be transferred to the Internet.

Participants in the workshop came up with a theoretical design, placing story segments into a simple grid with characters along one axis and plot elements along the other. The goal was to provide viewers with a variety of choices so they could customize their own viewing experience.

NewsLab took the basic idea and made it real. We chose the stories of four different couples from the documentary and dissected each of their stories into six separate segments: glimpses into the couples' lives, how they met, the moments before the wedding, their wedding vows, the subsequent kiss, and what they did afterwards. We then digitized each segment into a clip for video-streaming over the Web. We used screenshots from the documentary to serve as launching points for the individual clips to allow the viewer the option of diving into their stories at any random point.

Then we took it a step further by offering the viewer the more structured option of viewing a longer segment, either following the story one couple at a time through all their experiences, or seeing one experience at a time through every couples' perspective. We added more context to the story in two sidebars. One provides details about the documentary and links to background information. The other spolights vignettes that were scattered throughout the original documentary and provides viewers the choice of viewing them separately in any order, or uninterrupted in sequential order.

This basic structure could easily be adapted to tell a news story online, and would provide an outlet for additional material that can't be used on the air because of time constraints. Any story in which characters' lives intersect would be a candidate for this kind of treatment. A crime story could feature a relative of the victim, a prosecutor, and a defense attorney along one axis, and the crime, trial and punishment along the other. A consumer investigation might have a buyer, a business owner and the state attorney general on one axis, and comments about a product, a complaint, and action taken along the other. You get the idea.

Take a look at the online version of "Married at the Mall" (which will open in a new window) and let us know what you think. If you decide to try this approach in putting a news story online, we hope you'll send us a link.