A Short History of the Highrise

Breathing Life and Interactivity into The New York Times Morgue

A Short History of the Highrise¹ (SHOTH), an interactive documentary about the history of vertical living in urban environments, was a collaboration between The New York Times (NYT) and the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). The project was born out of a desire to challenge traditional journalism and explore what was possible when two institutions—one best known for top-tier print journalism and the other for groundbreaking interactive documentary—joined forces. The key idea was to use The New York Times archives as the primary source material to create an interactive documentary film. In 2013, the documentary won the George Foster Peabody Award, in addition to an Emmy² and First Prize at the World Press Photo Multimedia Awards in 2014.³ A watershed moment, this recognition signaled the growing legitimacy of interactive documentary as a form of digital journalism and as a representation of journalistic excellence.

This case study looks in-depth at what made the interactive documentary possible, with particular focus on the process of collaboration between a film institution and a newspaper, the use of archives, and a participatory approach to audience engagement.

An opportunity

Inspired by the interactive work he saw at MIT OpenDocLab’s New Arts of Documentary Conference in the spring of 2012, and by the interactive and participatory work at the NYT, Jason Spingarn‑Koff, then-commissioning editor of The New York Times Opinion Video team, approached Gerry Flahive, producer at the National Film Board of Canada, to discuss a possible collaboration.⁴ At first the conversation centered around one opinion video, or opinion‑documentary (op-doc). But once the notion of the NYT archives came into play, the idea of several op-docs became more feasible. “Extensive interactivity was not immediately on the table as an option, as we had to consider budgets, schedules, rights, the various human resources each organization could provide, etc.,” says Flahive.⁵ “But of course the notion of the history of the highrise as something that could be effectively and creatively expanded through interactivity was obvious to the three of us,” he adds.⁶

The op-docs section, a NYT editorial forum for short opinion documentaries by independent filmmakers, was only four months old when Spingarn-Koff approached the National Film Board of Canada. At the time, the NFB had a strategy of forming partnerships with news organizations for distribution of its Web-based interactive documentaries. But this collaboration was different; both institutions contributed significant labor, expertise, and equipment, and they started to work together from the beginning of the project’s creation. That was a new type of partnership, and not without some concerns.

“‘Journalism’” is not a term we ever used at the NFB in regards to our documentary work,” Flahive says.⁷ “It implies that a point of view is a bad thing, when for documentary filmmakers it is central to the creative act,” he explains.⁸ Flahive therefore anticipated some issues in collaborating with a major news organization like The New York Times. “However,” he says, “since [Spingarn-Koff] was a filmmaker himself, and his Op-Docs section had already shown support for cinematic and innovative work, I was confident that we could work well together.”⁹

For The New York Times, this was a special circumstance. The project fit with its mission on several levels: documentary within a newsroom, the use of archives, and innovative approaches to digital storytelling.

Spingarn-Koff had not only been given permission to innovate but also the mandate to do so. Furthermore, the idea of a collaboration between The New York Times and the National Film Board of Canada had already been broached by Andrew DeVigal, the head of interactive at the NYT, and by Loc Dao, the executive producer of the English language digital studio at NFB.

The New York Times had produced video for many years and decided that the op-ed team should have video to support it. Spingarn-Koff was hired as the section’s first video producer, but upon his arrival, he proposed the idea of creating an op-ed section especially for filmmakers. Commissioning both established and emerging independent filmmakers, Spingarn-Koff created the vision behind the op-docs section, which prides itself on showcasing stories with both a point of view and “an edge” that provoke discussion.

NFB’s director, Katerina Cizek, a veteran documentary director and an interactive and participatory documentary pioneer, had already created one of the first online feature documentaries and the first documentary using Web GL—a JavaScript application programming interface (API) enabling interactive 2D and 3D graphics—when Spingarn-Koff approached her together with Gerry Flahive.

At the time, Cizek and Flahive were a director-producer team for Highrise, a many-media, multi-year documentary about vertical living across the globe. Incidentally, Cizek and Flahive had long wanted to do a more extensive project elaborating on the history of the highrise. This collaboration with The New York Times was not only timely, but also opportune. Spingarn-Koff immediately thought of the NYT archives as a primary source.¹⁰ As editor of op-docs, he had creative freedom but a small budget, meaning that whatever project they would pursue would endeavor to bring to life an under-used resource at the NYT while keeping costs low.

Bringing the morgue to life

The New York Times photo archive—known as the Morgue, “where stories go to die”—contains five to six million prints and contact sheets.¹¹ Fewer than one percent have been digitized.¹² The Morgue was established in 1907 under the direction of then-managing editor Carr Van Anda.¹³

In February 2012, one month before Spingarn-Koff and Flahive’s initial meeting, The New York Times launched something called the Lively Morgue, with the idea of using Tumblr to publish photos from its morgue. In a statement on the Tumblr website, the NYT wrote:

We’re eager to share historical riches that have been locked away from public view, and have been awaiting a platform like Tumblr that makes it easy to do so. We hope you’ll enjoy the serendipity of discovery, that you’ll know something of the thrill we feel when we unlock the door of the morgue and walk into a treasure house made of filing cabinets, index cards, manila folders and more 8-by-10s than anyone can count.¹⁴

To give a sense of how many photographs are stored within the archives, the NYT reports that if they were to publish ten archived photographs a day, it would take until the year 3935 to publish them all.¹⁵

At the time of NYT and NFB’s first meeting about their collaboration, The New York Times was heavily invested in digital innovation. As far back as 2006, journalists Andrew DeVigal and Gabriel Dance were hired to innovate in the multimedia department. One year later, in 2007, Aron Pilhofer became editor of interactive news. Not only did these pioneers innovate new ways to tell stories, but they also built new tools that enabled interactive digital storytelling.

Spingarn-Koff, meanwhile, was no stranger to the archives. The Morgue provided the material for one of the very first op-docs, The Role of Youth, which was about the history of youth in crisis and created by filmmaker Matt Wolf and writer John Savage in December 2011. Spingarn-Koff knew that the archives would be an inspiring source of material for any filmmaker.

Just six months after the NFB and NYT’s first conversation about A Short History of the Highrise, Katerina Cizek arrived at The New York Times to spend a week in the Morgue. She had already written a successful pitch for a film trilogy using the themes “mud,” “concrete,” and “glass” and a basic multimedia component approved by editors at Op-Docs. Accompanied by archivist Jeff Roth, she buried herself in prints of cities and buildings from across the globe (see Figure 1). In describing her experience, Katerina Cizek says, “Nothing beats getting lost in a collection of six million photographs and finding your way out with a really fascinating story.”¹⁶

^{Figure 1. Documentary maker Katerina Cizek and NYT archivist Jeff Roth in the Morgue. Source: The New York Times.}

With her iPhone, Cizek took pictures of over 500 photos, front and back (see Figure 2). “The backs of the photos were as interesting as the fronts,” she says, since the backs contained handwritten notes with the year, place, and other information.¹⁷ In these early days of Cizek’s research, she began to conceive of how the interactive documentary she envisaged would take shape. “I love archival films,” she says, “but I’m always kind of disappointed by them. I want the frame to stop. I want to be able to look at that photo and see where it’s from.”¹⁸

^{Figure 2. A photograph with markings from “A Short History of the Highrise.” Source: The New York Times.}

Cizek came to the first pitch meeting with a two-minute demo of the first film with the first four shots animated. The narration was made up of rhymes, a risky proposition, but Cizek felt that it fit the form. An emphasis on user experience design (UX design) informed how the interactive elements were constructed. Inspired by pop-up books, Cizek envisaged the documentary as having the “shape” of an accordion, enabling the viewer to dig deeper into the material by moving vertically throughout the interactive documentary as well as by moving horizontally through the film. By clicking on certain photos, viewers could also “flip” the image around to see the original markings left on them by editors and reporters of the past. This would ultimately let viewers pause to take a closer look at the images, returning some agency to the person experiencing the story.

The op-docs editors, the social media editor, and the interactive team were all present for this initial pitch meeting, and Cizek’s demo convinced them to invest further in the story’s interactivity despite the fact that the original commitment only loosely required the use of multimedia, and not necessarily interactivity.

Coalition of the willing

^{Figure 3. Introductory instructions for NYT interactive feature “A Short History of the Highrise.” Source: The New York Times.}

During production of the documentary, each team member joined with his or her own agenda and unique set of interests. Co-creation, Cizek’s term for this model of collaboration, is key to the process and involves participants in every step of the project’s design. Collaborators can be anyone from university researchers, to media specialists, to community members. The project progresses based on input from everyone involved. In this case, The New York Times created a collaborative team of journalists, social media editors, and interactive designers to develop the user experience.

Social media editor Alexis Mainland, who became involved with the project’s design from its early days, says, “I think participatory aspects of interactives or documentaries are [usually] sort of tacked on at the end, and you just don’t have time to give them enough weight to make them feel important.”¹⁹ Jacky Myint, lead interactive designer at the NYT, saw the documentary as an interesting challenge to “combine and balance a lean-in experience with an engaging experience.”²⁰ For the NYT, interdisciplinary collaboration was already an important component of successful interactive documentary productions. Rather than work in silos, which is more common in newsrooms, the storytellers, interaction designers, and programmers worked together on the project as one team from the beginning. When the NYT’s Snow Fall, a multimedia project heralded for its innovative and effective approach to digital storytelling, came out in 2012, part of its success was directly attributed to this workflow, which broke out of the traditional siloed approach. As a result, the interactive department at the NYT decided to push interactive projects further. On the other hand, with different agendas, values, and processes between a journalistic tradition and a film tradition, some tension in the production process surfaced. In terms of verifiability, for example, the NYT Op-Docs editorial team had to strike a balance between point of view and accuracy. SHOTH had to undergo a rigorous editorial review process at each step of the way, and both the text and the images were meticulously fact-checked. The biggest debate over content involved Cizek’s critical position on the rampant development of condominiums. For the narration, she originally wrote: “Meanwhile, a new kind of tower is rising. It’s made of glass, it represents a new ideology. Housing is no longer a tool for social equality, it’s an instrument for financial speculation. They call it The Condominium.”²¹ An op-docs editor who was a former real-estate editor for NYT challenged the idea that condos are “instruments of speculation” and insisted Cizek change it. The team eventually settled on: “Housing is no longer built as a tool for social equity and equilibrium. It’s now a financial instrument of market capitalism—they call it the condominium.”²²

Another source of tension was the timeline for production. Newsrooms operate on shorter news cycles, often having to turn stories around within the day. Meanwhile, it can take months for an organization like the NFB to even process an idea for a project.²³ At times, the NFB documentary team found itself waiting around while the NYT interactive team addressed more immediate news stories. “There are huge challenges to finding the balance between the time frame of newsroom versus the time frame of an organization that can take years to make one documentary film,” says Cizek.²⁴ She adds:

Without the right people in place, it could be almost insurmountable. Allocations of resources, decisions, priorities are very different in both models. A project like SHOTH is very difficult to wedge into these models. We had a remarkable team in which every member went above and beyond their job titles in all ways to make it happen.²⁵

In this case, the project moved quite quickly for a documentary. The budget was approved in January 2013, and the documentary premiered at the New York Film Festival in September (see Figure 3).

During production, the team decided to add a fourth film to the series that would be comprised entirely of readers’ photos and stories. Social media editor Mainland insisted that the readers’ submissions be treated with the same kind of respect and design quality as the images from the archives. Previously, the NYT had experimented with participatory approaches, but the kind of content they received was not appropriate for the story, or there was not enough participation. Mainland was encouraged by this project and thought that the theme resonated with a real-world issue: the large number of people who live in highrises globally. She had an idea to put out a call for photo submissions documenting the experience of living in a highrise in different parts of the world, hopefully encouraging critical thought and reflection about highrise living. This resonated with Cizek, who considers participatory media fundamental to her work and a key element of SHOTH.

Although The New York Times has considerable reach, drawing attention to the need for user-generated content (UGC) before a project is released is not always easy. In this case, Spingarn-Koff devised a strategy to show a preview of the first film at South By Southwest, an annual film conference in Austin, Texas. Simultaneously, the team would launch a campaign to invite people to submit photos of their vertical living in order to have the photos ready at the documentary’s official premiere. A beautifully-designed submissions page helped entice people to participate. In the end, the NYT received about 4000 submissions and used about 400.²⁶

The technology used for the project also made the participatory aspect feasible. Before SHOTH, The New York Times used a user-generated platform called STUFFY. However, STUFFY did not allow for much customization of the public-facing submission form, and it was slow and bug-prone on the back-end, making submission review tedious. It also did not work on mobile, which greatly hampered UGC, especially given that the team depended heavily on social media to advertise UGC campaigns.²⁷

During the production of SHOTH, however, Mainland had three new tools that she was eager to test. The first was a new UGC submissions database, Attribute. The second was a mobile-friendly platform for creating a submission form for UGC. The third was Storysetter, the platform behind the NYT Storywall display, which was easier than STUFFY to customize and use. SHOTH adapted this Storywall engine from the NYT “The Lives They Lived” project,²⁸ an annual issue dedicated to readers’ photos and stories submitted about someone close to them who had died within the year.

These enhanced tools made it possible to use mobile phones to submit content and to play with the look of the content, so there was promise of a more diverse and integrated UGC. The social media team made a big commitment to the project, Mainland explains. “We had the sense that we were going to get something special,” she says.²⁹

When asked about accuracy in working with UGC, Mainland says, “You’re making a handshake contract with someone when you’re asking them to submit something: that they didn’t Photoshop it and it’s real.”³⁰ Though most of the vetting is based on this trust with readers, Mainland also maintains that the editors have become well trained in sorting through submitted work.³¹

The comments section of the SHOTH documentary—often the only interface between auteur and audience for newsrooms—was also a key point of focus for the production team. Besides merely serving as a place for feedback and conversation, it allowed the team to measure the quality of user engagement based on the type of comments posted. In the case of SHOTH, many of the comments focused on the rhyming narration, but people also commented on content. The team closely watched the conversation unfold on Twitter, too. The quality of thought and the level of reader engagement are key indicators of success, according to Spingarn-Koff, who says, “I’ve been taught to gauge the success often by the impact of the story more than the number of views, so we want people to talk about it and have something of substance to talk about…. The piece should have some edge to it.”³²

Overall, participation on SHOTH met the standards of the NYT both in number of submissions and global reach, and it rivaled some of the NYT’s biggest projects according to Mainland.³³ At the same time, Mainland does express concern about the socioeconomic homogeneity of those participating, a sensitive point in many participatory media projects that involve the use of digital technology. It is well‑known that the audience of The New York Times skews towards a population with a higher income. The technology required to participate in projects like SHOTH is expensive, and therefore a barrier to entry. In the future, Mainland would like to find ways to include participation from economically diverse communities.

Another question that arises is whether this kind of work is scalable. When asked how a smaller newsroom might produce interactive documentaries, the SHOTH team had some suggestions. First, the team talked about the importance of starting out small. A Short History of the Highrise initially started with the idea of making three short films using The New York Times archives with some minimal interactivity. It grew as more people got involved and brought more skills and resources. Second, the team talked about partnerships with local institutions. In the case of archives, that could be the local library. Other newsrooms can look toward partnering with schools, local experts in a particular topic, or hobbyists to provide sources and partnerships for documentaries. Third, the team explained that A Short History of the Highrise made use of existing technologies that only needed minor tweaks. Storytelling tools and templates are now often shared on GitHub, an open source site where people and organizations can share well‑documented code for projects. Partnerships provided the team another way to make technology and tools accessible, but much of A Short History of the Highrise was made from scratch. And, the argument between reproducibility and one-offs is something digital media institutions have to face on a regular basis. It’s not clear if a project at the scale of SHOTH will happen again soon. It would require the right circumstances and people pushing it forward, says Spingarn-Koff.³⁴

NYT Interactive Designer Jacky Myint explains what the interactive department considers when taking on a production:

From big to small projects, [we consider] what can be done with a template that we’ve already used with some customization, versus something that requires something totally new. Every day we make that call. The challenge is not to fall back on those templates because they exist. It’s easy to do that, to say, ‘Well, this could just be a list, because we have this template.’ It’s that balance. It’s hard, having requests come in from all the various desks wanting to do something and [to decide] what requires and—I don’t want to say deserve—but what has the opportunity to be something bigger?³⁵

In the words of Jason Spingarn-Koff, “It’s not really about having the money. It’s about having the motivation.”³⁶ During a time of transition and unclear business models, people in the field seem particularly motivated to experiment. And the SHOTH team, too, seemed to possess this motivation (and the resources).

Yin Yang

“Documentary holds up the mirror to journalism, as does journalism to documentary,” says NFB’s Cizek. “They are yin and yang. They are Laurel and Hardy. Through their relationship, they redefine each other as we ride through history’s fastest and most turbulent technological, political, ecological and social transformations.³⁷”

A Short History of the Highrise demanded tremendous resources. The production teams worked long hours. Every photo was fact checked and licensed, and interactivity and multimedia were complex. But it was worth it for two organizations that challenge what journalistic excellence and relevance mean in a digital age; this kind of experimentation pushes both documentary and journalism genres. The project also seemed to happen at the right time, with the right people, and under the right circumstances. The joint team could think of no mistakes or ways to improve the experience. Cizek describes it as a “dream project with a dream team.”³⁸

But there are aspects that are replicable. SHOTH made use of assets every city newspaper has: an archive, a loyal audience ripe for participation, and community reach for local partnerships. The documentary production process exemplifies what is possible when a legacy newspaper and documentary filmmaking team collaborate and combine their resources in the service of great storytelling, even without a roadmap.

This work embodies a type of experimentation that harkens back to the “new journalism” movement of the 1960s, pioneered by Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese. For Wolfe and Talese, “new journalism” revolved around borrowing language and grammar from other storytelling traditions; for the team behind SHOTH, it was journalism borrowing from the language and grammar of visual storytelling and cinema. As with every new wave of experimentation, new journalism was met with resistance and skepticism. Today, too, incorporating more artistically-inclined techniques into standard journalism processes is met with some apprehension, but projects like A Short History of the Highrise illustrate the potential behind these deviations from the status quo.

Wolfe appropriately reflected on the idea of “looking at all things afresh,” as if for the first time, without the constant intimidation of being aware of what other writers have already done. In 2015, new technologies for storytelling allow us the ability to, in our own way, “look at all things afresh,” to break away from what has been done before in search of storytelling that serves the purpose that both journalism and documentary have always valued: to represent and engage with the world in which we live.

^{1. “A Short History of the Highrise,” The New York Times, 2013 [http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013/high-rise/]. ↩}

^{2. “About,” Highrise: The Towers in the World, the World in the Towers [http://highrise.nfb.ca/about/]. ↩}

^{3. The World Press Photo 2014 Multimedia Contest [http://www.worldpressphoto.org/collection/mm/2014]. ↩}

^{4. Interview with Jason Spingarn-Koff, New York, NY, 27 February 2015. ↩}

^{5. Email correspondence with Gerry Flahive, 14 September 2015. ↩}

^{6. Ibid. ↩}

^{7. Ibid. ↩}

^{8. Ibid. ↩}

^{9. Ibid. ↩}

^{10. Spingarn-Koff, 27 February 2015.244 “About,” Highrise: The Towers in the World, the World in the Towers [http://highrise.nfb.ca/about/]. ↩}

^{11. David Dunlap, “A Treasure House of Photographs,” The Lively Morgue: About [http://livelymorgue.tumblr.com/about]. ↩}

^{12. Erika Allen, “News Gets New Life When Exhumed From the Morgue,” The New York Times, 20 May 2014 [http://www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2014/05/20/news-gets-new-life-when-exhumed-from-the-morgue]. ↩}

^{13. Ibid. ↩}

^{14. Dunlap, [http://livelymorgue.tumblr.com/about]. ↩}

^{15. Ibid. ↩}

^{16. Interview with Katerina Cizek, New York, NY, 27 February 2015.253 David Dunlap, “A Treasure House of Photographs,” The Lively Morgue: About [http://livelymorgue.tumblr.com/about]. ↩}

^{17. Ibid. ↩}

^{18. Ibid. ↩}

^{19. Interview with Alexis Mainland, New York, NY, 27 February 2015. ↩}

^{20. Interview with Jacky Myint, New York, NY, 27 February 2015. ↩}

^{21. Email correspondence with Katerina Cizek, 1 June 2015. ↩}

^{22. Ibid. ↩}

^{23. This challenge and subsequent solutions are explored more fully in this report’s case studies of The Guardian and NPR’s Frontline. ↩}

^{24. Cizek, 27 February 2015. ↩}

^{25. Ibid. ↩}

^{26. Email correspondence with Alexis Mainland, 24 June 2015. ↩}

^{27. Ibid. ↩}

^{28. Ibid. ↩}

^{29. Mainland, 27 February 2015. ↩}

^{30. Ibid. ↩}

^{31. Ibid. ↩}

^{32. Spingarn-Koff, 27 February 2015. ↩}

^{33. Mainland, 27 February 2015. ↩}

^{34. Spingarn-Koff, 27 February 2015. ↩}

^{35. Myint, 27 February 2015. ↩}

^{36. Spingarn-Koff, 27 February 2015. ↩}

^{37. Cizek, 1 June 2015. ↩}

^{38. Email correspondence with Katerina Cizek, 17 September 2015. ↩}