Herald-Tribune shows the way for Flash and database journalism
I’m still scooping my jaw from the floor after looking at the Herald-Tribune’s Flash interactive on how complaints about teachers are handled. Not only does this use Flash cleverly – particularly to illustrate the complex process through which complaints go (now try doing that in print), along with audio clips – but it’s integrated with a database so you can search by district and school, keyword, or even map, a great example of database-driven journalism. From Journalistopia:
“It took the Herald-Tribune 14 months and repeated threats of legal action to obtain the database under Florida’s public records law.
“Even then, some information turned out to be so inaccurate that the Herald-Tribune decided to create its own version, reviewing 30,000 pages of administrative documents to build a database […]”
Inspirational.
4 Comments, Comment or Ping
Shane Richmond
It’s really well executed (though the navigation gets a bit tricky in places) but did you see the graphic on the front page? What were they thinking? Talk about undermining the gravity of the story…
Mar 20th, 2007
Charlie Szymanski
The graphics department was unfortunately brought into the project by the reporters way late in the project. Many ideas were shot down and there’s no real good way to show Teacher Abuse in an image. Such is life with deadlines I guess.
Thanks for the kind words about the application though. Shane, what kind of problems did you have with the navigation? There are a lot of things I wish I had done differently, but for the most part I like how it behaves.
CS
Mar 20th, 2007
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