Part of my project is about exploring how journalists in the field use multimedia to tell stories in different and creative ways. To learn from the pros I spoke with Zubin Jelveh. A writer and producer at Conde Nast’s Portfolio.com, he runs the Odd Numbers economics blog and develops multimedia stories. Jelveh’s multimedia projects revolve around building interactive stories where reader participation generates movement and changes in maps, charts and quizzes. Prior to this, Jelveh spent a three year stint as a multimedia producer for the New York Times website, www.nytimes.com.

[Disclaimer: the story below has been edited to fit the Q&A format]

You write and create multimedia for Portfolio.com, which one takes up more of your time?

The producer part of my job is sort of dwindling to 5% of my time and basically blogging is taking up most of my time now.

The basis of a blog is that you’re always looking for a new tidbit or anything somebody else hasn’t covered, or something that you think you can approach from a new angle. So that actually limits how much multimedia you can do because multimedia is time intensive.

I think since I’ve started the blog, the multimedia I’ve done specifically for the blog have been very basic.

The best example I can use is the Olympics one. I wanted to show that despite what city officials would like to say that the Olympics is a great boon for city economies.

I was just trying to think of a way to counter that argument from the research that I’ve read it seemed that a game would be the easiest way to do it. And through that flash – I probably put that together in a couple of hours and threw that online.

Are there any advantages to having an interactive graphic versus a more passive multimedia?

I think anything that can draw the reader in to engage them on an intellectual level, stimulating and entertaining them – that’s when you’d want to use an interactive graphic.

Again, the issue is that it is time-intensive to do something like that, especially in the context of a blog. If you’re doing something that’s for a once weekly thing or a magazine – then you have much more time to work with a designer.

While the Olympics story is a blog post with an interactive chart, Alpha Dogs is very much an interactive feature with little writing and most focus on the user participation?

Yes. It was one of the ideas we had for launch (in April 2007). We were a new site and we just wanted to have something that was a little bit different and a little bit fun for sure.

Were just throwing around ideas, and you know how everything in New York about finance, at least before last week, is about who was a top dog. Taken very literally, we wanted to see who actually elevated themselves to the highest level.

So we just did a lot of research to find out where everybody sat in their building and how high off the ground their office was.

That basically involved calling around all the different buildings, all the different banks and hedge funds and getting that information… and also letting them know that we weren’t terrorists.

Who worked on Alpha Dogs and how long did it take?

Me and Jacky Myint, (a multimedia producer at Porfolio.com) worked on it full time, and then we had two editors overseeing and giving feedback.

Alpha Dogs, outside of the concept, it took about 2 days, like 16 man hours.

Wow.

Wow as in fast or wow as in long?

Wow as in long.

Yeah. Actually, that was the first time that we were all working together if we had to do that again we could probably do it in a day. Anything that you’re starting from scratch and you want to look very sleek, as definitely we would do at Portfolio, it takes time.

Something like that Olympics thing, where it’s for a blog and I think people’s expectations are different, there is not as much of a concern to make it look super pristine.

For Alpha Dogs, Jacky did most of the printing the maps. I did the research and wrote up the text. That’s one of those things that, once you get into a bigger news organization – things become very specialized.

Back when I was at the Times, was relatively small so they asked all the producers to do the slide shows or interactive graphics if they had the skills. I think the idea came about that there would be these multimedia journalists that could do all things. But the more

I’m noticing its becoming more and more specialized.

Like the Times I know has these – I think they have the best interactive graphics that are out there – and they have some excellent coders over there who very much know a lot about journalism but their primary job is to code interactives and they get help from journalists.

It’s the same thing over here, less so because we don’t have the resources of the Times but things, at least from my point of view, are becoming more specialized.

Do you find interactive features get more traffic?

When I was at the Times interactives were not getting as much traffic as the text stories. But by the time I left that was definitely starting to grow. And now that I am here, the interactives are comparable if not more popular than the text stories.

Do you find it challenging as a writer that you have to deny yourself the pleasure of writing a story, and you’re just stuck coding an interactive?

I actually find it to be the reverse. I don’t know whether its because I’m a blogger, and a good blog – you need to constantly need to be feeding it. For me its more like “oh, I wish I could take some time and really dig into an interactive.”

I don’t want to get too dramatic, but I think the visual relationship that some has the movies that’s kind of immediate – I think interactives move into that realm a little bit. I just find them in some cases the ideal way of telling stories.

But they take a lot of time, so I find it’s the reverse – I wish I had more time to do interactives.

One of my favorite interactives on Portfolio is the quiz game Wordplay, did you enjoy putting it together?

That was fun to put together. Just coming up with the alternate choices – I had to get some help on that because my brain stopped working after a while!

The most fun for me about that one was there was this points system, so it was actually fun to figure out how many points you should give and how many points to take away, and basically how to reward for the right answer.

As multimedia journalism evolves over the next 5 years, what story formats do you think will dominate and which will become extinct?

I definitely don’t think podcasts have wide appeal, or are going to have wide appeal for new organization because they’re time consuming I still don’t think the delivery method is as easy as it could be.

To me the whole act of subscribing to the podcast, and linking it up with your iTunes, and your iPod. But once you have your iPod, you have like thirty million things to listen to.

The kind of video that I’m seeing put out by historically print organizations is kind of a different tenor than what you see from broadcasters. It’s more in the mold of something you might see on PBS, and I personally like that a lot.

I think that it’s a very effective way of turning reported stories that are intended for print into a different format. I don’t know how popular that’s going to be, but I think it’s a product in and of itself.

Interactives and interactive graphics in particular, if news organizations figure out how to bring in more programmers, those will get only more and more popular. Just because they’re fun to play with and people want to be entertained.

Slide shows will be here for ever.

Audio slide shows… Again, the speed with which people interact with the internet, the juxtaposition of that with listening to audio, which requires you slow down and listen, and you can’t fast forward through audio. I’m just not as big a fan of something like the audio slide show.

The idea of using large databases, and putting them behind interactives – I think we’re still not doing that enough. I think there are still too many interactives where there’s not a lot of depth. You’re just basically clicking around on all the colored stuff.

There was one that we did at Portfolio.com called “Who Killed The Economy?” You’re basically picking between Alan Greenspan, or the hedge funds, and stuff like that. The readers pick who the winner is going to be, we collect the information, and after a short while we give the answer to who the collaborators think was responsible for putting us in the place where we are right now. That sort of intractability, I think, is the next big step.

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