Related story: Poisoned: An in-depth look at Rhode Island's lead-poisoning crisis

In May 2001, The Providence Journal published a major series on lead poisoning in Rhode Island and its impact. Later, the team that produced the project, both in print and online, assembled to share what they learned from the project.

The team included: Peter B. Lord, reporter; John Freidah, photographer; Jean Plunkett, series editor; Karen Bordeleau, copy editor; Cecilia Prestamo, designer/photo editor; Dave Herzog, computer-assisted reporting expert; George Sylvia, graphics: Dave McPherson, projo.com producer for the project; Joe Alba, projo.com programmer, and Beth Heaney, projo.com designer.

Lynn Arditi was the moderator for the followup program. Here is the first of two reports based on their discussion:

Lynn: No writer or photographer can pull off a series like this on their own. This took six people. The question is: What makes it work? Like with a film, you have to have a great director, someone with a vision, and the ability to carry it through. That was Jean, the series editor.

Jean: When I was assigned to the project, John had been shooting pictures for about a year and Pete had been reporting for a couple of months. And Dave Herzog had worked his magic and had lots of statistical material. We had a wealth of material, a rich story to tell. But how do we do it?

Pete articulated the theme: Why is it that despite all we know about lead poisoning, 3,000 children were poisoned in Rhode Island last year. Pete and John would tell stories; they were very impassioned. The challenge was how to translate that into a series.

We went from the broad to the narrow, focusing more each time. I wrote up a budget and would simplify every week.

All the stories were about 60 inches. That was the goal and it was Metro Managing Editor Tom Heslin's idea.

The other crucial decision: If the issue was lead poisoning affecting poor people disproportionately, and very often poor, single black woman, and there is not always a lot of sympathy for them, how were we going to show this without playing into the stereotypes? It was a spontaneous, creative decision to write the stories through one child each day. No one can turn away from a wonderful image of a child. We moved to having one child each day whose story would illustrate an aspect of lead poisoning.

I urged Pete to resist the urge to start off with an anecdote and abandon it and go to the facts and figures, but to keep it on Shonnell and do it that way. And we did a lot of talking all the time.

One thing that helped so much were the key decisions to hold it a little longer. Headlines and captions have to be really strong. It has to work together. Every caption should tell something that's not in the story. With Karen having a little extra time at the end, she got a chance to pay attention to these.

And there was not a single correction -- not one. And this kind of project was fraught with possible problems.

Peter Lord and John Freidah talked about the project's history and how they pushed for its publication.

Peter: (When first assigned to the story) I had to find out about the official story first. I had to talk to officials. But John had already found the victims. You had to show the victims.

Our first story was when the girl from the Sudan died. It was one of the most moving days I've ever experienced. That had an impact -- more than any other story.

John: I was hoping we could put in a blurb to thank these folks; they allowed us into their lives during a difficult time.

I began on it quite a long time ago -- two years. The first attraction was the broad impact of lead, with victims moved out of their homes, hospitalized. But it went further. There were battles up at the State House, what was happening with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Deveopment, and the Rhode Island attorney general's court case against the paint companies.

As a photojournalist, I'm drawn to people. What on the surface could seem like a difficult story to illustrate, I saw as very visual because you have people. The difficulty was getting to these people. I used to go to the lead clinic and just sit there. Eventually, I was able to make photos there and to go into these family's lives. I gave them my pager number. I got a call while I was on a job: two people are about to be hospitalized. I was able to drop everything and concentrate on this family.

In the beginning, it was a little bit of a sell. Executive Editor Joel Rawson didn't necessarily believe in lead. He thought, I grew up in a lead house. So it was a conversation: Did you know this...

When we finally decided to move forward, a lot of my work was already done. We decided to focus on one family a day, and keep it tight. It's not a super amount of photos every day. We kept it tight, kept it focused.

Another challenge for me was: there's an issue every day; do we have the material to make it work for every day? And I had to go back and fill in the holes.

The reaction was the greatest success in my career.

Question: Why did you print in black and white?

John: This story was all about content; it wasn't about color. Color can be a distraction from the content.

Once we determined the format, over six days, I thought it would be a strong element -- that people would pick up the paper and say, This is different, and relate to the stories from the other days.

Jean: It seemed appropriately somber, and beautiful, too.

To Joel's credit, he was open, and he said, you won me over.

Karen Bordeleau was asked to talk about how a copy editor handles such a large project.

Karen: Everyone wants to do an excellent job, though people's ideas of excellence are different. I was hounding them day and night for 2 1/2 weeks. Pete would be great about it; John, too. I was constantly nagging them for documents, and they were getting it for me.

When doing a series like this, I start reading according to the budget. It was very clear.

At first, Day 1 looks fine, but when you get to Day 2, you start to see inconsistencies; at the end of your reading, Day 1 is full of question marks.

We were doing a lot of that: Pete checking facts for for Day 1 or 2, while we were doing Day 5.

When the caption information comes in, there are other inconsistencies.

Pete: We were still learning stuff along the way.

Karen: As a section editor, I design, too. So you keep that in mind. If there aren't a lot of changes, it's OK to do that on the computer rather than having Cecilia reformat everything.

We knew early on there was a bill in the legislature. And you know that when this will affect people's lives, every single word should be right. If the Journal had four errors in that story, how do we know everything else is correct?

Dave McPherson talked about how the print and online operations worked together to come up with an online presentation that added elements only doable on the Web.

Dave: This is more of what we (projo.com) want to be doing, being involved in these types of projects. I went to all the weekly meetings. I didn't have a lot to say, but I started to become familiar with the material. We can help bring a lot of attention to your work.

Rather than just republish online, I wanted to bring other elements that you can't do in print. Extra photos of John's were shown in a Flash slide show.

The database of lead inspections we received from the state -- Dave Herzog got the data.

A third aspect was the online chat. We had no idea what to expect. The questions were rolling in nonstop. We're planning to do more of that.

Whether it's a small story or a large project, get us involved early. Even three weeks before would have been too late for the online database, the Flash slide show.


Lynn: There's a writer's culture at this paper, and when we tend to do a project we do really long stories, but as a reader, I could get through every story every day. It was very focused. As writers, are any of us more convinced that, as much as I want to write long, it's better to write short? Throw lots of stuff away? Is this what we should be doing? Writing short, with sidebars?

Andrea Panciera, projo.com editor: From the Web point of view (where is is difficult to read long reports online), shorter is better!

Lynn: Was it a struggle to come to the idea of one person a day? Did you have enough people?

Peter: Too many people. There's lots of families out there. And they're not used to newspapers. It wouldn't have worked without them opening up their lives, and they became characters. People got choked up about individual characters.

Question: Did this change the way you would cover your beat?

Peter: It would make me look more at things people aren't talking about. This was like a hidden problem. We should all look for stuff that isn't on the public agenda.

Jean: I think it's the people. You have to have people in the story. We've written a lot about lead, but never in this way.

Pete: It took weeks of time to learn (the material). It took a lot of research. I think anyone could have done it, given time and interest.

Question: The project planning meetings were weekly. How did that shape the writing?

Peter: We had our collection of families, and one job was to assign families to a topic. Which family showed the topic the best?

There were broad judgments we made. Burnadette was a good lead character. But we felt we ought to have a suburban family on Day 2 or we'd lose all our suburbanites.

Lynn: There were attributions, but only when necessary. It had an authoritative tone.

Jean: This project had drafts for every story. I would write little notes to Pete, like: This ending is really weak.

Pete: If I'm getting dense or losing her, Jean didn't mind saying so.

Jean: I tend to use notesface and talk to the reporters. It might be: It needs a really good ending. He would take them and think about them.

Pete: Day 6, Karen said: I don't like the lead of this story. And I was smart enough to listen to her.

We wanted to give the readers lots of access points, how to's.

Question: What pushed this topic into the category of project?

Metro Managing Editor Tom Heslin: This reflects extraordinary professionalism on the part of many people. It was a serious piece of work. For reporters who aspire to do projects: For the newspaper the project is a tremendous commitment of time and resources. How do you know whether to keep going? On this project, it started with John. Then Peter. You're constantly looking for the green lights. We keep upping the stakes for us. For major projects like that, it's a good thing to realize that to do them well you have to win over the organization. We could go out for a month and say: Let's do a great Sunday story on that. On this, it just kept getting better and better.

John: We had a good hand coming in: a child who died of lead poisoning. We had something: a middle-class white family whose child was poisoned. We came with a lot already invested at that point. A lot of times, you've got to convince yourself.

Peter: It made me think we should have a better way to survey our staff and ask what they think are big projects. It's kind of haphazard. We don't have a way of saying: Let's submit our thoughts or ideas and say, this is what we should tackle this year.

Dave Herzog was asked to talk about his involvement in the project.

Dave said he had done some stories about lead poisoning, based on data he received from the state health department and he always wanted to do more. He said this gave him the opportunity.

One of the things he looked at was the computer data from the health department about blood levels, which showed that while levels were going down, they were persisting in the inner cities. Also he obtained data of every loan as part of an effort to see how much of an impact they were having on reducing problems with lead poisoning.

Finally, he said one thing he always wanted to do was place data online, and this offered the opportunity.

Peter Lord commended the database compiled by Herzog and the efforts of Dave McPherson and the projo.com team to put the information on the Web.

Pete: This is a service unavailable anywhere else in the country, and it's talked about all over the country.

Iin wrapping up, Lynn said that the session appeared to provide for a series of lessons and tips in considering a story project, including:

* Come in to a project with strong story ideas.
* Remember that people tell the story best.
* Continue to focus, focus, focus.
* Keep the process open; editors should turn editing into a conversation.
* Think about the Web presence early.
* Save your data and facts for boxes and charts
* Check your facts.
* Write captions that tell more than what was in the story or the picture.
* Be open to compromise.
* The best ideas may come out of group meetings.
* Story projects are a long haul, so be prepared for that.