Reading through the Minneapos Star Tribune’s “13 Seconds in August” interactive project is like being a rescue worker or a reporter on the scene of last year’s bridge collapse.
You can scroll through an aerial photograph of the bridge taken just hours after the accident, travel from car to car to learn what happened to each person unlucky enough to have been on the bridge that day.
With the one-year anniversary on Friday, readers still spend hours at a stretch with the site, trying to comprehend the whole event. Staffers have never stopped updating the site with the status of victims’ recoveries. To date, the occupants of 78 of the 84 cars on the bridge have been identified.
Two things stand out: the massive job of tracking down details and the many different storytelling tools used in the interactive site. There are interviews with victims, transcripts of 911 recordings, photo galleries and the voices of many of the victims themselves in audio and video.
In this edited Q&A, lead designer Dave Braunger talks about design and management of the project and graphic artist and researcher Jane Friedmann talks about her never-ending task of updating the information as more is learned about the victims.
Sara Quinn: At what point did you decide to collect all of the information in an interactive site?
Braunger: The staff worked frantically to be able to turn as many pieces of information as we had into a working project.
Originally, the graphic wasn’t a straight vertical photo for the paper version; it was more of a three-quarter shot of the bridge, not an aerial photograph. The print staff was trying to fill it in for a double truck. They were trying to get a really quick idea of profiles and fatalities and things like that.
Rhonda Prast and Jane and I sat down and just thought, “There’s a good chance of getting everything. There’s no reason why we have to stop with that for the online graphic. We don’t have the same limitations as print for horizontal and vertical space. We can do anything we want to do online.”
How were you able to track down all of the people on the bridge?
Friedmann: It wasn’t easy. There were no official sources for that. It was an ongoing investigation, and then there were the privacy issues.
I just started going through the photos we had stored electronically. Some were taken by Star Tribune photographers and others were from the wire. I just looked for license plates. Then, we referenced those license plates for vehicle owners and called people.
I also looked on the Internet to try to find any references to the bridge. Like, “Oh, this is my mom and dad’s car on the bridge.” Anytime someone talked about who was near them on the bridge, I would get some clues. Like, “It was a man in a car by himself.” Or “There were two women, both in their twenties. One had blonde hair.”
It was a puzzle. And I just had to put all of the pieces together.
How did site change from initial sketches to the way it looks today?
Braunger: Originally, my idea of the layout was much more complex and visually complicated. After a while I started stripping the design visuals away and liked how the media really carried the stories.
As the design became more simplified, the power of the project really took over.
At one point, I had all of these plans that were very complicated. I wanted the overhead view to be mimicked with a side diagram, so you’d be able to see the entire span of the bridge. But I kept working on that and, at some point it just got yanked.
I thought, you know, the more crap I throw at this, the less impactful it is.
Simple typography, a simple box. Let the power of this straight vertical, aerial photo carry the design. A lot of people hadn’t seen it before. It wasn’t until you saw that photo that you really understood it.
What is it about the interactivity that makes it work?
Braunger: The site is pure objectivity. There’s no leading the viewer to anything. Everyone on the bridge has an equal amount of representation. And, that’s both good and bad. There are some great stories in there that people really wanted to highlight.
But it just really worked out best to have this kind of flat, kind of scientific way of displaying all of it. Everyone is given equal coverage, equal opportunity to tell their story.
We didn’t highlight which ones had video or not. Readers just went from story to story. It wasn’t really about the media that we had, it was about the information that we had.
How would you describe the reader’s experience?
Friedmann: I think the reader gets a sense of the community that unwillingly developed among complete strangers. The survivors had this immediate bond and interacted with each other while they were on the bridge. I think that interaction helps readers get a little bit better sense of what it was like to have been there.
Braunger: You get so addicted to seeing these videos, you have to watch them from beginning to end. It grabs you and readers will spend two hours looking at this stuff. It’s not something that you can easily bookmark and come back to.
One victim is talking about where they were on the bridge, and they’re referring to another car and then you see the other car and you think, let’s see what these people have to say. It’s this whole puzzle of seeing how all of these events are intertwined.
What sort of feedback have you gotten from readers?
Braunger: To actually keep a time capsule of where everyone was, what was going on — people really responded to that. To hear, minute-by-minute, what happened to these people on the bridge, that’s what we hear about most from readers.
Friedmann: It’s been very positive. The most gratifying feedback has been from the survivors themselves. It’s been somewhat of a cathartic process for them to go through survivors’ stories. A lot of them say it’s been really hard for them to hear these stories, but it made them feel less alone. They felt like there were others who could understand what they’d gone through.
The husband of one victim wrote to say that he had never seen anywhere else a photograph of his wife’s car. He then finally understood how she had drowned.
We also had a lengthy thank you from a health care provider, one of the supervisors of emergency response. He said, so often he and his colleagues are not so forthcoming to media and wished the media would just go away. But now he understands how valuable it is to the community to have us there to help tell the story. He and his colleagues were also really appreciative of seeing the project.
As this information was reported and gathered, how did you manage the workflow?
Braunger: The nature of this project is that the reporters are getting little bits of information over time. It would have been maddening for one person to have to add all of these little pieces as they came in.
So, it wasn’t waiting for a designer to throw this stuff in. We had multiple people with access … they can add content and remove it, edit it and copy edit it. Otherwise, the design becomes such a bottleneck.
It really is an archive. The project was designed as a Flash front end with a back end that is driven by XML files.
The project is actually split into two XML files that drive all of the information. One XML file is specifically for the videos. The second has all of the text and photo and gallery info as well as links to the videos.
Some people might say that you were able to do this just because you had a large staff. What do you think about that?
Braunger: Right. Everyone looks at the news organization that’s bigger and says, well we don’t have the resources to do that. We say the same things around here sometimes.
But it’s a matter of finding out how to do it with what you’ve got. You might have to scale something back, but there usually is a way. It just takes a lot of putting your nose to the grindstone.
I work with two very talented designers. Our Online Design Editor Jamie Hutt and my co-designer Jaime Chismar had great suggestions and ideas that are peppered throughout the project. We work very well together.
We were essentially given one hell of a puzzle. I mean the pieces that we got were great. Great reporting, great video, great audio, phenomenal photography. It really makes a designer’s job pretty easy.
Each of these stories is very emotional. What was it like in the newsroom?
Friedmann: It was a real challenge for me to make that phone call and ask that person if they had been on the bridge.
When I did get hold of people, I wanted to make sure that they knew that I respected their privacy. If they weren’t willing or able to talk with me, that was all right.
Braunger: Rhonda Prast, who was one of the reporters gathering the data, would refer to the victims on a first name basis. People in the newsroom knew the cast of characters, and they felt like they were just kind of climbing into their lives.
Rhonda would sometimes talk about these people by first name, or just by last name. And I would say, listen, I need a number. I just need to know which car you’re talking about. Frankly, all of these stories are heartfelt. And there’s 101 of them, so, I really couldn’t deal with that until later.
The beginning intro to the project was the last thing that we did. And that really kind of sends chills up my spine. They did such a good job of bringing that together. That audio transcript is just spooky. That’s as real as it can get.
Do you think that you will ever track down every person?
Friedmann: I don’t know. I believe there will always be several that we don’t ever find.
