OS Exclusive: Interview with Ted Genoways, Editor, VQR
This week marked the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on Mumbai, India, in which 162 people were killed, and scores injured. I began a series of articles that mirrored Virginia Quarterly Review's decision to run a four-part long-form journalism piece that would be exclusively online.
The articles, which all-told, totaled 19,000 words, told a stunning tale of chaos, terror, the deliberate infliction of suffering, and a response from Indian armed services and police that seemed to contribute to the death toll.
Jason Motlagh, the author of the article, spent months interviewing survivors and researching the details. The result is something stunning. And, I believe, ground-breaking. It heralds good things for what can be done online.
This type of journalism is usually saved for the pages of print. VQR's decision to run it online was monumental, and I was curious, now that the series was complete, how its editor, Ted Genoways, felt the experiment had gone. He was gracious enough to allow me to interview him.
In our interview, we talk about the successes and limitations of writing long-form journalism for the Internet.
LB: What was the genesis of the idea for doing long-form journalism as a blog piece? Why not publish it in the print journal?
TG: Jason Motlagh had written an outstanding article for us about separatist groups in India and came by the VQR offices to discuss what he might work on next. I wondered if he thought it would be possible to undertake a long-form narrative of the Mumbai terror attacks. Jason has great contacts in Mumbai, especially with reporters there, so he agreed to give it a go. The original idea was to publish it in our Fall issue, but Jason was still working as the deadline approached--and the piece kept get longer and longer. But it wasn't just getting bigger; it was getting better. We started talking about releasing it on the web as a way of letting it run as long as it needed to be and also timing its release closer to the anniversary.
LB: Now that you've done it, what is your initial reaction to the response the piece(s) have received? Do you think it would have have attracted a larger audience in the journal? Or do you think that you've benefited from word of mouth (something that is hard to do with journals, I would think.)
Probably the most gratifying element of the response has been hearing from survivors of the attacks--words of praise and thanks but also additional information and refinements of the timeline. We're working on a revised version of the article, something else that wouldn't be possible with a print publication. It's still too early to judge the full readership of the whole piece, but we've already had a strong response. The upside of the blogosphere is that it's democratic nature allows a great piece like this, even if it's from a small publication like ours, to circulate widely and swiftly. The real question is whether we can convince foundations or other funders to support this kind of journalism, because it's expensive to produce and putting it up free on the web doesn't do anything to offset those costs.
LB: What is the future of this piece? Is it something that your writer is going to turn into a book?
That's up to Jason--but he's gotten a number of inquiries from agents and book editors. I think that it would make a great book, and Jason is the perfect writer to undertake that job.
LB: Having done this once, and really broken new ground, would you do it again?
That's an interesting question. This piece was really a special opportunity, and I think that we should try experiments like this only when we feel like we have something as singular and important as this piece is. On top of that, this isn't the kind of thing that we can afford to do often unless we can identify sources of support. So I think we've proven that we can undertake this kind of ambitious reporting successfully and shown that there's an audience out there for it. Now the question is whether we can figure out a way to pay for it. The web is a cheap delivery mechanism, but multiple trips to Mumbai, months of research, and the staff time to edit the piece, prepare it for the web, and promote it, isn't free. We're lucky to have great support from the University of Virginia, but in tough economic times, we need to find a few altruistic supporters of journalism who see this kind of work as important, whether it's profit-generating or not. I'm optimistic that such people are out there.
> As so many complain that the web is full of 'bad journalism,' this piece will become my touchstone for rebutting such nonsense.
That's great--and you're right: it's untrue that the web is bankrupt of good journalism. And we're actually very excited about the possibilities of mixing traditional media with new media. Indeed, one of our principal foundation supporters, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Journalism, underwrote an article that we published by Kwame Dawes about HIV/AIDS in Jamaica. Pulitzer funded a photographer, Joshua Cogan, and film crew to accompany Kwame. They developed that story into news segments for PBS and, with support from the MAC AIDS fund, into an incredible online project called "Hope: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica" <http://www.livehopelove.com/>, that recently won an Emmy for "new approaches to news and documentary programming."
Kwame also wrote poems that he and Josh turned into audio slideshows. That approach inspired a project called In Verse that I created with radio producer Lu Olkowski. That project produced paired poems and photographs for the current issue of VQR (Susan B. A. Somers-Willett and Brenda Ann Kenneally in Troy, New York, and Natasha Trethewey and Josh Cogan in Gulfport, Mississippi), but it also turned into several amazing radio segments for WNYC's Studio 360 <http://www.studio360.org/episodes/2009/11/06> <http://www.studio360.org/episodes/2009/11/13> and some incredible audio slideshows that exist solely on the web. That project got off the ground because of a pilot program called Public Radio Makers Quest 2.0, an initiative of the Association of Independents in Radio funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
What I find hopeful about those projects is that they represent a convergence of nonprofit organizations--print, television, radio, and multimedia storytellers working with altruistic funders like MAC AIDS, Pulitzer, and CPB. At a time when journals are threatened and support for journalism is dwindling, these initiatives seem vital and exciting to me--evidence that great storytelling can be carried out on the web as easily as any other medium.
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Comments
One of the problems in situations such as these is the failure of the police to correctly identify the situation, and to respond appropriately based on the situation. These fall into two main cateories: hostage taking, and what are called "active shooters."
With hostage taking there is an initial outburst of violence, followed by the shooter(s) settling into a static, often barricaded position. In other words, he's not going anywhere, and additional victims, other than the hostages, are unlikely. Police response in such situations tends to be more deliberate, taking time to bring in the SWAT team, the hostage negotiator, setting up communications, etc.
With an active shooter the intent of the shooter is to kill as many people as possible. Thus the shooter is not in a static position, but is moving within a building, or moving from building to building, or even from block to block. In those situations police response must be much more aggressive, focusing on immediately containing the shooter and making it difficult for him to target new victims.
As you can imagine, police tactics that are appropriate in one situation are not appropriate in another. In a hostage situation the prudent thing would be for initial responding police to stay outside and wait for the "whole team" to arrive.
In the case of an active shooter the better strategy might be for police to immediately try to engage the shooter. Of course, one problem is that they're not going to know what kind of situation they are walking into -- number and location of shooters, kinds of weapons, and so on.
The old saying is "don't bring a knife to a gunfight." An updated version might be "don't bring hostage-taking tactics to an active shooter." I think this may be what happened in the case of the Columbine attack, with police setting up outside while the killers were walking around inside shooting people. In that regard there were a number of parallels between Mumbai and Columbine, though obviously the scale of death and destruction was far greater in Mumbai.
Anyway, the Mumbai articles were fascinating and disturbing. Thanks for bringing them to our attention.
There are two questions.
1) How do we make our offering good?
2) How do we pay for it?
And I wonder if perhaps 80% of the time, energy and talent is thrown into Question #2? I am not saying it isn't hard. I'm saying that if all we look at is #2, or as happens about once every nano second--we blend the two questions together and come to believe they are the same; then Question 1 takes a back seat.
The solution will come when those focused on #1 come to the table and sit in chairs just as comfortable as the chairs where those answering the financial questions sit. And, when there is leadership at that table capable of seeing the delicate balance that must be maintained between the two questions.
You writing this is a step towards that balance between the two questions. So is the action of whoever the invisible editor of OS is today in their extraordinarily good decision to feature this.
Both of you helped something bigger than all of us.
Terrific work!
I'm really touched by your reaction. When I saw that VQR was going to do this (they sent a subscribers' letter on Sunday), I thought to myself that this was unique, and really needed to be covered. I've been fortunate in that Ted Genoways has welcomed my blogging of the articles, and I was really blown away by his agreeing to be interviewed.
I think he's right. This is groundbreaking journalism, but look how much money it must have cost, and there's no advertising to support it. So, who will be the new benefactors for the Web? How can we find them? How can we convince them that educating the public is a worthy project, especially now, when it seems that anyone with money and access to the media wants to promote their own stuff.
I was pleased by the choice of EP. There's a lot of good stuff written today. I'm only sorry that more of it couldn't be on the cover today. But I hope that people who read this here will go over to VQR and give them a shout-out for the stellar work they did.
The writer was paid very well for his efforts. VQR is a non-profit quarterly published by the University of Virginia. This is about access, not being paid. Believe me, if you read the interview, Ted Genoways is clear that people got paid. I see your fears for the future. But that's not what happened here.
Jason