Behind the scenes of Frontline's international election package
FRONTLINE/World has launched a great new online project that helps gives voters an international perspective on the U.S. presidential race. "Dispatches from a Small Planet: Election 2004" features new web-exclusive reports each Tuesday through the election, from both young "backpack journalists" and from award-winning veterans such as Lowell Bergman and Orville Schell.
FRONTLINE/World producer Angela Morgenstern gives CyberJournalist.net a behind-the-scenes look at the making of this fantastic project:
"We wanted to build on FRONTLINE/World's signature style of backpack journalism and bring a unique angle to U.S. election coverage -- on the Web....
"I think the exciting part of this project is that it truly represents a willingness on PBS and FRONTLINE's part to put resources and editorial focus on Web-only projects. While the broadcast is on hiatus for the summer, we are putting all of our energies into the Web site, recruiting prominent writers like Lowell Bergman, as well as up and coming young journalists who have not been published before. They'll be writing and photographing specifically for the site and its needs.
"The effort is very entrepeneurial, with a core staff (our seasoned editors, 1 part time producer, 2 part time APs and a part time designer). The Berkeley journalism school is playing a major role in the effort (we are housing our summer offices there and students are helping out with researching, factchecking, and more), and the project is funded by PBS.org and Carnegie Corporation of New York, with some in-kind contributions from Berkeley J-School.
"PBS.org deserves a lot of credit for this project - they approached us about doing something for the elections with an international focus because they liked the fact that FRONTLINE/World was taking risks on its Web site, going beyond the broadcast, making appeals to a new audience, and giving opportunities to budding journalists. This will be included as part of PBS.org's BY THE PEOPLE election coverage.
"We'll be rolling out a dispatch a week for the next 14 weeks, as well as one major interactive feature TBD. All the dispatches are originally written for the site and commissioned from journalists who are traveling abroad. We're leaving flexibility in the schedule to cover countries and events as the news curve changes, always with an eye on providing insightful context to our own political process.
This fall we will be rolling out four more FRONTLINE/World Fellows pieces which are extensive Web-only online journalism projects. This year's fellows travel across Europe, to Haiti, Afghanistan and Kashmir. We'll be using the fellows projects as an opportunity to really experiment with online video and flash in a more rich and creative presentation format. Enthusiasm from the up and coming reporters always helps feed that process!
Since we don't have a broadcast driving traffic during the summer and early fall, a major test of the experiment will be our ability to form web partnerships to create mutual traffic to each weekly dispatch and fellows project. So far we are working with Yahoo! News, Pew, and others, and the experience has been great. We are very interested in building a coalition of online news partners who are interested in linking to us, as well as possibly being listed in appropriate areas. Each week our crack team also makes overtures and conducts outreach to like-minded area sites and blogs, to try to grassroots word that this content is fresh and available.
"Please note that with the elections project we will engage users with weekly chats on our partner site Washingtonpost.com. with a chat with that week's correspondent or relevant expert, every Friday at 8am/11am."
Angela adds that the employees have been "producing the site from across the globe -- at various points throughout planning, we have been true 'new economy' workers, all communicating via the Web and from wireless laptops, with our correspondents in all corners, and at various points our editors in Italy and South Africa, myself in Colombia, and our APs in Canada and Costa Rica!"
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