It began with appalling numbers: On average, Hispanics perform lower on achievement tests — in all subject areas — than their white counterparts. Regardless of location. Regardless of income or socio-economic status.

This was what Dr. Eugene Garcia, an education expert and former education official in the Clinton administration told our News21 seminar. The topic was the gap in educational attainment between Hispanic students and their peers in the U.S. public education system.

We decided it was a story worth delving into. We did not want to create a story painting Hispanic students as victims or one that would show them as incapable of overcoming systemic obstacles in their way. That would just encourage apathy. Our editor, former executive editor and senior vice president of “The Sacramento Bee” Rick Rodriguez, suggested experimenting with what he called solution-based journalism.

In solution-based reporting, journalists uncover a problem and attempt to give the audience evidence of what society can do to fix it. As we immersed ourselves in the subject, we found students, educators, projects, programs and individuals that were successfully in bridging the achievement gap. Highlighting some of the most successful endeavors, we built our documentary-style narrative — using the aesthetics of a MediaStorm production — around these success stories. We did not shy away from the stark and disturbing realities facing Hispanic students in our education system.

One of the main tenets of the Carnegie-Knight News21 Initiative is innovation. As we got further into our story, we realized our project essentially followed the same conventions as a short-form documentary for television. Not exactly innovative. So, we began tackling this idea and had conversations with our managing editor Jason Manning and visual journalist Andrew Long about how to differentiate our project from a program one might watch on CNN.

We believe the Web video experience it is a fundamentally different experience from watching the evening news on your television, but how? The main difference is the end user’s behavior: instead of sitting back in the recliner or sofa, one naturally leans forward toward the computer — interacting and engaging with the material. As digital media producers, we decided to find a way to capitalize on the different opportunities this lean-forward dynamic creates.

One solution is to provide a rich, multimedia experience with a customizable and interactive video player. There is no reason not to place links, graphics, augmenting audio or video inside the bounds of the player, creating a fuller package for the audience. When a source mentions a data set, why not allow it to be downloaded on the spot? If geographic context is needed, why not give the viewer the option to immediately view the map? Layering media gives the producer limitless possibilities to provide a more synergistic and full experience.

But why stop there? We should give the ability to create a project of this complexity to anyone, regardless of programming knowledge. Create a tool capable of building the player.

Nothing we’ve mentioned here is beyond the capability of a competent developer — such as Britton Halle who built our tool this summer. What is necessary are journalists who know how to have meaningful interactions with developers. But most content creators do not moonlight as programmers and don’t have the good fortune to share a newsroom with one. To allow other producers to replicate similar project formats, we created an open-source tool to allow producers without these resources to achieve the same effect of layered media.

This is something journalism hasn’t done enough. It is our wish that this idea doesn’t simply burn out and die. We want to take this tool and the idea of building more than just content out into the professional world. Show newsrooms and producers what they can do when they work with developers and take risks to change the status quo. That is why we plan to submit our project to the Knight News Challenge. With the aid of Britton, some creative and forward thinking newsrooms, and tons more hard work, we hope to make our profession believers in the benefit of building success through innovation.

About midway through the Spring 2009 semester I decided on a topic to pursue for the coming summer News21 journalism initiative.  The topic was broad: Latinos in the military. I decided to do a little research on the Web to see if there were any discussions already brewing.

Last August, I joined the social networking site Twitter, where millions of people share their thoughts about everything and anything.  I wanted to know if anyone on Twitter was talking about my topic, so I threw a few word combinations at Twitter’s search engine.

Nothing much came up in my first few searches but eventually I got a few results by searching for “citizenship AND military.”  One of the results was particularly interesting.  It said:

“My heart breaks for him that can’t go in the military. He should B able to  serve the 4 yrs and B given the opportunity to get citizenship.”

The message was posted on April 9 by a user named “Yankeelin” and was the third “tweet” in a series about this individual.  Prior messages from the same user said:

“My daughters boyfriend Alberto is from Mexico too. He’s been here since he was 5.”

and

“…and he graduated H.S. as the top ranking ROTC cadet in NC, but his family and him are not legal. So he can’t go in the military!”

I found the story compelling, so I saved the links to the posts and forwarded them in an e-mail to my reporting partner for the summer project. The subject line was: “Maybe we can use Twitter to find stories?”

On May 18th, the first day of the News21 program at Arizona State, I decided to follow up on this story but I wasn’t exactly sure how to proceed.  How does one approach a complete stranger on the Internet?

Yankeelin’s Twitter profile revealed that her name was Linda and lived in North Carolina.  A White Pages search of her name and hometown returned one result with a phone number, but I decided a less forward method of first contact might be more appropriate in this case.

On Twitter, you can send a message to other users by beginning a message with the “@” symbol followed by the person’s username.  One problem with this method is if the user does not log onto the service frequently, he or she could easily overlook this kind of direct message.

The other challenge was that Twitter limits each message you send to 140 characters, 11 of which I would be using up with “@yankeelin” and a space before my message.  So cramming an introduction and an explanation and a request to talk was going to be tough to do in 129 characters.  However, I managed to squeeze in the following message:

“@yankeelin Im a student studying latinos in milit, love to chat about ur daughters bf Alberto (saw ur tweet from april)- chcameron@gmail.com”

By sacrificing some punctuation (”I’m” became “Im”) and with the use of some well known Internet abbreviations (”ur” for “your” and “bf” for “boyfriend”), I was able to get my message across in exactly 140 characters.

A few days went by and I considered calling the phone number that the white pages search had turned up, but to my surprise, just before noon on May 20, I received an e-mail from Linda in response to my tweet:

“Hi I saw your ‘tweet’ to me about my daughter’s boyfriend wanting to go into the military.  You were writing me in reference to a tweet I wrote back in April.  My daughter’s e-mail is attached, and the two of you can communicate about it.  Her name is Jo Beth.”

A few emails to Jo Beth eventually led to some phone calls with Alberto, the JROTC superstar with dreams of joining the military.  He mentioned that his girlfriend had explained how we found him and we shared a laugh over this unorthodox way of reporting.

The more my reporting partner and I chatted with Alberto the more interested we became in his story.  Here is a kid who was the top JROTC cadet in the state and all he wants is to serve his country in the military, but he can’t due to his citizenship status.

We pitched his story to our editor and the decision was made: we HAD to talk to this young man.  So we booked our flights to North Carolina.

Next thing we knew we were sitting in Alberto and Jo Beth’s living room with two cameras, a lighting kit and a notebook full of questions.  We emerged a few hours later having squeezed every last detail out of Alberto and feeling very confident about the story.

As we flew home from the East Coast, it was amazing to think that the opportunity to interview Alberto started with a successful search on Twitter.

Celebrities and others have given Twitter a reputation for obnoxious and pointless messages about what someone ate for breakfast, but in terms of connecting with REAL people with REAL stories, it was the perfect tool.

The word innovation gets thrown around A LOT these days within the journalism profession. Nearly all news organizations are talking about innovation and some are hiring “innovation editors” whose job descriptions are often nebulous at best. An inside joke in the industry says to never accept a job with “innovation” in the title — because your days will be numbered.

Innovation is often in the eye of the beholder. What seems ground-breaking to one journalist may elicit shrugs from another.

At ASU News21, we came up with our own simple definition. For us, innovation could be any way of reporting or presenting news that has not been tried before — or has been tried only sparingly. We added the requirement that these new methods should improve the news for our audience. We challenged ourselves to think of ways to help readers and viewers have a better experience when interacting with our content.

A brief explanation of each of our projects is included below. Are these projects truly innovative? Our readers, viewers and colleagues can judge for themselves.

TRAVELING VIRGIN

Deanna Dent is a talented multimedia reporter who had been mulling a project on the Virgin of Guadalupe for some time before joining the News21 project. The Virgin’s story is unique. What began as a purely “Latina” religious character has transcended all ethnic, national and cultural boundaries. Deanna felt the story could be best told using multiple content formats. She also wanted to let viewers skip to any part of the story they wanted to at any time. She proposed providing only the barest form of linear structure — in the form of three main “pods” with branching “subpods.” News21 visual reporting instructor Andrew Long helped Deanna conceive of the design framework. She then worked with Web developer Britton Halle to complete the project. We have seldom seen media presented in this fashion on news Web sites.

BUILDING SUCCESS

During the News21 seminar taught by Professor Rick Rodriguez, reporters Elizabeth Shell and Jeremy Pennycook discovered an interest in education among Latinos. The more they learned about the challenges facing Latino students, the more concerned they became. So they decided to focus on a few programs that have won national recognition for their success in helping Latino students close the achievement gap. They thought the story was best told primarily through video — but they wanted the ability to present other content formats at the same time, in as seamless a fashion as possible, so that one could watch the video while looking at a graphic, reading a bio, etc. When Jeremy and Elizabeth searched for a tool that would help them do this, they found none. So they decided to work with developer Britton Halle to create one. The result is an an Adobe Air application that can be downloaded here. The project is open source. We welcome additions and improvements.

SHIFTING FAITH

Two News21 reporters, Travis Grabow and Emily Graham, felt drawn to aspects of religion in Latino life. They started their research independently but soon came to the conclusion that combining their projects would make for a stronger story. Emily focused on “re-conversos,” those Latinos who find they have Jewish roots and decide to convert. Travis focused on Latinos leaving the Catholic church for “newer” religious traditions. A “looking back” to Judaism and a “looking forward” to new faith motif emerged from their discussions. Developer Caige Nichols adopted a “carousel” tool that allows viewers to scroll forward and back through the project — as if through time. Along the way viewers interact with the story via video and text.

ANALYZING AMNESTY

Reporter Evan Wyloge felt drawn to the current debate surrounding “immigration amnesty” or a “path to citizenship.” While researching the story, he became convinced that most people don’t realize that immigration amnesty happened before in the United States — under President Ronald Reagan in 1986. Evan set out to tell the story of that program’s impact and to look for a place where a new amnesty might have the most effect today. He also wanted very much to engage readers, policy experts and the subjects of his stories in an ongoing discussion. The result is the Twitter widgets readers find on each page of his story. They are calibrated to bring in discussion on very specific topics — and to make it easy to start new discussions. Evan started out to build his own social media aggregator, but the folks at Twitter pre-empted him with an effective aggregator/widget tool of their own. Evan is still working on his tool with developer Caige Nichols. They plan to make it more effective for journalist who want to tap social media in an intelligent way.

FIGHTING BATTLES

During the News21, seminar reporters Chrystall Kanyuck and Chris Cameron became interested in the subject of undocumented immigrants who serve in the U.S. military. This interest soon expanded to include many aspects of Latinos in the military. The reporters were struck by the compelling human stories as well as interesting data they encountered. Convinced that most presentations of data in news articles are often removed from personal stories, Chris and Chrystall set out to create a presentation that presents data in a visually compelling way while also giving respect and weight to individual people. With the help of instructor Andrew Long and developer Caige Nichols, the pair put together a Flex/Flash presentation to accomplish their goal.

CROSSING LINES

No News21 reporter traveled farther or into more challenging circumstances than Dave Kempa. During the seminar, Dave became interested in the motivations of border crossers. This led to a number of trips to the border region and one trip to a small town in southern Mexico. Dave expanded his inquiry to include not only the motivations of border crossers but the circumstances and people they leave behind. He also looked at attempts by people in Mexico to build their own economic opportunities so that their children won’t feel compelled to migrate. Dave has an unabashed love for the written word combined with respect for the role of photography and video in storytelling. He wanted to combine the two in a unique way — to give readers/viewers the best experience possible. The result is a three-chapter article that automatically cues relevant multimedia at just the right places in the story.

CHANGING POLICY

News 21 reporter Christine Rogel delved into the complex issue of immigration law in the workplace, with a particular focus on the federal program known as E-Verify. Christine had to dig deep into state and federal policies — as well as the personal stories of workers and business owners. As she finished her project Christine sought a way to present this policy-heavy story in a way that would invite readers in. The result is a Flash video introduction in which Christine literally becomes a part of the story package, personally explaining the issues and inviting the audience to learn more.