Collaboration is Key: A Conversation with Mr. DeVigal

Andrew DeVigal is an award-winning storyteller who helped shape the way news in presented on the internet. He was trained with a background in design and graphics, but lead his career though his passion for journalism and an interactive approach to sharing human experiences using collaboration through graphics, video, photography, print and audio. He is praised in high regard for his work as senior designer and producer at ChicagoTribune.com and as the multimedia editor at The New York Times. DeVigal has also won a plethora of awards from Emmys to the Jim Gordon Editor of the Year award.

I was fortunate enough to spend some time with DeVigal and talk about the state of journalism, its interplay with social media and how his approach to collaborative storytelling has led to innovative decisions in the newsroom.

My first question is very general. What is your definition of Multimedia Journalism? Does it differ from what most people believe, which is telling a story with more than one medium?

Well as the former Multimedia Editor at the New York Times I always said that title and that description was just awful. If it is multimedia, meaning all media, then it is just media. It is actually ill-defined and it actually hurt me, I think, when I worked at the Times, because they just said “Oh, he does it all.”  It incorporated video. It incorporated photos. It incorporated graphics, text and audio. That is ultimately what it is, but at the same time it is just, to me, storytelling. It’s just media.

When I left the Times, I was not surprised that they ended up dismantling my team. Each member of my team either went to the graphics department, the video department or went to the design department. Or they even went to the technology end. If you think of multimedia as a unit, then does that mean the graphics department not do media? Or that the photography department not do media? In some ways, it is all the departments together. It is all the visual material. When you think of multimedia, it is a very audio and video type of experience. I don’t know if that differs from most people. I do believe that in some ways that video and audio is multimedia because there are two mediums, but most people would just call that video, but to me it is multimedia. If I had it my way, I would not call anything multimedia. It is like just calling it “New Media”. It is embarrassing to call things “New Media,” because it is all just media.

I spoke at a keynote to 700 high-schoolers the other day and they were talking about how the rest of the day there would be a track for digital skills training, which is awesome. It is great that they think of it that way, but ,really, in a year from now or hopefully even sooner, it is going to be just skill training because most things are going to be digital. It is almost odd to even have a newspaper design course, because it should just be design, because you want to design for both print, interactive video and for web and for mobile. That is where readers are shifting towards. So why limit yourself? It should just be called design just as much as multimedia should just be called journalism or communications. It is how we tell stories.

Now that mediums, like DSLRs and Audio kits, are more affordable and user-friendly what do you think separates what I call “Internet Reporters” and Journalists?

How do you define internet reporters?

Well since social media is so easy to use, anyone can post up anything  up and call it news. There is even an app where someone can learn how to put together news packages using their phone and put it online. What separates someone who can do that from a journalist?

I wouldn’t say separate. I think there is a balance. I think it is dangerous when we start putting up walls between things.  It is almost as dangerous as saying graphics designers can only do graphics or photographers can only do photography. Creating those silos is what is the issue in the first place.

One of the professional reasons I left the New York Times, was because I was excited to be involved with an newspaper that was at the top of its game but it was still a top-down approach to storytelling and information sharing. That is one side of the spectrum. The other side is the unfiltered social web. Anything can happen. Everybody sort of talks and nobody listens.  To me, its Mayhem. Chaos.

When I left the Times, I wrote a blog post about being excited to find an equilibrium between these two polarizing ends. When is it appropriate to tell a story with social media and have a little bit of traditional media that we consider as  journalism? Or is there a balance that drives it the other way? It depends on the story, but I don’t think there should be divide. We should encourage an ecosystem where journalist and the public are truly intermixed.

If you  look at the way we have been doing journalism for the last decade, it is going to look like one extreme side of storytelling. I don’t think that business model has been working. But we also can’t just do the unfiltered social web either, because then we are going to have shit like the Boston Marathon and the users on Reddit trying to identify and had a witch hunt to find the perpetrators. That clearly didn’t work, but at the same time that unfiltered social web influenced newspapers to run photographs of the bombers on the front-page. There has to be a systematic approach to be able to share information. Maybe teach the fundamentals of journalism, such as ethics, reporting, authenticity and sourcing to the unfiltered web.  And as being traditional journalists in some ways , learn how to understand the behaviors of the community so that they are informed and participate as a democracy.  In the future, journalism might be practiced in places that might not fit as traditional journalism.

It sounds like from what you are saying is that the things we as journalists are trained in, like ethics and sourcing is what is different between the two.

Right. I also think there is another value of having the empathy to truly understand that there is more than one side to a story. I think that is where media is falling apart right now. Our Ideology is so fixed on how we want to distribute or consume news. We tend to just go to one ideology and say “this is what I believe in so I will stick with my people and believe in this.” That’s dangerous.

You mentioned your professional reasons for leaving the New York Times. As we are developing our skills set, we are also developing our guidelines for what type of place we want to work for. Do you feel like some of the standards in better known organizations like the Chicago Tribune or the New York Times limit journalists to tell a story or empowers them to tell a great one?

I am going to steal some words from Mike Fatcher, the interim director of the Univeristy of Oregon’s School of Journalism abd Communication’s Turnbull Center and Agora Journalism Center. When we ask the question “what is journalism?”all too often we try to answer that question by looking at the things of past. We try evolving what we have learned in the past and innovate. I think what we need to start thinking about is how do we start to shift to really look at the future as an answer to that and see what is possible. It comes to the same understanding and essence of being disruptive means you have to leapfrog the existing status quo and create something brand new. To experiment and to maybe fail or engage and collaborate with other constituencies you normally wouldn’t have collaborated with . To me, that’s what is exciting and that is how we should define what is the future of journalism.

What do you think makes a complete multimedia journalist?

A complete multimedia journalist knows his or her strengths and leverages that, but also knows his or her weakness and has the ability and compassion to collaborate.

That is the second time you mention collaboration. So it is a big —

Hell yea it is a big word. With a capital C!

So how important or realistic of an expectation is that when looking for work in this industry? There are one-man bands, shooting, recording and editing all by themselves. Is that really something we should expect to be doing out in the field?

Collaboration is the way I have always approached journalism. In fact, that was my job at the New York Times. To try and foster an environment of collaboration so that technologists who know how to invent new story forms can work with the visual or audio storyteller so that they can present new story forms with amazing content. A developer can’t just generate that, but at the same time a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer isn’t going to be the one coding a webpage. That collaboration absolutely needs to happen. Only then will you actually be able to innovate in so many ways because of the power of interdisciplinary perspectives of new approaches.

That has been one of my concerns; learning the one-man band. Some projects now are that way and others call for collaboration and it is so much easier and efficient that way and has some beautiful shots and interview.

The question at the end of the day is which one has a better product? It’s the one with collaboration.

And there isn’t one way to say all collaborations are better though.

It’s how you define collaboration. To me, if collaboration is all designed by committee, that shit fails.  Collaboration is not everyone having feedback. Collaboration only happens when you recognize as a team who provides what expertise.  For example, if you are trying to get together a designer, a photographer, a videographer  and an audio expert, then does the audio expert have a say in what the photography should look like? Then that is compromise. Then you are trying to satisfy everyone’s values and perspective. That’s bullshit.  There is a reason that there is a strong photographer in that team because that is what that person does best.  Let’s respect that and let that person be in charge of that particular media. That is when you are truly leveraging the interdisciplinary skills, because you are collaborating with the expectation that everyone brings a skill set unique to the team.

What is your favorite bodies of work that you have created?

When I worked at the Times,  we did a couple packages that I really enjoyed. It is one of those things I can’t really claim because some of the ideas came out of collaboration and someone else had a great idea or that we edited through a decision that had happened weeks ago. Out of those collaborations came two projects I am really proud of.

“One in Eight Million” profiled the lives of New Yorkers. We did it on a weekly basis in 2009. For a full year we profiled 59 New Yorkers throughout the year. That was fun. It was amazing to work with Todd Heisler who is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer. The black and white photography was just stunning.

 Click image to go to One in 8 Million via NYTimes.com

It was bold. It was something we had never done before. It originated from the digital newsroom rather than the print newsroom.  It supported the belief that audio is the backbone of multimedia storytelling. We led every story by finding a person with a compelling and amazing story and then verified that their voice was also compelling and could add to the story and then finally finding a way to visualize that based on the edit we were working towards rather than the opposite.  We weren’t shooting for a visual story and then capturing audio later. It was about the narrative.  It was really an amazing approach and thoroughly enjoyed producing it and am particularly proud of it.

The other one that I highlight was this project in which I worked with James Dao, Damon Winter and Gabriel Dance in we would visualize and present another year- long project called “A Year at War”. We followed a battalion from upstate New York to Afghanistan and did episodic releases. It was visually stunning, the editing was top notch  and the presentation and engagement for that project was really innovative at the time. Those are the two things I am particularly proud of in terms of multimedia story telling.

Click Image to go to A Year at War via NYTimes.com

One of the pieces that people here at the U of O talks a lot about is Snowfall. What was interesting about it is that the piece was published after you left the New York Times. One of the most stunning things about it was its use of graphics, along with the photography and interviews that came with the story. The graphics though are probably the most untraditional  of all the things we are learning.  Is that something you feel journalist now should be learning to create?

I agree with you. The informational graphics and the diagrams helped visualize that narrative of how the skiers went down and how that tragedy happened.  It was essential and raised the bar. The other area of graphics is the integration of data visualization.  How do you organize data and tell a story through it. How do you present it in a way that people can understand it and identify the trends in a much more consumable way as oppose to just sending it out as plain data.

Click Image to go to Snowfall via NYTimes.com

It is a whole different craft for most people who are trying to be amazing photographers or videographers . You have to switch your brain in another way to understand data and present it in a visually compelling way.  It is one of those things where I would encourage collaboration again. Snowfall was the utmost of collaboration. The answer to your question is collaboration, but if you have an inclination to data visualization go for it. I think it’s a huge gap in the news industry at the moment because there isn’t enough people who are doing it well.

The one thing I will add with Snowfall and the idea of innovation is more around the narrative. As you mentioned, by the time it was published I was already gone from the Times and here in Portland. The presentation of it was extremely innovative ,but I would actually say the true innovation happened months before it was published. When that package landed on my desk the summer of 2012, I thought to myself  “Oh my god.” John Branch was going to write it, who has great access to the story and the survivors of the avalanche. It is a story that has enough compelling information that happened in the past, but not in the recent past so that the story can’t influence it. There was a way to tell the story in a visual matter through photography, video and especially in graphics.

I ended up talking to the graphics director, Steve Duenes, and we were excited to do something special. We set up a meeting with the sports editor, Joe Sexton, and basically said “We really want to go big with John Branch’s next package and I think it is going to be amazing. There a lot of great possibilities here, but here is one catch. We need to edit the words with you.”

Joe Sexton being Joe Sexton, who is an amazing editor and human being, his reaction was “Hell No. John Branch is my writer  and reporter and there in no way you are going to touch our words,” and he walked out of the meeting.

Steve and I had to pick up our jaws from the floor and said “what the hell just happened?” We thought the project was at a loss, but then two days later Sexton’s deputy Jason Stallman called me and said “I just talked to Joe. He is in.” He have been great collaborators in the past and why would we do him wrong.  That to me was the innovation. Changing how we do business. The innovation of being able to say yes and look at story in a truly multimedia way.

What do you think changed his mind from a dramatic “hell no” and walking out to a yes?

If you know Joe, you know he is very dramatic and impulsive and that is what makes him so great. I asked the same question to Jason Stallman. He reinforced to him that we did a great package on Derek Boogaard the year before with an amazing interactive video package and Sexton was the editor when we did “One in Eight Million.” So he knew we were capable of doing phenomenal work. It was the idea of us editing his words which was the challenge.

Click Image to go to Punched Out via NYTimes.com

What led you to the idea of editing his words?

We knew that we wanted to be able to present graphics, video and photos interspersed within the experience of reading text. To be able to do that required us to work closely with him to look for paragraphs we could take out and suggest that we can say it better with graphics.

You are well-decorated when it comes to all the different places you have worked. You have worked all over the country for different news organization.  Which was your favorite and why?

I would say the New York Times. That was the epitome of my journalism career.  It was rewarding because I was working with Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters, photographers and editors at the top of their game and they were so passionate about journalism, news and storytelling.  It was also extremely challenging because it was one fucking tough place to pitch ideas. To be successful there, you really had to learn to sharpen your elbows.  People owned what they believed in and I loved that. That is an inspiring place to be so you really had to prove to yourself and to others why your point was relevant. There was no better place to defend your belief and, at a place with unbelievable resources, evolve a story form so that engages readers in a different way. It was both challenging and rewarding.