News and Analysis Advertising Press Clips

Web Dreams for Journalists:
Inside the Making of Columbia's NYC24

Editor's note: We asked the journalism graduate students who put together NYC24, an ambitious Web-based publication of the New Media Workshop at Columbia's J-school, to tell their story this week. @NY editor Tom Watson served as an adjunct professor in the workshop this spring.

By Jonathan Dube, Arik Hesseldahl, John McGrath
For the New Media Workshop

Call us crazy. We wanted to capture the essential New York, package it all together and put it on the World Wide Web for the world to see.

At least, that was the idea we got while drinking a few pitchers of cheap beer at our local watering hole (No cliches, the professor said). The problem, of course, is that there is no essential New York. But that didn't stop us.

So after our class--24 students in the Columbia University School of Journalism's New Media Workshop--agreed to the project, we tried to think of a focus.

We thought about the city workers who make the city tick. We debated ideas on stereotypes about New York. One person suggested focusing on the "pulse" of New York, whatever that meant.

In the end, we decided not to have a focus. You see, we've learned a lot here at journalism school. So we came up with 2,457 stories about New York--more or less--and then realized they all sucked. So we came up with 13 others, and went with those.

We decided we wanted to be a real publication, so the first thing we had to do was create an unwieldy bureaucracy and make it hierarchical so that people could order each other around and make each other's lives miserable. Just like the real world.

Early on we realized that production was going to be a challenge, if not a nightmare. We'd all worked on smaller sites before--homepage-length stories with relatively simple navigation. We knew that the size of the site we envisioned would complicate navigation exponentially. A story is really just a story. But when you're dealing with the Web, you have to make an extra effort to hand-hold your reader, and sometimes even despite your best efforts, the reader gets lost.

What we needed were common threads to stitch together the disparate stories and helped readers navigate through the series. In our case, that thread turned out to be time--the two-hour time slots we imposed on ourselves on April 18, beginning at midnight, and ending the following midnight.

We kicked around the idea of using two characters, as site guides to provide a humorous entry point to each story. Enter Umlaut and Tilde, fictional characters played by two students, photographed wearing silly clothes in sillier poses. They were to be digitally forced into contrived postcard-style photographs connected to each story. This idea died around 4:30 a.m. the morning before reporting day, when Danielle Fino, our creative director, had a vision of the hell all these mixed metaphors would lead us into, and pulled the plug. Never mind the fact that this was supposed to be some form of actual journalism, a craft not known for mixing fact and fiction. Exeunt Tilde and Umlaut.

By the 18th a few story ideas had died on the vine, only to be replaced by emergency backup story ideas. The reporters had collected background material and each had been assigned a two-hour period in which to get their story. Our unsteady Deus ex machina was ready to be set into motion.

The J-school's sixth floor computer lab, also known as our second home, became the nerve center of the operation, where cameras and tape recorders were stockpiled and passed out to those who needed them. Editors stayed on the job around the clock waiting for phone calls from reporters checking in, either in a panic or ecstatic based on the relative success or failure of their stories.

Then Mother Nature decided to send New York a nor'easter. Things got a little wet, but our reporters managed. Bundeep Singh Rangar, our Times Square Bureau Chief, stayed in Times Square for the entire 24 hours, yielding an interesting collection of scenes, including the guys sweeping up the sidewalks as punishment for minor crimes and some stand-up comics at Comedy Nation.

So what did we learn about telling stories on the Web? We learned that there are more tiny technical details to worry about, when building a Web site of size and scope of NYC24, especially when you start from zero. Many of us learned how to defy our natural instincts that cry out for sleep and normal food and human contact.

And when it was all over, we found ourselves right back where we started. Drinking cheap beer at our local watering hole.

SEE THE SITE