Creating a useful survey that entices your audience to respond, however, requires planning and time. Think about it: If a video does not captivate within 10 to 15 seconds, people click off. That’s for an an activity that requires them to just sit back, relax and watch. Now imagine how difficult it is to get people to lean in, to contemplate and analyze their own experiences and reactions as they fill out a survey.

Here are a few tips for journalists on creating a compelling and effective online survey tailored to return results.

Focus

Before you even begin to write up the questions, you need to ask what exactly you are trying to learn from this survey? Just like a well-written article or well-produced Web video piece, keep it focused. Don’t try to cram in questions to cover all the different angles of your topic. Pick a focus and stick to it. And be sure the results are presented quickly and in a way that will be interesting to respondents

Length or Time

No one wants to sit through questions after questions, scrolling and scrolling down a Web page. Once people realize a survey is going on and on, their focus wavers and they put less thought into their answers. So keep it short and choose your questions wisely. Ask only questions that you know you need answered. Each question should result in a data point that works toward goal–whether it is information on source with a particular experience or it backs or disproves a thesis. Here is an example of a brief, focused survey from Lives in Focus: Family Life Behind Bars

In other words, your survey should require minimum scrolling no more than three to five minutes to fill out completely and thoughtfully. Have a look at this survey on unreported crime. What’s the problem here?

Types of Questions

There are numerous categories of questions–from multiple choice to open-ended–that can return exactly what you need if deployed correctly. This survey, done by The Local, was a smart follow-up to story about a fatal accident in the community. But editors later realized the questions asked were subjective and very hard to quantify and map in a meaningful way. This survey about cultural diets, also done by The Local, was much easier to quantify.

• Multiple Choice:
  • Offer discrete numerical quantities rather than descriptive qualities so that you collect numbers that can be graphed. For example, “How often do you eat out?” Never (0 times); No more than twice a week (1-2 times); Often (3-5 times) / Daily (5-7 times). Avoid: Sometimes; Often; All the time. These are subjective qualities.
  • Make the choices mutually exclusive. In other words, people should not struggle between the choices or have several apply to them.
• Check Lists:
  • Giving people the option of selecting various common items or experiences will make it more likely that people complete the survey.
  • Make sure to give them choice of adding “Other” and a place to enter what “other” is.
• 1 to 5 scale:
  • Allows people to rank their experience, likes and dislikes.
  • Always keep the scales well-balanced. At one end is “Excellent” and at the other end is “Atrocious.”
  • Space your adjectives evenly. In other words, the choices should represent a complete spectrum and not leave gaping holes. For example, you should avoid: “Loved the event / Had a good time / Hated being there!” There are several degrees missing between “Had a good time” and “Hated being there” that could provide useful data.
• Yes and No:
  • As in all forms of journalistic interviews, avoid “Yes” and “No” questions.
  • Caveat: There are some good uses of the Yes/No question in a survey. After you collect some background information or context, you may ask a Yes/No question to categorize each respondent and then lead them into a separate branch of the survey.
• Private Info:
  • Remember to ask for a name and contact info. You’ll need this to verify or follow-up.
  • Inform people that you will NOT be sharing or publicizing the data in any way.
  • Use a Text box to collect this data.
• Open-ended:
  • You provide a longer text box to capture people’s experiences and perceptions.
  • Limit this to one or two MAX per survey. Too many open-ended questions can turn off respondents and limit your ability to chart or graph results because the answers often are not quantitative.
  • An optional, open-ended question or two at the close of a survey can sometimes yield great material to be used as anecdotes  or quotes.

Order of the questions

• Provide a variety of question formats to keep them interested filling out the survey
• Using the same format question after question can result in people answering without much thought.
• Make them flow in a logical order.
• Perhaps one question answers a question generally, while the next asks for specifics.

Presenting the Findings:

• Just collecting the data makes the page appear static. Instead, consider presenting the raw data in real-time as people fill out the survey. Seeing results encourages participation.
• Or entice participation by saying respondents will be taken to results page once the survey is completed.
• Is there an end-date on the survey or will you continue to accept responses. A deadline might encourage participation but it might also be irrelevant.
• Crowdsourcing v. Open-Source: Will you share the data in a format that others can analyze and manipulate?
• Is this a one-way experience. They give, you take? Or can the data provide a service to those who took the survey? Can they use that info to make any informed decision?

Final Touches:

• Keep questions simple. People should have to figure out what you are asking them!
• Make sure you are not passing judgment. You want to find out what your audience thinks. The survey is not your soap-box.
• Have a friend or colleague take the survey:
  • How long did it take them?
  • Were they confused about the any of the questions?
  • Are you missing an important element?
  • Is there a stronger logical order to ask the questions?
  • Were they interested or bored?
• Once you publish it and have some results you can’t change it. So get it right!
• Search Engine Optimized Title: Write a strong SEO headline that draws an audience.
• Compelling Precede: Write a strong intro that entices people to participate.
• Provide a time estimate: “This survey will take no more than 5 minutes to fill out.”
• Remind your audience that this is not a scientific survey based on population sampling.
• Who ever has the link can participate and those who don’t have the technology can’t.

The service makes it remarkably easy to collect and post video at breaking news or scheduled events. The Qik app uses a phone’s built-in still camera so you don’t need a phone with video capability.

Qik is free (though the app comes at a price with some service providers), works on more than 140 types of phone and provides easy upload to Facebook, Youtube and Twitter. Videos are automatically stored to the Qik site where you can also generate an embed code that can be dropped into blog or webpage for live-streaming.  Cover it Live, a top-notch live-blogging service (see the DNJ post), can broadcast Qik streams.

Online video is making huge gains, posting double-digit growth in the last year, according to recent research. Some 80 percent of online news users regularly watch video and the expansion in video viewers on web-only sites is up a whopping 300 percent since 2008.  Qik offers online journalists a low-budget and easy-to-produce way to get at this market.

To date, Qik does not offer editing capability. However, the Qik Video Pro app allows users to zoom and apply assorted filters to videos. It also offers enhanced audio and a selection of different upload options.

Qik is not without competition, Kyte and Flixwagon being the two closest contenders.  A comparison in mid 2008 gave Kyte the edge on video and audio quality, but rated Qik highly for usability.  Both rated better than Flixwagon.

Qik, a Silicon Valley start-up that went live in 2008, aims to be the go-to social networking site for video. It offers all the social networking standard features for  video: Storage, tagging (and geo-tagging), groups, privacy controls and integration with an address book.

In 2009 Katalyst Media, an online production company co-founded by Ashton Kutcher and Jason Goldberg, hosted 24 Hours @ Sundance, an online reality show-style competition, broadcast live from the Sundance Film Festival via Qik. To see Qik in action, check it out.

The seven-part video – an hour in total – along with the rich assortment of examples, resources and tutorials is as compelling as it is complete a road map of the way forward.  Journalists ranging from the indie blogger to those working in large corporate outlets need to learn how to present stories extracted from the unprecedented amount of  data now available. That data may be collected independently with free and easy-to-use polling tools like Polldaddy or gathered  through sites like Data.gov and Google Public Data Explorer.

Here are two examples of data visualization presented in the documentary:

The Jobless Rate for People Like You, developed by The New York Times, allows viewers to drill down and personalize unemployment data.

The Stimulus Tracker, by MSNBC.Com, allows viewers to see where stimulus package money has been spent down to the county level and weigh its effectiveness. Viewers can also track where the money was spent relative to the voting records of politicians.

The idea that information presented visually and interactively on the web is a powerful way to draw in readers isn’t all that new. Infographics and interactive illustrations of events ranging from the trajectory of a plane crash to a winning Superbowl play have been around for years.  But growth in data visualization specifically has been hampered by the prohibitive  time and cost of parsing the data, developing the code and producing the final product.

The documentary does an excellent job of addressing these issues and the many other practical realities of producing and presenting visualization in a journalistic context.

In ‘Part IV: A New Era in Infographics’ Hannah Fairfield,  Graphics Director  for the Washington Post,  points out the importance of simplicity and the need to clearly present to viewers how to navigate the visualization. It’s also important to present the information in a way that is meaningful to those represented in the data.

In ‘Part VII: Technologies and Tools’ an assortment of heavy hitters in the field discuss the variety of tools now out there or in development that allow news organizations large and small to reduce the coding involved in producing interactive data visualizations. Many Eyes,  Protovis, and Flare are examples of software that offer templates to present timetables, charts and maps among other things.

In addition to their value as news content data visualizations have a lot of design appeal. IBM researcher Marten Wattenberg acknowledges that while stream graphs like ‘The Ebb and Flow of Movies: Box Office Receipts 1986-2008‘ are beautiful and effectively draw readers in, in reality they may not provide much depth of information. In the news world there is often a trade-off between design, approachability, deadlines and the actual information contained in a graphic.

In ‘Part VI: Exploring Data’ the documentary hones in on a topic that comes up throughout: the need to contextualize data and to give it narrative structure — the need to tell compelling stories with the data. Award-winning New York Times designer Amanda Cox along with others acknowledge the difficulty in striking a balance between allowing users to personalize data and draw their own conclusions while also providing the kind of narrative context that makes the information valuable journalism in the first place.

This may endure as data visualizations most vexing challenge.

With digital photography, especially when building slideshows and audio slideshows, the importance of good work flow can be woefully underestimated and the effects of bad work flow can be disastrous – inconsistent color reproduction, insufficient image resolution, lost work and hours and hours of lost time.  A bulletproof system for capturing, processing and archiving images is essential.

So what are the specifics of good digital photo work flow?  With the help of Congress and through the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, the good folks at the American Society of Media Photographers have developed an answer, if a somewhat exhaustive one:  The Digital Photography Best Practices and Workflow (dpBestflow™).

The site is a comprehensive repository of resources, skills, and systems for managing the entire “life cycle” of a digital image.

The irony of  dpbestflow.org is that it is so far-reaching in scope that it requires good work flow just to navigate the material.  The team addresses the problem with a ‘start here’ tab and the intro video embedded below:

StartHere from ASMP dpBestflow on Vimeo.

In truth, much of the material is beyond the needs of most news photographers; managing CYMK output for glossy print publications or the relative merit of bilinear or bicubic interpolation when resizing images, for example.

The well-designed quick reference guide may be as deep as many photojournalists or photojournalism educators need to go.  Or, it may work as a more surgical point of entry into specific topics of interest.

In addtion to the site dpworkflow site, there is also the Digital Photography Best Practices and Workflow Handbook (Focal Press, 2009) by Richard Anderson and Patti Russotti (dpBestflow™ Project Director and Contributing Author, respectively), as well as a schedule of nationwide seminars and a host of online forums. More information is available at dbBestflow.

Tracking audio changes assume that louder scenes (explosions, musical crescendos, shouting) correspond to higher levels of drama. Rapid visual changes (quick motion across the screen, camera motion, or rapid edits) also correspond to action, a quicker tempo, and higher levels of drama. A combined index of audio and visual changes graphed over the length of the movie represents its unique fingerprint, revealing its dramatic highs and lows.

I analyzed forty noteworthy movies and collected the results in this interactive tool. Use it to explore the dramatic profiles for each movie and their corresponding scenes. Do the highest peaks in each profile match the movie’s climactic moments?

Explore the Story Analysis tool, which was used to produce the graphs. Use it to see how each movie’s audio and visuals are analyzed in real-time. You can analyze your own movies (FLV or MP4 format), output the data, and post the results for others to see.

How it was done
First, all the movies had to be converted to the correct Flash-friendly format. Each movie was converted to an MP4 (H.264 codec) file using Handbrake, a free open-source video transcoder. Then I had each movie stream into Flash with the FLVPlayer component.

Tracking the audio changes

Audio levels were analyzed with the ActionScript command, SoundMixer.computeSpectrum(). The command takes a snapshot of the current sound and stores the information as a series of numbers that can be translated visually. While my sound visualization is rather simple, there are countless creative ways to visualize sound. There have even been contests for the most creative visualizations. Since I was most interested in the variation of sound levels throughout the movie, I captured the amplitude (or volume) of the sound every 10 milliseconds and graphed it with a gray line. An average of the sound amplitude was calculated and graphed with a bold white line.

Tracking the visual changes

Every 10 milliseconds, Flash grabbed the image from the video stream with the BitmapData class. The command, getPixel(), gathered the red, green, and blue color information from each pixel. The red, green, and blue color distribution of an image is known as an RGB histogram. My goal was to track changes between histograms that would indicate major visual changes due to camera motion, edits, or subject motion. Much research has been already done on the subject of tracking shot changes for video cataloging, involving complex (and patented) algorithms. I made my calculation quite simple, determined by differences in the histogram area coupled with a dampening function to normalize the extreme values. The resulting index, which reflects visual changes, was graphed as a gray line. An average of the index was calculated and graphed as a bold white line.

Combining audio and visual changes

Combining the audio and visual indices resulted in what I termed, the “drama index”, a measure of the dramatic highs and lows in a movie. The overall shape of the profile, shown in red, can be interactively smoothed out or made more detailed by changing its resolution in the Story Analysis tool.

What does your favorite movie look like?
Analysis of forty distinguished movies–the top ten of all time, the worst ten, the ten highest grossing films, and the previous ten Best Pictures–not surprisingly reveal no common pattern, but it does provide a standard, objective way of tracking a film’s dramatic peaks and valleys–their position, duration, and intensity. This screenshot is a profile of Star Wars. Note the dramatic beginning when Princess Leia’s vessel is boarded, and the slow build-up to the three dramatic peaks at the end: the rescue from the Death Star, the duel between Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi, and finally the destruction of the Death Star. The analysis works best on modern action films. There is, of course, no consideration for acting, for cinematography, or for the dramatic climaxes that may come in quieter moments (such as the sudden change that crosses an actor’s face with a revelation).

Other movie visualizations
There are many other interesting visualizations of movies. NetFlix recently ran a contest to see if the public could find a more effective way to predict which movies users would prefer based on past ratings. The results of two of the top teams can be visualized as a network of similarities between movies, or as a landscape with similar movies clustered together. (Based on these maps, if you liked Star Wars, then you probably also liked RoboCop).

One recent visualization cleverly plotted the interactions between characters. The hand-drawn map and synthesis of time and geography reminds me a little of Charles Minard’s map of Napolean’s march to Moscow, as discussed and praised by Edward Tufte as a gem of information design.

Finally, the New York Times produced a fascinating look at the box-office revenues of the movies. I love seeing the periodicity in the graph reflecting the predictable huge bumps during the summer blockbuster months and holiday season before the Oscar considerations. Notice also the relatively short, squatter profiles of recent movies compared to the long tails of movies in the past.

What more can we visualize of movies, or the structure of individual stories?

The plan is to build on The Times’ work, which first launched in the spring 2009, and to make it more scalable, generating greater community contributions and involvement. (Read more about the project here.

Jere Hester, director of the J-School’s award-winning NYCity News Service, and I just kicked off a Hyperlocal news course that will help feed The Local with news posts and collaborative projects.

Our goal, however, is not just to have ten students cranking out copy for The Local. We’ll take this collaboration as an opportunity to innovate Hyperlocal coverage on a platform that has growing traffic and momentum to make these Hyperlocal projects meaningful to people living in Ft. Greene and Clinton Hill.

We won’t keep the lessons to ourselves but will share them with you here each month, starting with a post next month on nurturing and motivating community contributors.

In the meantime, if you have ideas about what we should try to implement on The Local, please let us know in the comment section.

When I asked her if there would be a time when such a title would be an oxymoron, she said simply that that time is now.

Schiavocampo has the job many of my students, all aspiring foreign correspondents, want most. With her wheel-on backpack, she goes off to assignments in places like Haiti, Lebanon and Ghana. She blogs, takes still photos, files broadcast pieces for the nightly news and for MSNBC.com, often as her own one-woman video and audio crew.

NBC, like most of so-called mainstream media, has sharply reduced or outright eliminated its foreign newsgathering operations in the past five years. Always the most expensive and perceived by many even inside the industry as the most expendable form of reporting, foreign news gathering has taken a body blow in the dramatically changing economic environment and the digital refiguring of journalism.

But in the supposed ashes of the crash burning of foreign reporting, Schiavocampo and others see a bright future.

“I’m very optimistic,” she said. “We’re finding new ways to tell stories. Things are changing in a way that makes foreign reporting better and more exciting.”

In my shortened career as an editor at Newsday, a paper like several others that closed all of its foreign bureaus, I saw the quick emergence of the advantages of technology in gathering and dispersing foreign news. Satellite phones themselves were remarkably useful as replacements for the scratchy, impossibly unpredictable service from some countries. Transmission of stories in the first Gulf War was possible at times only through cable. Earlier, photographers and broadcast journalists who covered big events like the Iran hostage crisis at times would have to put their film on a plane to get it out to their news organizations.

Schiavocampo, who started out on a traditional path, pursuing a job as a news producer, wanted to be a foreign correspondent. So she left to pitch stories as a print reporter. She added the other skills to meet market demand as a freelancer. NBC noticed and hired her. In that wheel-on backpack, she fits her cameras, two laptops, lights, cables, a tripod and a boom microphone. It all goes in the overhead bin.

Like me, Charles M. Sennott had been a newspaperman his entire career until the Boston Globe closed all its foreign bureaus three years ago. Sennott, with Philip S. Balboni, started Global Post early last year.

“My thinking,” he said as he drove (hands-free) to work in Boston one morning last month, “was 100 percent in the direction of the digital age.”

Global Post is an unquestioned journalistic success with more than 70 correspondents under contract in almost 50 countries, and an ever increasing number of daily hits from not only this country but around the world. Many of the reporters are foreign correspondents who lost their jobs in the abrupt downsizing. But some are talented younger correspondents who never worked for a newspaper or broadcast foreign bureau. Sennott, the executive editor, runs the multi-media website almost as a traditional foreign desk, with assigning editors and copy editors on staff.

“We’re able to put together multi-media packages that are like the best of what was being done when newspapers had foreign bureaus,” he said. “And we’re doing this for the American news consumer. Sure, lots of material is available online from the BBC and other sources. But Americans need foreign reporting that’s geared toward their interests and experiences.”

Sennott is a boisterous personality, passionate about keeping foreign reporting alive. He sees the digital tools available to foreign reporters as a means, not an end, to the pursuit that he has dedicated his professional life to with many years as a correspondent in the Middle East. He continues to report himself, and was particularly proud of this audio slide show he did with photographer Seamus Murphy that accompanied an article from Afghanistan, headlined “Life Death and the Taliban.”

But while the prospects for great journalism are evident in the digital age, the same dogged questions of economic sustainability are on Sennott’s mind a lot these days, as with all of us who love foreign reporting. Global Post seeks advertising and offers a premium subscription service. It pays its correspondents a flat salary that is not comparable to a newspaper and certainly not a broadcast salary for foreign correspondents. It also offers stock incentives.

“I’m really sad that the luxury is gone from having one news organization that took care of you and provided a steady salary, security and benefits for you and your family. It was a wonderful time but that’s over. We have to move on and that’s what we’re doing here. No one knows if Global Post or any other new venture will make it. But foreign news is so important that we have to try.”

The journalist, professor and journalism historian John Maxwell Hamilton, sees Global Post and other ventures not as the dying gasps of foreign reporting, but as a natural progression of an ever-changing environment for foreign news. His important new book, “Journalism’s Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting,” traces the incremental evolution through the colonial period when publishers would go to ships to get reports from passengers through various technological, economic and political developments to today.

Prof. Hamilton’s conclusion is that we are in a new stage that he has called the confederacy of foreign correspondents. In this new world, that traditional path of correspondents working for a news organization as described by Sennott is only one of a rich mixture of types of reporters covering foreign news—from reporters at the New York Times to citizen journalists, who used new technologies like cell phone photography and blogging to figure so prominently in the coverage of news events like the Mumbai terrorist attacks, the protests over the Iranian election and the impact of the Iraq war on Iraqis.

In the book, Hamilton, a former foreign correspondent himself and professor at Louisiana State University, describes the eight members of this confederacy, including local foreign correspondents, who write about foreign news from here; foreign foreign correspondents, non-Americans who are often citizens of the country they cover; parachute foreign correspondents, such as Mara Schiavocampo; and premium foreign correspondents, who work for high-cost news services, such as Bloomberg or Dow Jones.

When I caught up with him in his office, Hamilton was as optimistic as Schiavocampo and Sennott.

“First of all, it’s not as if there is going to be one solution to the problem,” he said. “I don’t see this as a collapse of bureaus leading to less coverage. Some organizations have pulled back on bureaus, but some have remained strong. The bureau concept has changed. The ability to travel efficiently with reduced equipment and with less people saves time and costs.”

Hamilton argues that foreign reporters have always been in short supply and that foreign news has always had the lowest audience of readers.

“It has always evolved slowly and been the most susceptible to changes in technology and economic conditions. But now we have a much greater variety of information available and a wider variety of the types of reporting and reporters available. We are now seeing an adjustment to the changes. In foreign reporting in particular, and journalism in general, it has been a constant adjustment to change. And it survives through the efforts of the journalists.”

Yet for all the apparent complexity of award-winning projects like The Word Train and The Documents of Aribert Heim his core philosophy of design is simple: Get out of the way of the content and create interactive graphics designed to keep viewers engaged.

Simple usability is key. For example, it wasn’t until he put the big buttons on the top right that people seemed to use Milestones: Barack Obama, a time-line of the President’s life, in significant numbers. The time-line itself was too complex to draw people in on its own. It needed a simple point-of-entry for viewers to engage, he said.

During an October 8, 2009, presentation at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, arranged by associate professor Sandeep Junnarkar, Dance talked about his own career trajectory and shared some tips and tricks he’s learned while working at the Times.

His presentation has been edited into thirteen segments, each with individual topics ranging from the need to provide context for viewers around an interactive graphic to the importance of functionality, innovation and the increasing importance of user-generated content. Below are three of the most informative. The entire collection can be viewed here.

Gabriel Dance – Part 5: Usability 2 from CUNY Grad School of Journalism on Vimeo.

Gabriel Dance – Part 11: User Generated Content from CUNY Grad School of Journalism on Vimeo.

Gabriel Dance – Part 9: Transparency & Innovation from CUNY Grad School of Journalism on Vimeo.

(UPDATE 10/4/09: The New York Times received an Online Journalism Award on Saturday, Oct. 3, for its Interactive Graphics, besting MSNBC.com and Wired.com. The category was “Outstanding Use of Digital Technologies, Large Site.”)

In the brave new world of multimedia journalism, there are many considerations weighed while creating online projects, and Dance will discuss some of these issues including usability, transparency, and user generated content.

Dance has been at The New York Times since 2006 and in that time has won several awards from the Society of News Design, as well as being part of the team that received the grand prize in the recent Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism.

DATE: Thursday, Oct. 8
TIME: 6-8 p.m.
PLACE: Room 308

This free event is open to students, alumni, faculty, staff, and guests of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

If you are not affiliated with CUNY, please fill out this reservation form.

Writing captions for photographs displayed on the Web has many similarities to writing captions for photographs displayed in a newspaper–except we can add a lot more information. Here are some important tips on writing captions for the web:

Sequencing the Images:

• When creating a photo slideshow, select a range of images that tell a story and have a narrative arc.
• The intro image should capture the essence of the piece.
• Subsequent images might be portraits of a people or objects that play a central role in the story. Use close ups, wide angle shots of people interacting with each other or with objects.
• Consider the last image carefully: it should be an image that ties the piece together and entices your readers to read the article.

Writing the Captions:

• The intro image should have a caption that contains information that tells us what the story is about.
• The second caption should contain the condensed “nut graph” of the story which gives your audience the significance of the story.
• Do not explain what is obvious in the image, but rather provide additional information that complements the picture.
• Point out what a casual viewer might miss at first blush.
• If there is a central character in the image, provide the who-what-where-when information.
• For each of the above, consider the two following options:
  1. For some images, describe something telling in the image and then provide background info.
  2. For other images, provide background info and then describe something telling in the photo.
• If a photo essay is running along side a story, have information in the captions that draws people to read the story.
• You also have the ability to link to related articles from within the captions. I wouldn’t put in more than one link per caption.
• Even though a couple of images might be repetitive (i.e., a portrait and then a close-up of the same person), include captions on both. Find a creative way to provide information without being repetitive.
• Consider writing a subhead before each caption.

Examples:

• NYTimes.com: Living at the Edge of a Cliff
• Time.com: China’s Deep Freeze
• WashingtonPost.com: In Kurdistan, Hiking With a Purpose
• NYTimes.com: Fishermen in Karachi, Pakistan
• Time.com: The Perils of Childbirth in Afghanistan