New York Times SpoolCast Announcer: Andrew DeVigal and Steve Duenes of the New York Times interviewed by Jared Spool, recorded from the studios of User Interface Engineering, December 11th, 2007. [music] Brian Welcome, I'm Brian Christiansen, producer of UIE Podcasts. This Christiansen: week, our Jared Spool interviews Andrew DeVigal and Steve Duenes of the New York Times. Andrew is the editor of the multimedia desk, and Steve is the director at the graphics desk. A great deal of the visual content that you see in the New York Times goes through them. Jared asked them for a behind the scenes look at the processes and inspiration that goes into their work. The duo will also be presenting "Engaging an Audience: Using Out of the Box Thinking to Create Great Designs" at our web-app summit this March in Coronado, California. We're excited, and if you'd like to join us, check out WebAppSummit.Com for more information. And now, here's Jared. [music] Jared Spool: Welcome, everybody. I have on the line with me today Andrew DeVigal and Steve Duenes. They are from the New York Times. They're going to be speaking at the UIE Web App Summit. They're going to be talking about the journalistic process that The New York Times for doing some of their interactive graphics, which is one of my favorite parts of The New York Times. I'm always excited to open up my online edition and see what fascinating graphics have been put together. One of the first ones that really attracted my attention was the home run analyzer that you guys put together, which was this interactive way too look at the different home run records over time, and how fast people achieved them. Of course, this was all in the light of the Barry Bonds story, and did he actually achieve something at a faster rate than, let's say, Hank Aaron or Willie Mays. But, in talking to you guys about this before the recording, one of the things that I learned about this was that this is an ongoing data driven application. This wasn't just a one time thing. Is that correct? Steve Duenes: Well, it started out as a one time thing, and then, obviously, people continued to hit home runs, and so... I think originally the chart was limited to just the top 20 home run hitters, or those who had hit just 500 home runs. As the season progressed, others were making it onto the list. I think Alex Rodriguez made it onto the list, and Jim Thome. So, there was sort of a need to keep the chart updated, and Matt Erikson here quickly tweaked it, wrote a script, and that allowed the chart to update itself. We ran into some problems later in the season, but ultimately that worked out pretty well. Jared: So, this is something where you didn't really imagine it would be this automatically updated thing, but as time went on that was a function you added in. Steve: Yeah. You know, a lot of the interactive graphics we produce are kind of one offs. Meaning they go up. They tell a story. They're sort of available to readers for a few days, and then ultimately they're always available. People can Google these things and find them, but they're not really heavily promoted on the site anymore. And so, like a newspaper story that sort of comes up and goes away, some of our interactive do the same. That's kind of how we were thinking of this. Barry Bonds was approaching the all time record, and your description is right. The chart really looks at the connection between the age of the home run hitter and the number of home runs that they hit. We thought it would just be a one time thing, but obviously as the season progressed, the producers wanted to continue to link to it so there was a need to amend it. Jared: Now, how many of these types of interactive multimedia experiences do you guys create in a month, would you say? Steve: Well, it depends on the month. Jared: [laughs] A normal news month, I guess. Or do you do these more in a slow news month? Is this something you guys do as a background to other activities, or is this really...? How's that work? Steve: We are working on them in the background. I think Andrew's group... Maybe Andrew can answer this question better than I can. We're tied a little more tightly to the daily news. Do you want to....? Andrew DeVigal: Maybe one clarification. Steve and I, we collaborate very frequently on projects, and Steve leads a relatively large group of graphic and visual journalists, and I lead a group of multimedia journalists that look on either the audio side of things or the multimedia side of storytelling, as well as other components that we do with multimedia. So, when news arrives, the opportunity to collaborate together is when we deliver these high impact multimedia stories that you've mentioned with... We can talk in a little bit about in the future, or in this podcast about, such as the DNA gunneries or the date analyzer where we usually team up together to produce a package, so, in response to your question, Jared, about how frequent. It really is depending on the news events as well as what's happening with the overall site. My team is also involved in creating and developing templates or tools that allow a larger number of producers to be able to tell their stories in a multimedia approach. Jared: So how does that process work? Let's take the debate analyzer. That's a very cool application. It's basically allowed people to... Why don't you describe it? I'm not going to do it justice. How the debate analyzer works. Andrew: Right, the debate analyzer. It sounded... It is what it sounds. It's a way to interact with the transcript during the debate. In it, you can get a side by side display of video, as well as the transcripts from the debates. We've done about, I believe, seven of these since the end of December. And, within the transcript, you can also randomly access certain points of the transcript via a list of major topics. So, you can actually scroll through, rewind through the video, as well as the transcripts. So, that part of the tab was developed on my desk by a guy named Gabriel Dance, one of our producers. The second tab allowed folks to be able to actually type in specific words or phrases to search within the transcripts. The entire piece... The second tab generally was produced by Tom Jackson, but that overall piece was collaboration from a number of folks from Steve's desk. So, the user interface, the flow of the information, and all the back end programming was a collaborative effort. Steve: The majority of the effort on that piece was definitely Andrew's crew. Specifically, the transcript analyzer... Tom's programming work on that was pretty extraordinary. I think part of the inspiration for that piece comes from some of the print graphics that the graphics desk has done in the past. The one that I'm thinking of is one that we've done for a couple of years that analyzes the State of the Union address. So, what we've done is we choose 20 words, from Iraq to Afghanistan to taxes to immigration and count the number of times that the President mentions those words in the speech. Then, because it's the same speech you have kind of a consistent set of data that you can compare one year's speech to the next years. What you start to notice are these patterns emerge. There are years when, you know, he is very keen to talk about Social Security and health care and his focus is clearly on domestic issues. So, you see those numbers, the number of times those words get used. Those numbers are high, and then the next year depending on what happened in the country or what his policy focus is, the emphasis will switch to Afghanistan or Iraq, words that have to do with foreign policy. And so, over the course of a presidency you see these patterns build up, and it's very interesting just to look at a number of years and see how things change, how the emphasis of the speech changes. With the tool that Andrew's team has built that analysis occurs basically on deadline. You can look at the emphasis that different presidential candidates are striking during the debate. It's not quite the same thing, but the concept is very similar. Jared: Hopefully the goals a bit, as we collect more and more and record and transcribe each of the debates for the coming election we can also scan them over time and distinguish any patterns over one debate over another as the time progresses. So, that's the hope of what we'll ultimately get with the Debate Analyzer. Steve: So, basically the Debate Analyzer to some extent is a tool kit that you put together that you can now just sort of plug debate content into. How much customizing do you do for a given debate? Jared: There really wouldn't be any customization. Otherwise, once the platforms are built out we don't necessarily customize per debate because we want that consistency throughout over time. There is a certain amount... Steve: For example, the YouTube debates where the questions were coming from these sorts of YouTube folks versus from a news moderator. Jared: Right. Steve: Did you have to change for that? Was that something you anticipated from the beginning or was it something that just happened to plug in nicely or... Jared: We just sort of, as with any news story that we try to cover and present online - we basically respond to how the story unfolds. That just happens to be the way that... Steve: I also think that the structure that they set up, you know, with the transcript that describes a moderator or describes a questioner is kind of broad enough and flexible enough so that whoever is asking the question if it's a news person or if it's coming via YouTube, the structure that they set up still holds up. It's still able to accommodate that change without them modifying the interface. Jared: Just to be clear, it's not an easy matter of just plugging it in. For each debate there is a certain amount of leg work to be had to make this happen, so... [crosstalk] Steve: ...from the front end. I'm sorry? Jared: Can you say a little bit more about what that leg work is? Steve: Well, I mean, recording the video itself and being able to get the transcripts time coded at the same instance. There is a lot of fine tuning to make the entire piece work the way, as smoothly as it does now every time we run these cells. It's not a simple plug and play situation. Steve: Right. So, you've got a fair amount of work. Is there work that crops up in the moment that you weren't able to plan for as much at this point, given that there's been, at least for the 2008 elections, 700, 000 debates so far and we're not even in 2008 yet. Has it gotten to the point where you know all the steps and the steps are really straight forward it is just a bunch of leg work that has to go into it? Jared: Yeah, I can say that is pretty accurate. There is certainly a lot of leg work in terms of basically making it, producing it within our template. Just to be clear, the development on the front end was tremendous. To be able to create a video roll and make it responds directly to a transcript, and makes it searchable. I mean those are pretty heavy programming work from Tom and Gabe on the front end. So, with the knowledge of what hypo-content we were going to expect and what type of content we were going to search on. That's part of the challenge that we had to sort of think about on the front end before we even used it on the particular series of debates. Steve: Now you also mentioned another project that you were particularly proud of. Jared: DNA Exonerated? Steve: Could you talk a little bit about the story behind that and sort of how that project came about? Jared: For that particular story we...obviously it is not an entirely new story in terms of the DNA Exonerated. A lot of it comes from the Innocence Project. In terms of the exonerated being recognized through DNA. So it was part of a story that was reported over a year. As the news desk came to us, in terms of how to present the story in a multi-media fashion. Our desks were pretty much deployed in thinking about how to successfully put together some big old presentation and seamlessly compel our viewers. You know with our voice and with the heart of the story. Supported by the facts and the numbers of the data and that is where the challenge came to be. Steve: This is a story of people who had been sentence to prison for crimes that subsequently DNA has exonerated them. Jared: That's right. Steve: So, this explorer tool that you put together basically talks about each of these people and talks about in many ways what their life was like as they realized that they are now no longer in prison. Jared: That's right, and we focused the story on their life after prison rather than the actual circumstances. And that was the focus of the overall piece. The one year reporting that was done ahead of time was really looking at one specific exonerated, Jeff. Jeffrey, and what we wanted to do was sort of surface the body of work or basically surface the other stories in allowing the voices of those men to be heard as well, literally. So, part of the goal of our presentation was to present smaller bites. Smaller sound clips on the front end so people can actually hear the voices of the exonerated, and as you drill down as you go into the interactive there are ways to explore the voice of the story, the voice of the men, as well as sort the different numbers and the different data within the interactive, relatively difficult to explain without actually showing the visual of how that is done. I encourage the folks to get on NY Times to check it out. Steve: Right. Right, and again we will provide a link in the show notes for the interactive piece. What is interesting to me about this particular thing is the way that you combine text and visuals and the audio component. How you let people basically explore all of those things. Jared: Right, and again I think that was also the handy work of Mr. Tom Jackson on my desk in terms of how to produce that with a flash component. It's also...it was a collaborate effort of working with the rest of my desk. I worked very closely with Steve's desk on thinking on how to present that information as well as working Coy Vince Design Group in terms of some of the usability of aspects of presenting a complex story of this fashion, as you recognize with multiple data points and multiple audio files. We look at that and we kind of think about other applications that we have used to be able to surface audio tracks, for instance. You might see a hint of an iTunes kind of feel, but obviously it's something we try to fit within the context of the story. Steve: Right. So, I guess that brings me to a question about how you guys are sort of inspired by other things that are built by folks. Do you guys get together and say, "Hey, look at how iTunes does this particular way that they represent audios playing, or look at how this tool does this?" I mean, do you spend a lot of time sort of exploring and talking about other applications that are not necessarily related to reporting the news but could have design elements in them that you could take advantage of? Jared: I don't know how much we talk about it. We talk a little bit about it, but I think both of our groups explore different outlets. We're part of the culture, so iPod is kind of ubiquitous, and it's hard not to be influenced in some way by some of that interface design. For our group, inspirations come from a variety of sources, things that have gone on in the graphics department in the past, what other news organizations are doing now and what they've done historically. I know a great source for us has always been the old Fortune Magazines from the 1940s, to look back at what the graphics desk that, magazine did at the time. It's really kind of amazing the quality of the information graphics they were producing. It extends even into advertising. I can think of a Microsoft campaign that they ran in magazines where it was a photograph and there was kind of a child's drawing over top of the photograph. And what the reader was supposed to do was to assume that Microsoft products would allow you to kind of imagine different possibilities beyond just what the reality is in the photo and to apply that kind of construct in kind of a weird way. Actually, that was an apartment building on the Upper East Side that exploded about a year and a half ago. So, the thing that we want to do for readers as graphic journalists was to show them what existed before the apartment building was gone. So, we had a photograph of the rubble, and we made a very simple line drawing on top of that that represented what the structure looked like before and we were able to annotate that to say what existed on what floor. Obviously, the information and tone and everything is very different, but the inspiration in terms of how it's constructed, something very basic is inspired by an advertisement. I really don't have anything else. Do you want to jump in? Steve: Obviously, we're all users of a certain amount of technology from Apple products to even Google products. I mean, there are certainly inspirations that we come about just by general use of what we do. To be honest, I'd like to think there is a certain amount of expertise on both of our desks as well as Coy's design desk that kind of would want to challenge some of that norm and just sort of say, "You know what? Maybe, this will work. It's not somewhat new, but there's ways to explore it and try to make it easier for the user. We get inspired, but we also would like to try to think that we can break some new ground with some of our interactive. Jared: I think that's true. I do think that even within the building, you know, we don't sit with Ander's group, and we don't sit with Coy's group or other people who are doing different kinds of design work in the building. Sometimes you see something that they do and it influences what you are doing and you sort of build on that, and then they see that and they sort of build on it a little bit more. And so, there is plenty of kind of internal inspiration going on as well. Jared: Yes, I am consistently blown away with how clever you guys, the stuff you do that recently you had an interactive graphic about RV trailers. Steve: A long time ago, you mean? [Laughing, chatting, and talking over one another] Andrew: ...through it. You can see through it? Jared: Yeah, yeah. No, it wasn't a long time ago. Steve and Steve: About a year and a half ago. Jared: Was it a year and a half ago? Somehow I just discovered it. I don't know how I found it. In this particular interactive you have this trailer that you can move this magnifying glass over, drag the magnifying glass, it shows you what's inside the trailer and again, it's one of these things where you could easily just done a side by side with an inside and an outside, but there's something just compelling about dragging this magnifying glass around and what I really like is in the kitchen the burners seem to actually burn. [laughter] Steve: A rare little bit of cheese from the Graphics desk. We try to keep things straightforward but the designer on that project, who is really a terrific designer; Sean Carter was working from a piece. The piece came from the print section of the "Weekend Review" and Bill Marsh, who is our graphics editor over there, kind of had this idea. He noticed the trend that RVs are just getting huge and he thought it might be fun to make a comparison to... I can barely recall exactly what the specific comparison was, just because it seems like it was so long ago. That's seems like years ago. [Laughing and cross talk] Andrew: That's like years ago. [Talking over] Many projects before... Steve: You're right, one of those little silver bubbles and so, you know, Bill gathered the information and then Frank O'Connell, a great 3D illustrator on our desk, put the drawings together and in print obviously you don't...there's no magnifying glass application, so they approached it a little more conventionally, Sean made the leap to think about what we were trying to show, that it was interesting to show both the exterior and the give readers access to the interior. That was what he came up with. Jared: It's gorgeous. It's seamless, in terms of how it works. Images just flow. You really do believe that you are, sort of, looking into this...you are somehow looking through the screen and into this vehicle. When in fact, it is really just really fast Flash graphics, but it just shows how you can take something very simple and do some amazing stuff with it. So it's very exciting that you are going to be talking about this in March and I'm going to encourage our listeners to attend our seminar so they can hear you talk more about this but I want to thank you guys for taking time today to talk to us a little bit about your inspiration and how this stuff becomes soup and we look forward to hearing more from you. Thank you very much. Steve: Thank you, Jared. [music] We hope you have enjoyed this podcast. You can comment on this and other episodes as well as find more UIE podcasts at UIE.com/audio. Don't forget if you would like to hear more from Andrew DeViegle and Steve Duenes be sure to join us for their presentation at our Web App Summitt, March 26 through 28, 2008 in sunny Coronado, California. You won't want to miss it. Learn more at WebAppSummit.com, that's all for this week. Thanks for listening. Good-bye.