Telling stories for continuous deadlines and multiple platforms involves several choices that editors must discuss with reporters, mojos, visual journalists, web producers and other editors. These decisions won’t all apply to every story, but you should consider them with every story and coach the journalists who work for you to consider them routinely:

• Should the reporter and/or visual journalist file immediately for the web?
• What are the multimedia elements of the story?
• How can you make the story interactive?
• Should you tell some or all of this story in an alternate form, something other than the traditional string of paragraphs, in print and/or online?

Discuss possibilities early. Early in the coverage of every story – often in the initial conversation – you need to discuss these issues with the journalists involved. It was never right for reporters to work alone on their stories, treating photos and graphics as an afterthought and getting the story just right before they let anyone else see it. That offense is compounded and inexcusable in today’s multi-platform newsroom. Multimedia elements and continuous deadlines demand early decisions and extensive coordination. The assigning editor often plays the key role in that planning.

Determine responsibilities. Multi-platform storytelling may involve more journalists in the gathering process. In your early discussions, decide who should be responsible for gathering each piece of the story – reporter, photographer, videographer, artist, librarian, web producer, database editor, assigning editor, whoever. Throughout this handout, “you” means the collective team that the assigning editor coordinates.

Determine deadlines. As you plan the story, you need to set deadlines, even if they are only targets. Discuss what elements need to be finished when, so you can feed each platform with all of its elements at the right time.

Don’t try everything. Each story will offer several possibilities you can pursue. On big stories, you will want to pursue many or all of the possibilities. But most stories won’t be worth the staff time that all of those possibilities will take. You make some decisions as the story unfolds, but you also make some decisions early about what elements offer the most promise and how much this story is worth. You can change plans as the story unfolds, but decide early what you think the story is worth.

Start with your audience

 Don’t start your considerations with the story, but with the audience. Consider what job this story is doing for the user. Are you informing, amusing, giving useful information? The job that the story does will help you decide how to tell it. Also consider who your audience for the story is. These considerations about potential users will guide some decisions about how to tell the story.

Be first with the news

The ridiculous concerns about “scooping yourself” online have finally been put to rest in much of the newspaper industry. Before the Web, we had to concede an advantage to broadcast media in covering breaking news. Now we can and must own breaking news, large and small. It drives web traffic and it marks your organization as the place to turn for news. So reporters need to learn what to break online and how to write an unfolding story.

Accuracy still rules. When you cover a breaking story online, basic rules on accuracy and verification don’t waver. Your standard of completeness changes, but not your standard of accuracy. You can have a reporter file a one-sentence bulletin that emergency crews are responding to a fire call at City Hall. You know that much for sure from the police scanner. Updates will present more facts as the journalists verify them at the scene or on the phone: It turned out to be a false alarm; or a black cloud of smoke is rising from City Hall; or it’s really across the street from City Hall.

File however you can. A wireless-equipped laptop is the best tool for filing breaking news. But coach your reporters to use whatever available tools fit the situation. They can email or text-message you from a phone or PDA or call you and dictate. Whatever the tools, whatever the situation, your job is to help the reporter get key facts online as soon as they are verified.

Tell the story. After the reporter has filed the first few facts as bulletins and brief updates, consider a writethru for a significant story. This will give your web audience an overview of the story and give the reporter an early draft of the print version. Coach the reporter in the varying styles of the different types of stories: Just-the-facts inverted pyramid style for bulletins and updates and more analytical, forward-looking or narrative approaches for writethrus and print stories.

File alerts. You want to be first not only on the web but in email and on the phone. When you have basic facts verified for a major breaking story, someone needs to file an alert for users who have signed up to receive breaking news immediately. Depending on the story and your organization’s practices, writing the alert may be an editor’s job, rather than a reporter’s. Be sure to verify with the reporter, though, with a phone call, email or text message. Especially with text-message alerts, you need to tell the most important facts quickly in just a few words. Don’t try to tell the full story here; a good alert will send users to your web site for details and updates.

Consider multimedia

Consider video. Video is especially important to young users and increasingly important to older users. Your audience is enjoying video on YouTube and other Internet sites. You need to make it an important part of your storytelling toolbox. When you are covering an event, video can almost always be part of the story package. If a character is telling an interesting story, let him tell part of the story in his own voice on a video clip. How you handle video will depend on how your organization is staffing for multimedia: Giving video cameras to reporters or photographers or designating full-time videographers. Whatever the staffing responsibilities, your staff doesn’t have to shoot all the video. More and more of life is captured on video. Make sure reporters, photographers and videographers ask for official videos, security-camera videos, police-cruiser videos and home videos that will help tell the story.

Consider audio. Digital audio recorders let us capture the voices of characters. Telling stories in audio form allows users to download them to iPods and listen to them as they travel or work. Again, your staff doesn’t have to record all the audio. Recordings of official meetings or emergency phone calls or police radio traffic can bring extra dimensions to a story.

Consider slide shows. Slide shows let us tell stories in still photographs much more powerfully than the few photographs you have space for in the print edition.

Consider sound slides. Sometimes a video of a character speaking is pretty static visually. Put that voice over a slide show relating to the story, and you have a strong storytelling tool.

Consider virtual reality. If the setting of a story is important, you can show it in a detailed interactive way by shooting 360-degree photographs and editing them into a steerable virtual reality that lets the user see what the place really looks like.

Consider PowerPoints. Increasingly, subjects of news stories use PowerPoint slide shows to explain issues to peers, clients and staffs. We can use those same slide shows (or develop shows of our own) to explain the issues to our users. Keep in mind that most PowerPoints are accompanied by a person explaining the context of what you are seeing or connecting some dots. Consider whether you need some audio to accompany the slide show or some introduction or extra slides that provide that context or connection. Or maybe you use a single slide to illustrate a point.

Consider simulations. Much of your audience grew up on video games. Your stories will be more meaningful online if you can offer simulations that help them try their skill at something you are writing about or use a game-like simulation to experience it more richly. You may not have to produce the simulations yourself. If the military, a contractor, airline or engineering firm uses a simulation for a topic you’re writing about, see if you can get something to use online to help users share the experience.

Consider animations. Computer animations can illustrate processes, such as how a new industrial process will work. Again, you don’t always have to produce the animations. If reporters can obtain an animation used by officials or engineers, it would enhance the multimedia presentation of the story.

Consider source documents. Source documents let your audience dig into a story as deeply as they want. Some will be satisfied with a quote or two from the report or the indictment. Others will want to read the full document themselves. Whether as pdfs of paper documents or as links to online documents, add credibility and depth to stories by adding the source documents. Don’t do this just with official documents. Love letters, old newspaper clippings and private journals can add depth and credibility to stories as well. For big stories, always ask reporters about source documents you can use to supplement the story.

Consider your archives. Many stories are really just chapters. Give stories context by providing links to previous stories on this issue or related topics.

Consider interactivity

 Turn users into participants by making your story interactive. You can do this on at least four levels:

• Involve participants in the reporting.
• Involve participants in telling the story.
• Help participants personalize the story.
• Engage participants in the continuation of the story.

Consider crowd-sourcing. Crowd-sourcing helps your reporters connect with participants who know what you’re trying to find out. Use your web site to connect with people who know something about the topic. Sometimes you will need to word the invitation carefully, so you’re not passing along rumors or tipping off competition. But invite your audience to tell you what they know. Crowd-sourcing can help you connect with confidential sources or obtain official documents in an investigation. Crowd-sourcing can provide quick answers on a breaking news story. Crowd-sourcing can gather stories for a light feature. You can use the product of crowd-sourcing in multiple ways:

• Invite people to e-mail you and you check out their tips and use the best stuff you can verify in your story.
• Invite people to share their information directly online and their discussion supplements your story.
• Invite the open online discussion and mine the best tips from that, using what you can verify in the story.

Consider a wiki or discussion thread. If you’re covering an event or issue, you could invite participants to tell their own stories – either as a standalone or to supplement your own coverage. They can contribute either as a wiki that each user adds to and edits what has been written before or as a discussion forum, where each contribution adds to what has come before.

Consider a live online chat. Either the reporter or a source (or both) could make your story interactive by doing a live online chat with your audience.

Consider databases and calculators. Users can personalize stories when you provide databases that allow them to find the information that applies most closely to them. For instance, if the city approves an increase in property taxes, an online calculator can help each user decide how much her own increase will be. Or if you’re writing about falling test scores in schools, a database can allow parents to find the numbers for their own children’s schools. Interactive maps are an effective database. The user can click on his neighborhood and get the information that means the most to him.

Consider discussion forums. If your staff has produced a good story, it should draw reaction from the audience. By establishing a forum for discussion, you allow users to continue the story with their opinions, experiences and questions. This may generate tips for follow-up stories. Or it may be a discussion that deepens the experience for users, however long it lasts.

Consider polls. A poll lets the audience participate in the story by adding their opinions. Be careful not to present an online poll as scientific. It measures passion more than it measures opinion.

Consider alternate story forms

Many stories or parts of stories are told most effectively in print or online in forms other than the traditional string of paragraphs. Discuss with your staff whether all or part of a story should be told in the forms described below. An alternate story form can be a sidebar to a main story in the traditional paragraph format. Or the alternate form can become the story, either as a standalone or with the string of paragraphs as the sidebar. Consider whether your story would work best as a grid, graphic, board game, video game, timeline, list, series of vignettes, quiz or some other alternate form. Many of these alternate story forms can be particularly interactive online.

The editor needs to lead the way in consideration of alternate forms. Many reporters have a natural tendency to think in terms of traditional story forms and will need their editors’ help to start thinking differently about storytelling. In addition, much of the work of alternate story forms should be a team project, involving artists, photographers, librarians, web producers and editors, so the editor needs to drive the discussion of alternate possibilities. This discussion needs to start without preconceived notions. Sometimes the right decision will be that a traditional string of paragraphs should be the main story or all of the story.

Information layers

Timelines. A timeline places a specific event or series of events in context with other events. This can be simple text or you can turn it into a graphic or perhaps illustrate with photos of some of the events. You can combine a timeline with a map, showing how an event unfolded through space and time. An online timeline can be interactive, with extra layers of information at points on the timeline as you click on them or roll your cursor over them.

Chronologies. A chronology details how an event unfolded. A chronology can be all text or can tie into a map or diagram that explains key steps. If you don’t have a map or diagram, photos of key people or events might enhance the chronology. Again, you can make an interactive chronology online that includes layered information.

Glossaries. A glossary explains terminology relating to a particular issue. This doesn’t absolve the writer from explaining some terms in context in the story, but gives an opportunity for more detailed definitions. Again, visual elements can be part of a graphic, with photos or drawings of some of the words defined. As with other layers, an online glossary can be interactive – click on the word and you get the definition, illustration, etc.

Use-It Boxes. Pull out useful information for the audience into a box that attracts the eye quickly. This may be something the user will be looking for later when she returns to the story. Use-it’s, also called go-and-do boxes, might have date and time of an event, ticket price, location, a phone number for more information, how to make donations, how to volunteer, who can participate, web sites, etc. Consider how the user might act in response to your story. If the story moves the reader to act, the information that tells her how to act should be easy to find. An online use-it box could include a button to help the user put an event on the user’s Outlook calendar.

What’s-next box. Especially in a running story, consider a box telling the audience what to expect next. This is essential in a series. An online series also should include links to sidebars and previous installments or to an index for the full series.

Tables, charts and graphs. If a story uses more than two related numbers, consider presenting them in a table, chart or graph. Numbers almost always work better in one of these formats than in prose. The more numbers you use, the more important that you simplify them for the audience in one of these forms. Again, you can make these interactive online.

Statistics. Does the story include statistical information that can be presented in an understandable typographical table as a separate element, such as a box score?

Databases. Consider whether the story should include a searchable database online, allowing the user to find the information that helps him personalize the story and find the most meaningful information to him. A database can be a onetime feature that accompanies the story or it can become part of the “evergreen” content that increases your web site’s value. Sometimes you can program a database so it updates automatically as new information is posted online elsewhere. If not, you need to label it with the date and consider whether and how to update it periodically. If a reporter is using a spreadsheet, database or any form of computer-assisted reporting, consider the best way to present the data online.

Cast of characters. If the story involves several people, consider a separate element with mug shots of the characters and thumbnail sketches. This can be simple biographical information or it can include fun facts that don’t really fit into the narrative but add to the character development of the total package. This is another element that can be interactive online. The cast of characters can be multimedia, with audio and/or video from each character.

Bio box. If the story is about a particular newsmaker, consider a box with some basic information – age, education, occupation, family and perhaps a fun fact or two. With both the bio box and the cast of characters, some overlap with the story is inevitable and desirable. But exact duplication is a waste of your space and the user’s time. Make the bio box or cast of characters mostly new information. Mug shots or even a wide candid shot add to a cast of characters or a bio box. (A note about the “boxes” referred to here: Whether you actually box them with a border is a matter of design style for your paper. If the borders of your box are white space, call them windows or breakouts if you prefer. Or make up your own terminology that works for your staff.) The online bio box can include links to video or slide shows about the newsmaker.

Fact boxes. Sometimes, especially with a complicated story, a fact box summarizing key points is helpful.

By the numbers. You can bring several disparate facts about a story together in an easy and eye-catching way in a “by the numbers” box that features the numbers in large type and explains them in smaller type. The online “by the numbers” can offer more fun facts or analysis as you click on each number.

Comparisons. These can be informative, comparing features of an existing law with a pending bill, or humorous, listing what’s in and what’s out. You can do a comparison as simple text side-by-side in two columns. But some photos or other art will make it more appealing. Again, the online comparison can be interactive, with layers that provide greater depth.

Grids. A grid can relate facts in multiple ways, either as a comparison or to tell stories of multiple events in parallel fashion. For instance, you can recount turn-of-the-screw meetings in grid fashion, with a different column for each board or commission and with rows identifying name of the board, actions taken and what’s next. Grids are great for comparisons when you have more than two items being compared or more than two ways of comparing items.

Lists. Lists almost always work better as a separate element, even if it’s just text, than in the prose of a story. The online list can be interactive, giving deeper information on each list item when the user clicks on it.

Pull quotes. Does a particular quote seem to sum up the story? Consider highlighting it in a box, perhaps with a photo of the speaker. Pull quotes often are just design devices. Use them for more than just breaking up the type. Find the quote that helps summarize or tell the story. The online version of the pull-quote can be an audio clip. Or the pull-quote might tease users into the story from a home page or index page.

Fresh quotes. Don’t just highlight duplicated quotes that you pull from the story. You might present some quotes – either from characters in the story or person-in-the-street quotes from a news event – that stand on their own. These can run with or without photos of the speakers. You can also use quotes – fresh or from the story – as reefers.

Rails and strips. You can pull a mix of these different elements together in a vertical rail or a horizontal strip that will help frame your package and give the browsing user several layers to draw him into the story. In the online presentation, a rail can have links that allow the user to choose where to go more deeply into the story.

Sidebars. Remember the old standby of sidebars. You can use a sidebar for any of a variety of reasons: Perhaps the information would disrupt the flow of the main story. Or maybe it would get lost in the main story and really deserves its own headline. A sidebar doesn’t have to be displayed as a story. Consider whether it would work in one of these other formats discussed here, such as a fact box or a Q&A. Discuss possibilities early with the reporter, so she knows before she starts writing what sidebars to use.

Q&A’s . Some information works better in question-and-answer format than in a string of paragraphs. Online, you could present a list of hyperlinked questions, allowing the reader to click on those that interest her or browse the questions in the order of her interest.

Visual layers

Staff photographs and videos. Can your staff shoot photos or videos of the people, places and events of the story? How can photos help tell the story? How can they draw attention to the story? Plan early with the visual staff. Don’t be bashful about making suggestions, but respect the professional skill of the photographer or videographer to come up with better ideas than you or the reporter might suggest.

Official photographs and videos. If your staff can’t shoot live photographs or videos, seek official photographs of some of the people you are writing about. Depending on your state laws, police-cruiser videos may be available and provide important layers for some stories.

Archival photographs. Check your files, paper and electronic, for historical photographs that may tell part of the story. Increasingly, video and audio will become part of your archival resources as well.

Collected photographs and videos. Remind reporters to ask the characters they interview for photographs or videos they have taken that might show events or places where your staff was not present. Remind reporters and photographers to seek candid photographs and mug shots of dead or missing people and to seek youthful photographs of subjects of stories, if the story will deal with that period in their lives.

User-contributed photographs and videos. Does the story present an opportunity to seek photographs and videos from the audience that will help tell the story? Users can help tell the story in print or online in lots of ways. If you are covering a spot-news event that happened before your staff could reach the scene, you can ask online whether any users shot timely photos. If you are covering a communitywide event such as a storm or a big event such as a parade, festival or sporting event, users can add their pictures and videos to your staff’s professional photography.

Illustrations. A staff photographer or artist might be able to create an effective illustration to help tell the story and attract the user’s eye. Or a character might be able to provide illustrations done by others.

Artist’s renderings. When your community is planning a new building or project, the architect, engineer or developer usually can provide an illustration showing how it will look when finished. Ask whether they have animated their vision of the project into a virtual reality you could present online.

Maps. A simple locator map might help the user understand where an event took place. Or a complex map might show how and where an event unfolded. An interactive map can let users enter their sightings or experiences geographically.