Snowfallization

Posted on October 24, 2013 by Carl Zimmer

Review of "Sea Change," by Steve Ringman and Craig Welch, Seattle Times. Web site.

Review of "The Course of Their Lives," by Mark Johnson and Rick Wood, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. Web site.

Last year on Download the Universe, Veronique Greenwood wrote a review of a story about an avalanche. Journalists write about avalanches fairly regularly, but this piece, called "Snowfall" was different. It was a one-man-band of text, video, maps, and unfolding photos. The story attracted millions of readers and earned scads of awards, including a Pulitzer. And it has ushered in an era of big, ambitious online packages of newspaper reporting. Not surprisingly, science offers some of the best stories for the Snowfall approach.

One recent example is "Sea Change," published last month by the Seattle Times. Photographer Steve Ringman and reporter Craig Welch tackled the immense but little-known disaster that is ocean acidification. The carbon dioxide we pump into the atmosphere doesn't just warm the atmosphere. It also lowers the pH of sea water, making the chemistry of the ocean dangerous for some species. Oyster companies are already feeling the effects of the dropping pH, and if we continue to acidify the oceans at our current rate, the ecological effects could be tremendous.

Here's a nine-minute video from the project:

The package Ringman and Welch have created has three main text stories. It starts with an overview of acidification research, which is followed by two close-ups on fisheries that are being affected–namely, oysters and crabs. (Both are economically important to the Seattle Times's local readers.) Welch reports the stories in the classic mode of environmental journalism, mixing together in-person reporting in far-flung locations with explanations of the research that revealed the scale of the problem. The photos are impressive, the videos are well made, and the visualizations–which try to convey how big the phenomenon of ocean acidification is–are fairly successful.

If you've already read "Snowfall," the presentation of "Sea Change" doesn't feel like a bolt out of the blue. But that just shows how much our expectations have shifted. Just look back seven years to a similar series called "Altered Oceans" from the Los Angeles Times, to see what I mean. The authors, Kenneth Weiss and Usha Lee McFarling, won a Pulitzer for their efforts, which were even more ambitious than "Sea Change." Rather than focus on one way we're ravaging the oceans, they set out to create a picture of all of them, from pollution to climate change.

Although it came out in 2006, the "Altered Oceans" package of stories holds up well today. But the packaging is showing its age. The fancy front page takes you to five stories that are nothing but text. There are also animations and photos, but they're squirreled away in slow-loading pages. After looking at one of these pages, I discovered there was no way to find my way back to the front page again. Seven years of programming advances made "Snowfall" possible–and now raise our expectations for such ambitious online pieces. (Welch recently discussed the making of "Sea Change" with the Columbia Journalism Review.)

From the mountaintops of "Avalanche" and the open oceans of "Sea Change," we take a claustrophobic trip indoors with "The Course of Their Lives." It's a four-part series from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel about medical students dissecting the cadavers of people who donated their bodies to science. There's no news here, no warning of an impending disaster. Instead, reporter Mark Johnson and photographer Rick Wood faithfully follow students through a remarkable experience–getting to take apart another human being, down to the brain and guts. Wood and Johnson both bring an emotional sensitivity to the project that makes reading it a deeply moving, human experience.

While I would heartily recommend "The Course of Their Lives," I would also point out some shortcomings. I don't want to belittle the piece by talking about them; they're worth talking about as a way to ponder the kinds of decisions that newspapers make when they create Snowfall-esque stories about science.

Some of the bells and whistles attached to "The Course of Their Lives" don't add much. The videos are mostly of talking heads, who sometimes speak stiltedly. Distilling people's words down in compelling written prose remains a superior technology to a video camera that's simply switched on.

I was also underwhelmed by the interactive anatomical diagrams that went along with the stories. They're meant to illustrate the lessons that the students learned about the cadavers, organ by organ. But who actually needs to see lungs light up on a diagram of a body to know what lungs are? The powers of visualization, both online and in apps, are spectacular. (My favorite anatomical example remains this ebook about Leonardo Da Vinci's anatomical sketchbooks.) But there's no point in using those powers simply to check off a box in a to-do list. It's another lesson that we should respect the technology of prose.

Ironically, the prose itself in "The Course of Their Lives" also felt a bit antiquated. American newspaper journalism long ago settled on a certain style. The paragraphs became short, and the sentences shorter. The words needed to be plain and serviceable. There were perfectly good reasons for this approach–but a lot of them had to do with the physical properties of printed newspapers. Stories couldn't be made of densely packed paragraphs, for example, because editors would need the freedom to cut off sections of stories at the last minute to make them fit their available space.

These were good reasons, but they had some odd consequences. Along with their standard fare of short news pieces, newspapers would also prepare a few massive, long-form pieces–Pulitzer-bait, essentially–but these pieces often retained the staccato structure of short news stories. In these sprawling pieces, that style read strangely. And once New Journalism's masters like Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese turned magazine features into a new art form, the adherence to the old style in newspapers became even more peculiar.

Today, as newspapers and magazines shift online, that style has grown even more out of date. If you read stories from publications that got their start online, such as the Atavist, you never find the staccato style of old newspaper stories. There's no need to adhere to it.

Thus "Sea Change" and "The Course of Our Lives" serve as illustrations of journalism in transition–created by people trying to figure out how to bring the best of the old world of newspapers and leave the rest behind.

(Photos: Top-Steve Ringman, Bottom-Rick Wood)

Zimmer author photo square Carl Zimmer writes the "Matter" column for the New York Times and is the author of 13 books, including Evolution: Making Sense of Life.

A Year of Downloading the Universe

Posted on February 26, 2013 by Carl Zimmer

By Carl Zimmer

It's now been a year since we started exploring science ebooks here at Download the Universe. By the time we got the site off the ground, people had already started producing some digital gems. The first work reviewed at Download the Universe, The Elements, brilliantly dismantled the ingredients of a book and rearranged them to take advantage of the touch-sensitive iPad. In 2011 science writer Laurie Garrett had taken the leap to Kindle in order to write I Heard the Sirens Scream, a harrowing account of how the United States responded to 9/11 and the anthrax attacks.

Yet we were also dismayed to discover find a lot of wasted opportunities. David Dobbs delivered the first unbridled attack on a stinker, a silly pamphlet called Smile that promised that grinning will solve just about anything. Likewise, I reeled at The Demise of Guys, an incoherent ebook by a prominent psychologist convinced that men were lost to porn and online games.

Both of these books were published by TED, based on talks that they had hosted. While there's a lot of good stuff to be watched on TED, there are a fair number of talks that pretend to be based on solid science when, in fact, their foundation is a thin, cracking skin of ice. Smile and The Demise of Guys didn't seem to be carefully vetted by an editor who would push back against poppycock. Both ebooks felt as if they had been simply waved through like cars in a line of traffic. In fairness, we did give positive reviews to some other TED Books–Controlling Cancer, What's Killing Us, Living Architecture to name three. But that unevenness makes us wonder if the quality of ebooks depends on the author and the author alone.

Absentee editing was not unique to TED. Meandering Mississippi was based on a series of newspaper articles–by which I mean they were little more than cut and paste into a new format. An ebook about dinosaurs was little more than a digitized cable documentary. An ebook about the Titanic somehow managed to lack any passion.

It would be a shame if ebooks became nothing more than hastily assembled spin-offs of print books, documentaries, or lectures. Fortunately, as this past year progressed, we had lots of good reasons to keep our hope for ebooks alive. New ebooks turned up that exceeded our expectations, or simply popped up far off the grid, beyond our preconceived map of what ebooks could be. I still enjoy turning the pages of Leonardo's anatomical notebooks, intercalated with insights from modern anatomists. For some of the best ebooks the term "ebook" barely even functioned. Snowfall was a ravishing account of a deadly avalanche hosted by the New York Times web site. Ironically, when it was turned into a more conventional ebook (if ebooks are mature enough now to even be conventional), it became a far less satisfying experience.

This past year also offered hope in the form of new publishing outfits dedicated to ebooks, many of which were about science. They were few in number and small in size, but they typically showed a level of care and creativity that much bigger publishing companies lacked. Symbolia offers comics science journalism. Byliner and Matter produced some excellent pieces of "in-between" science writing–too long for a magazine article, too short for a book.

Top honors go to the Atavist, a Brooklyn publishing house that produced an impressive string of pieces over the past year, on subjects ranging from moon rocks to brain-controlled robots to the mysteries of consciousness to a hunt for tree kangaroos. While readers can buy a stripped-down Kindle version, they can also buy an edition with elegantly incorporated maps, audio recordings, and other features.

Like many other journalists and scientists, we also dipped our collective toe into the ebook waters. David Dobbs joined Download the Universe having already written the best-selling My Mother's Lover. Deborah Blum published an absorbing account of a sensational murder trial called Angel Killer. I helped build an app to accompany a textbook about evolution I co-authored. Seth Mnookin edited a Matter ebook about regenerating organs.

I expect we will delve deeper in the year to come, both as writers and as reviewers. Over the past year, we've published over 80 reviews and essays, and we've got a healthy inventory of titles we're looking forward to writing about in the months to come. The ebook business is continuing to grow, but it's still hard to find out about new science titles. We plan to keep making it a little easier.

Zimmer author photo square Carl Zimmer writes frequently about science for the New York Times and is the author of 13 books, including Evolution: Making Sense of Life.

Great Investigations Deserve Great Ebooks

Posted on January 23, 2013 by admin

In The Wrong Hands, by Ryan Gabrielson, California Watch/Center for Investigative Reporting. $.99, Kindle Single.

by Deborah Blum

For well over a year, the investigative reporters at California Watch (part of the non-profit center for Investigative Reporting) have been pursuing a story involving abuse of mentally ill patients in state care - and of institutional indifference to that abuse.

That investigation, led by Ryan Gabrielson, focused on five state operated centers that house "some of society's most vulnerable citizens – men and women with severe autism, cerebral palsy and other intellectual disabilities living in taxpayer funded institutions." To sum up the results, it found that center residents had been beaten, tortured and raped by staff members. And that a police force, set up to protect resident safety, had apparently helpfully looked the other way.

The stories, first detailed in a series called Broken Shield, are best described as horrifying, a litany that includes the taser burning of a dozen patients, the rape of others, and the death of a quadriplegic patient with cerebral palsy, who died of internal bleeding after three cotton-tipped swabs tore through his esophagus. None of these incidents, as the investigation makes clear, were thoroughly evaluated by the well-paid police force assigned to those centers. In many cases, including the worst ones, no charges were filed.

There's another interesting issue here–the platforms which California Watch used to tell this story–but I'd rather start by considering its importance, its indictment of the way we care for helpless and troubled people, in particular the system in California. And to acknowledge that I'm not alone in this reaction. Everyone from newspaper readers to state officials was appalled. The stories prompted major reorganizations of centers, investigations by outside experts, and new legislation, signed by Gov. Jerry Brown, mandating far stricter law enforcement oversight. This month, the state agreed not to seek Medicare reimbursement for care at the most troubled centers. This is a story that matters, one of the reasons I wanted to bring it up here.

These powerful changes are foremost a result of really powerful reporting. But California Watch also amplified that effect by making sure that its findings were heard across multiple platforms. The stories were placed on its website. They were distributed to newspapers across the state, running in all eight of the state's largest newspapers. They were showcased on radio programs, partly through the center's partnership with KQED. Videos were provided to television stations. California Watch even produced a graphic-novel style video, which illustrated the trauma suffered by patients and their families.

And in December, the Center for Investigative Reporting published the series as a 99-cent Kindle single titled In the Wrong Hands: How a Police Force Failed California's Most Vulnerable Citizens. In one sense, the single is perhaps the least impressive part of this approach. It's a workmanlike summary of the original series rather than a uniquely good e-publication in its own right. The story-telling remains in a basic newspaper format; there's a puzzling lack of illustration, audio, video or really anything would bring additional life to the telling.

This is less of a problem in a gorgeous narrative or exceptionally fun-to-read story. But this is neither of those things. In the Wrong Hands reads like what it is –a repackaged newspaper series rather than a well-articulated book. It's dense enough and dark enough to occasionally be a challenge to read–exactly the kind of story that benefits from other kinds of media–perhaps even some of California Watch's own novelistic video. I suspect that with a little more time and care, this could have been a more substantial and more meaningful e-single, one that would have reached an even wider audience (when I checked on January 21, its Kindle single standing was 364,414).

I respect–and even admire–the California Watch model for distributing news and for solvency in a digital age (briefly outlined here at the Nieman Journalism Lab). But as someone who also has hopes for the e-publishing age that we are growing into, I'd like to argue for setting a high professional standard for e-books, both short and long, one that really moves them beyond old-time print. If we're building a new model of story telling then there's nothing wrong wanting it to be a really good one.

And, after all, a great investigation–which In the Wrong Hands was–deserves a great platform.

Deborah Blum, author of The Poisoner's Handbook, published her first e-single, Angel Killer, last year. She writes for numerous publications, blogs about chemistry at Wired, and teaches journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Snow Fall: A Gorgeous Ebook Comes to Life on the Web

Posted on December 21, 2012 by Carl Zimmer

Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek. By John Branch. The New York Times and Byliner.

Reviewed by Veronique Greenwood

On Wednesday night, a mysterious new article appeared on
the New York Times site. News of it began to leak out via Twitter, and people who headed over to read the first chapter of Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek, an account of a backcountry ski run turned deadly, found a piece not only grippingly reported but
physically gorgeous, laced with soaring animations of the mountain, a looping GIF of the wind over the snow, and haunting audio and video captured by the
survivors. Here's a sample of the reaction, from Atlantic correspondent Yoni Applebaum:

That @johnbranchnyt feature on Tunnel Creek? If this is the future of journalism, it looks beautiful: nyti.ms/UGCPpU

— Yoni Appelbaum (@YAppelbaum) December 20, 2012

By Thursday morning, the rest of the story–five further sections in all–had been posted, and we'd learned that Snow Fall, a groundbreaking example of
journalism enhanced by the web, would appear without multimedia features in the Sunday edition of the NYTimes and be the first ebook released
through a new collaboration between the New York Times and Byliner.

I've read the story and examined both the Web and ebook versions, and I'm here to tell you: buy the ebook if you'd like to carry the text around with you, but please, please do yourself the favor of reading it online.

The story starts on the back side of Cowboy Mountain in Washington. Two days' powder lie thick over the landscape, and
professional skier Elyse Saugstad and a group of 15 other ski industry professionals and local experts have just joyfully begun the descent of an
out-of-bounds run named Tunnel Creek. Standing in a copse of old-growth trees, Saugstad looks uphill and sees something that should not be there: a
two-story-high wall of snow. Seconds later, she and an unknown number of others are buried in a river of ice that, if it had not already crushed them to
death, would suffocate them within minutes.

These skiers and boarders weren't noobies. Over and over again, you hear, in the survivors' own voices in the embedded videos, that this was a dream team
of backcountry skiers with decades and decades of experience between them. They would have known if it had been unsafe to go. But in meticulous reporting
John Branch gently teases out the new technologies that have given out-of-bounds skiers enough of a boost in confidence that avalanche
deaths have leapt in recent years, along with the cultural effects—the politesse, the bravado of even smart skiers—that clicked together like the parts of a deadly machine in
Tunnel Creek.

The comparison that immediately comes to mind is with Young Men and Fire, the last book written by Norman Maclean. Maclean's 1992 masterpiece is a reconstruction of the
Mann Gulch Fire, a disastrous 1949 blowup in Montana that consumed 12 smokejumpers, the elite fire-fighting parachutists of the Forest Service, in less than 10
minutes. As I watched the animations laying out the tracks each skier took, and watched the helmet cam videos of Saugstad and others taken just before, and
after, the mountain fell, I thought, “This is what Young Men and Fire would have looked like, had the smokejumpers had video on their helmets.”

If the Byliner version, which has only text and a few photos, were the only version, I'd be crowing over it. But having seen the beauty and skillfulness of
the web version, I have to wonder why the New York Times did not release Snow Fall through The Atavist, which has made it their business
to tell multimedia stories in ebook form. Perhaps there's a business question in play here. After all, the Atavist offers stripped-down Kindle versions of their stories, which sometimes climb up Amazon's best-seller charts. For now, there may just not be enough demand for elaborate programming for these long-form features. And since the Times has already built Snow Fall an online home–and, as of Friday morning, sold most of the advertising
slots in it to Sotheby's–they may see the ebook simply as a way to skim a little more cream off what they've already done, without investing too much more work.

That's a bit of a pity. But at least we'll always have the Web.

Veronique
Greenwood is a staff writer at DISCOVER Magazine. She writes
about everything from caffeine
chemistry to cold
cures to Jelly
Belly flavors, and her work has appeared in Scientific American,
TIME.com, TheAtlantic.com, and others. Follow her on Twitter
here.

Evolving Fish, A Dying Sea, And A New Genre: Digital Comics Science Journalism

Posted on December 6, 2012 by Carl Zimmer

Symbolia. First issue free. Subsequent individual issues $1.99. Annual subscription $11.99. Available as an iPad app or pdf; other devices to come. See web site for details.

Comics first gained respectability as art, then as storytelling, and more recently as comics journalism. Joe Sacco's celebrated Safe Area Goradze, for example, showed how comics journalism could deliver powerful portrait of life during wartime. Published in 2001, Safe Area Goradze was the product of a pre-ebook age, the sort of printed work that you might buy as a deluxe hardbound edition and display on a shelf. A decade later, comics journalists are increasingly giving up paper and going digital.

A new example of this new genre is Symbolia, a magazine that released its first issue this week. It's been generating a good deal of buzz, with write-ups in venues like the Columbia Journalism Review, Poynter, and Publisher's Weekly. I decided to check it out and discovered a creation that was fit for reviewing at Download the Universe. That's because three out of the five stories in the first edition are about science.

Continue reading “Evolving Fish, A Dying Sea, And A New Genre: Digital Comics Science Journalism” →