The Washington Post on Journalism “Without Judgment” and Webby win
The Webby Award ceremony is this week, and it’s a great opportunity for a look behind the scenes at the award-winning production, “The Decided, Revealing Voices of Clinton, Trump Voters” by The Washington Post.
It was their first time using the Verse interactive video platform to tell stories. The idea was born during the many months Dalton Bennett and Alice Li spent on the campaign trail in 2016. “We asked ourselves, what was this race really about?” says Bennett. “How do we get to the bottom of that question — what motivates people to make up their mind and choose their candidate?”
Adds Li: “We would meet so many interesting people and hear their stories but we never got a chance to fully explore that.”
Bennett focused on finding supporters of now-president Donald Trump, Li on supporters of Hillary Clinton.
When their colleague Emily Chow, a design editor at The Post, heard about the project, she suggested they look into using Verse to tell the story. The Post has been beefing up their video operation in the past two years, building out a sizable team of talented visual storytellers — and gaining a reputation across the industry for technical innovation and a willingness to experiment and try new things.
Interactivity came up early in the process, says Li. “We knew that we wanted to focus on several voters and it was going to be difficult to do that in one linear video,” she says. Using Verse, they created a seven “chapter” story, with an introduction that leads viewers to a six-way choice, consisting of thumbnail video portraits of each of the voters they profiled. Verse’s “Pathfinder” tool allows the audience to click on one of the faces to begin a short video profiling that voter.
They didn’t add names, party affiliations or locations to the menu of faces. “This whole notion of not being able to judge a book by it’s cover,” says Bennett. “We thought it’d be cool to present people voters who look like people you might know in your community.”
This was particularly important given the concerns about the influence of Facebook and the “echo chamber” on last year’s election. The producers didn’t want people choosing someone from the grid just because they were a Democrat or a Republican.
“We want you to take them for who they are and really listen to what they have to say,” said Bennett. Adds Li: “You watch so you can come up with your own conclusion on what they have in common, and what they don’t.”
As for Verse, “It was a contained video player that was interactive, rather than a website,” says Li, which was exciting because rather than being dominated by text or design “it was very much a video-driven interactive project and we got to control how that worked.” She also liked how it was embeddable in many different article pages.
Given the sophisticated look of the interviews, I was surprised to hear they did the shoots solo. Both cameras were fixed, one from the front, one from the side.
The many days on the road led to some adventures. For Li, after a particularly early start to a shoot day, she found herself taking a nap during a quiet moment, alongside her subject Bernice Scott. They were both “wrapped like burritos” in fuzzy blankets in matching armchairs.
For Bennett, the adventure was a little more painful. During his time with rodeo rider Cameron Mullins, he decided to give bull riding a try. Despite being an experience horseman, he was thrown and stepped on by the bull, leaving him with a broken pelvis. For his another shoot two days later, he was walking with a cane.
In the end, the subjects were all pleased with the production, says Bennett. “They’re people who tend to be skeptical of the press. All of them that saw it and interacted with it walked away feeling they we had given them a fair shake…without judgment,” says Bennett. “This platform allowed us to do that.”
Written by VERSE Executive Producer, Meredith Hogan
