The Point | Journalism's future is in global dialogue

Just about 10 years ago, when I was working to present a 29-part serialization in The Inquirer of what would become my book Black Hawk Down, we had some discussions about presenting the story at the same time on the paper's Web site, www.philly.com.

At the time, it seemed like a fairly simple task. To the extent I thought about it at all, I figured it meant we would just display the text of the story each day online, along with the rest of the paper's offerings. That was when Jennifer Musser (now Jennifer Musser-Metz), a young woman who worked for the online edition, stopped by my desk to ask me what sort of research material and documentation I had for the project.

I had been working on it for years at that point, and had piles of audiotapes, notes, documents, radio transcripts, photos, etc.

"Could you bring them in?" she asked.

I brought in bags of stuff, and Jennifer and the other folks at Philly.com put together a Web site (see it at http://go.philly.com/blackhawk).

I can brag about this Web site because, other than writing the story and supplying the background material, I had nothing to do with creating it. It blew me away. When I started in the newspaper business, I learned to work on a typewriter with carbon paper, paste pot and scissors. Jennifer's creation combined text, video, audio, documents, maps, illustrations, and a sprawling Q&A feature into something that was more than an amazing presentation - it was a glimpse of journalism's future. It demonstrated the clear superiority of the Internet over the printing press.

In the case of Black Hawk Down, apart from all the multimedia razzle-dazzle, it opened up a global dialogue with readers, including men who had fought in the battle. They corrected my mistakes, pointed me to better information, and offered to be interviewed, allowing me to improve greatly on the story before it was published as a book in 1999. Mine may have been, thanks to Jennifer, the first book that ever benefited from this new journalistic tool. In a sense, the story was edited by the entire world.

But little has happened in the 10 years since. Surprisingly, the site Jennifer created is still in the vanguard of Internet story presentation.