The multimedia project was a runner-up in the 2007 Casey Medals.

In July of last year, when the tally of homicides in Oakland, Calif., was on pace to make 2006 one of the city's deadliest years on record, The San Francisco Chronicle decided to provide more than the typical coverage. 

To complement our extensive newspaper offerings, about a half-dozen staffers spent four months producing a comprehensive multimedia package. Our hope was that by telling these stories through multimedia, our audience might connect with the coverage in a more personal, meaningful way. Although a story about how a family copes with the loss of a loved one can be moving, we believed that multimedia – such as hearing audio of a mother talk about the last time she saw her son – can be equally, if not more, powerful. 

For our project, called “Oakland: A Plague of Killing,” we used multimedia to put a face on the statistics and to show the ripple effects of violence in the communities. There were 148 homicide victims in 2006, an increase of 57 percent from the previous year. 

To illustrate the toll on specific communities, we produced an interactive map of Oakland’s homicides over five years, beginning in 2002. The final animation showed 557 dots — one for each death.

We then overlaid the map with the locations of liquor stores, some of which have been described by police as magnets for crime. We also created mini profiles of the victims that included a photo, basic biographical information, a link to published stories and an audio clip from a friend or relative who shared a memory about the victim. In addition, we produced audio slideshows, podcasts and videos. One video, which focused on a program that exposes at-risk teens to life at San Quentin — has been nominated for a national Emmy.

The project was a big accomplishment for our team. We had the expected challenges in gathering information on a topic of this nature — for example, one of our podcasters had his life threatened in the field. But the challenges we faced inside the newsroom — getting the internal resources this project required — caught us by surprise. 

However, I suspect we’re not alone. As newspaper staffs shrink while demand for online content grows, newsrooms will increasingly face these tough decisions.

Here are some of the lessons we learned while producing this project. I hope they will make your online endeavors easier to pursue. 

Sell your project to the people who will make it happen. In many newsrooms, "project" is a dirty word (see “time suck”). Add the mysterious "multimedia" in front of it, and you might have some serious selling to do. Early on, perhaps my biggest mistake was not doing the hard sell. Although I explained the project’s details to everyone involved, that wasn't enough. I should have illustrated the ideas, even conceptually. Wireframes or even rough sketches could have helped in getting the multimedia vision across. Also, don't assume that people will know what you're talking about. Despite all the industry attention given to multimedia, would your editor know the difference betweena podcast and streaming audio? Or a Flash interactive and a Google Map mashup? Recognize that you’re asking editors to commit resources to something that is likely still very new to them. So educate them. Demo whatever content you have, even if it’s unedited. If your multimedia wows them, you’ve got a sale. If it doesn’t, maybe it wasn’t such a great idea after all.

Continue to work for buy-in from everyone you need. Many editors proclaim that "multimedia is our future." But is your newsroom making time for multimedia today? We thought we had buy-in, but several weeks into the project, we got the message that resources were too tight. Unwilling to shut it down, we decided to sneak in work on the package when we could.  In the end, everyone was pleased with the package. But given the demands on everyone’s time, it was a risk to proceed. 

Major edits to multimedia can be a major pain. Demo key elements along the way. This lesson applies most to interactive graphics and Web presentation, but it’s a good idea to show those involved several previews of each component. Why? Generally, multimedia is less flexible to edit than your typical text story. While an involved edit on a 20-inch story may take an hour or two, making key changes to a Flash interactive could take a full shift — or many days. So rather than wait until the end to demo your multimedia, get feedback early on — for your sake. We made this mistake with the interactive homicide map. Our Flash designer had invested many shifts researching the locations of various businesses (such as supermarkets) and adding those markers to the map. But during a late-stage demo, none of the editors wanted those included.

In some places, the final project fell short – many of the homicide profiles were missing information and the overall presentation didn’t do enough to promote the depth of content that lay beneath. Design, we learned, is even more crucial online because of how easily content can go unnoticed. 

Don't take no for an answer (sometimes). The theme of my three-year-old multimedia career has been: 1. Come up with a multimedia idea. 2. Get it rejected. 3. Figure out how to do it anyway.  In talking with other multimedia journalists from across the country, it's a similar story. So if you have a great idea but no support, learn to do it yourself (or find others who can help). It costs nothing to Google "How to edit audio" or "How to create Google Map mashup." The Web is flooded with tutorials and free technology. And the tools are getting easier to use. 

Analyze the results. And share them. Good or bad, the results will make you a more effective multimedia journalist. Poor results (few people clicked or cared to comment) will teach you what’s not worth doing. A strong response will give you momentum for your next project. 

Our project received approximately 400,000 page views and more than 60 e-mails, including this one: “Although I don’t live near Oakland, I had to say I think this is a great tribute. Not only does it provide a place for the families of these victims to pay tribute to their loved ones, it also makes others aware of the massive scale of homicide … More importantly, it gives each victim a face and name … It doesn’t show the victim as a number, but as a once was living, breathing person until death.”