Behind the
Scenes:
The Making of 'Amtrak: All Aboard?'
http://www.csmonitor.com/specials/amtrak/index.html
By Ben Arnoldy
csmonitor.com
News Producer
I
am always on the lookout for stories that are best told on the
Web. When I heard an NPR story on a brewing battle in Congress
over Amtrak, I remember how unusually inadequate the radio
report felt. I wanted to see a map of Amtrak’s current system, I
wanted to compare ticket prices with airplanes, and most of all,
I wanted to experience the trains that people continue fighting
to keep. When I felt my fingers itching to get on the web to
learn more, I knew I had a web story.
The news peg turned out to be better than I expected. Five years
ago, Congress had mandated profitability in 2002 for Amtrak and
created a new oversight body to draw up a reorganization plan if
the railroad missed the deadline. Despite the buzz about the new
high-speed Acela service and the blow to the airlines by Sept.
11, Amtrak not only failed to break even by this year, it was
running bigger deficits than ever. Perennial talk of
restructuring suddenly got serious.
In initial planning meetings, the csmonitor.com staff boiled
these events down to three questions: Why is Amtrak losing so
much money? Why do people defend it despite that? And what are
the restructuring plans being considered?
Our staff had been experimenting with a number of online
storytelling formats, including Weblogs, interactive maps, and
audio slideshows. Each of our three questions seemed to be
answered best through a different format, resulting in a
presentation that makes the most of the web’s capabilities.
To get at Amtrak’s business troubles, we put ourselves in the
shoes of a consumer deciding between taking a plane, train, bus,
or car. Time and price are crucial factors when traveling, and
we wanted to let users see how the options stacked up between
cities served by Amtrak.
Comparing fares is a tricky business, however. They are based on
a dizzying array of variables. The best we could do was to
choose the same departure date and the same return date, spaced
enough apart and far enough in advance to avoid introducing
pricing penalties. I made sure to explain to readers the
variables we used and noted other “hidden fees” not included.
I set up an Excel spreadsheet with the list of city pairs as
rows and a travel time and ticket price column for each mode of
travel. Four producers worked to fill in the data, finding the
lowest prices from Web databases used by consumers: orbitz.com
for planes, amtrak.com for trains, and greyhound.com for buses.
The car option required some more consideration, since there is
no “fare” for driving your own car. But there are expenses such
as fuel and maintenance. Fortunately, AAA maintains an
up-to-date per mile operating cost ratio. The AAA site also
offers point-to-point driving times and distances.
We took this spreadsheet that only an accountant could love and
turned the data into a fun interactive map. Users can click on
an Amtrak line and get a quick snapshot of how much money the
route lost (or profited) and the comparison data with planes,
buses, and cars.
However, Amtrak has never
been profitable and, despite that fact, it has many die-hard
fans who keep pressuring Congress to fund it. To convey this
emotional angle of the story, we needed to go beyond the numbers
and take our users on a train trip. And what better train than
the Sunset Limited, the longest ride and largest loser of money?
Another producer and I boarded the train in Orlando with an
audio kit, a digital camera, a regular camera, and a laptop. The
assigned seating at meals turned out to be a perfect way to meet
people to interview later. (And of course nobody could claim
they were too busy to talk!) Generally, my co-producer monitored
the audio levels and shot photos while I interviewed the riders
and staff. I admire those “backpack” journalists that do all
three by themselves.
After interviews we would spend time in our cabin kicking ideas
back and forth and I would start to write pieces of the story.
We wanted the interviews to give people a sense of who still
takes long-distance trains and why. We turned the best
interviews into a slideshow with audio clips that we produced
afterwards in Boston. Our own observations about spending three
days on a train turned into a first-person essay.
Worried about overwhelming readers with too much detail on the
three main restructuring proposals, we opted to tell that angle
of the story through 200 word summaries supplemented by maps,
infographics, and competing quotes from key players.
Almost as an afterthought we
compiled a Weblog from Monitor archive material on Amtrak. It
revealed a striking pattern over the last three decades of
efforts to kill the railroad only to have it keep chugging. The
narrative provided unexpected context for this season’s
breathless predictions of Amtrak’s demise. We now plan to
incorporate archive Weblogs into our future special projects.
While many of our projects rely on the print edition for some or
most of the content, this project was produced entirely by the
Web staff. The print edition ended up repackaging our material
for a consumer story on train travel. It’s nice to see that
content can travel in both directions.
