There's a first for everything

- and here's mine on multimedia reporting:

East Stuart

This launched from my old employer's Web site after I left, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. (I know, I know, I'm violating all kinds of web2.0 tenets by posting this long after it hit the web, sue me)
This is my answer to a question I asked in fall 2007 - how can you do a profile story of a neighborhood using the Web? What would it look like? What's the news hook that makes people explore it? How do you keep the journalism strong?

I don't think it's a rousing success, but I'm glad it's finished.

The most important thing I wanted in the story was to make it choose-your-own adventure. The viewer can explore the site as he/she likes. The shell of the site (the jumping-off point) is an aerial map of the neighborhood, with waypoints on the map that point to different locations with historic or future significance. There are a half-dozen gentlemen as "tour guides" who describe features of the neighborhood. I don't know if it's successful but the goal was to tell a different, more powerful story than what I could do with words, images and maps in a newspaper.

Did it work?