Online storytelling's 'zeitgeist of exploration'
Talking with WashingtonPost.com's Tom Kennedy

Interview by Dan Willis
Web consultant and former WashingtonPost.com site development director

Tom Kennedy is the Managing Editor for Multimedia at washingtonpost.com and the father and protector of the site's Camera Works section. Earlier this month the White House Press Photographers Association announced 27 individual awards to Kennedy's staff (You can see the winning works here). The volume of awards to a single organization is unprecedented. More noteworthy, however, is that the awards to this newspaper-derrived Web site were in the association's television category (the site has won awards in that category for three years in a row). Under Kennedy's leadership the staff of Camera Works has pushed the creative envelope and experimented with new forms and techniques for telling digital stories to an Internet audience. Kennedy came to washingtonpost.com in 1998 after 12 years at National Geographic magazine, where he was the Director of Photography, and as many years working at daily newspapers as a photographer and photo editor.

Dan Willis: Do you remember the first thing you ever put online?

Tom Kennedy: "It was the night of the first State of the Union speech after I got here (washingtonpost.com). We were able to get an image on the home page about five minutes after the speech started, probably a half an hour before anybody else.

"I remember going through the newsroom and I was like "YES! I'm back!" I kind of looked over (and other people were like) 'What the hell is that guy talking about?' It was a big deal to me, moving over from National Geographic and doing that."

Is the Web a good place to tell stories?

"Yeh. As I was winding down my career at Geographic, I was increasingly dissatisfied with the limitations of print, particularly as it pertained to creating a sense of narrative about a story.

"I felt that there were some enormous limitations that were never going to be broken out of again --- thinking back to Life, Look, and some of the great magazines in their heyday. It just seemed to me that the Web was the answer to it all.

"The Web is an incredibly immature medium so a lot of the defining elements of storytelling are still fluid. It's a more flexible medium for combining elements to provide the most personal and effective kind of story. It's shown me more versatility than other forms of media.

Even television?

Yeh, I think that the television formula is so entrenched and so difficult to maneuver. The options are so limited for documentary storytelling in the broadcast world.

"On the Web, there's still a zeitgeist of exploration going on and a feeling that we haven't written all of the rules yet. There's still a hell of a lot of material yet to be discovered.

"There are probably very valid economic imperatives why print is what it is today and why television is what it is today. To tamper with the formula of it is to risk the economic imperatives that have to go with it to make companies successful. But there are limitations that are onerous in terms of storytelling. I don't want to be bound by those strictures."

So if the Web had a successful business model, then it would be stuck in the same place as print and television?

"Unless we'd crafted the model in a way that enabled the kind of storytelling that I think ought to be at the heart of things and that that was somehow part of the success."

How would you describe the state of online storytelling today?

"I still think we're in an incredibly early stage of development and in an incredibly primitive form. The vision that's in my head a lot of the times is still more advanced than our capabilities.

"I don't know when that's going to change, but I feel like we've not fully arrived. I think we're beginning to understand how the different forms of media can play off of one another and create the kind of experience that I'm describing, but I'm not sure that we've really successfully done it. I think we're still a long way from nirvana on that."

How would you compare storytelling today to work in the early days of the Web?

"I think it's a little bit better. The initial paradigms were so profoundly influenced by what existed in print, at least here, that there wasn't any kind of referencing of what documentary storytelling could be. We're moving beyond the model of a photograph stuck on a page with a whole lot of text as the sum total of a story.

"I think we're evolving past that and the pace of evolution is picking up."

What made those initial paradigms change?

"I think just starting to play with stuff and beginning to see creatively what could work and how it might work.

"We've pursued two tracks simultaneously. On the one hand, I've been really fascinated and focused on trying to execute purely within the video realm; On the other hand, you have to pay attention to the structuring of other kinds of media and their relationship to each other. It's a different sort of experience.

"If you only did one track, I think you'd be closing a lot of possibilities implicit in the other. They both deserve nurturing. There isn't one right answer on the way to tell the story on the Web. I think we need to be alert and adroit and recognize that."

What's different about producing content for the Web rather than for print?

"Well, I'm enjoying this a lot more.

"For most print products, there's such a force of institutional history that it's very difficult to allow for new possibilities. (At washingtonpost.com) virtually everything is new and fresh so there's more of an "aha!" moment when you start to see good stuff.

"I love that joy of experimentation and being able to get in the laboratory and mix all the chemicals to see what kind of polymer you get. It just isn't the same when you're told you've got to mix the chemicals in a certain way, where you know that the formula output is going to be good, but it's always the same output.

"I like being surprised ... and creating surprises."

What's going to happen with storytelling on the Web in the future?

"That's what we've got to figure out.

"There's a level of transparency in the storytelling that we're doing now. We're enabling the viewer and the subject of the story to encounter each other without a lot of noise and distortion.

"At Geographic, I felt that part of the time I was encountering artists that were so supremely talented and self-confident in their abilities that they were mainly regarding their subject matter as an opportunity for them to exercise their creativity. They were less concerned with the subject than putting their creative prowess on full display for the world to see. I always had a problem with that attitude because what really should be on display is the power of the subject matter. The artistry is in the rendering of that subject matter as powerfully as possible but not getting in the way of the rendering.

"That's my hope for our storytelling, that we continue to evolve our sophistication in the mixing of the elements so that people are conscious of being told an incredibly powerful story, but they're never so conscious of the elements themselves that they get lost and diverted from the experience of the story.

"We're at a primitive state in our evolution and we're just in the start of the beginning rather than the end. We've barely inched away from the strictures and restrictions of more mature forms of media.

Are you frustrated by that?

There are days when I am, because I wish we could make progress faster and I wish I could have more sureness about the answers. But I also realize that part of the joy of exploration is not having to move too fast. It's probably unfolding in as good a pace as one can expect.

What other evolution do you expect to see in online storytelling?

"Something that interests me is how we can use the user's action to help drive what we're doing.

"When you think about how e-commerce enables commerce to be done so much more efficiently and so much faster, the Web is really the hand maiden of globalization. It enables anybody from an artist making hammocks in the Yucatan to General Motors to do their business more efficiently. It interests me how you can bring those kinds of transactional values into storytelling and make them part of the experience.

"People are choosing to interact with each other in a certain way that might be different from the ways in which they would have otherwise interacted in the past. It's personalized, but not directly personal.

"For example, I'm telling you a story about what I've witnessed, and you can tell me what that means to you. Then other people can pick up on that dialogue and get something out of that and contribute their own piece. Pretty soon, it's going back to the culture of oral storytelling that existed at the dawn of time."

What storytelling is going on today that you admire?

"In the work of individuals, I see glimpses of creative calculus that are different than some of the things that we're able to do.

"Like Pedro Meyer in Mexico City, he's doing his ZoneZero or Alan Dorow who's doing Musarium. People who are dedicating themselves to presenting some form of multimedia in an extremely compelling and a good way, but not particularly worrying about finding a mass audience or the economic model that's going to make them the next General Motors."