A successful experiment with an online exclusive

What do you do when your investigative reporter wants to write a magazine-style piece, but you don’t have a magazine to publish it in? Why not create a micro-magazine on your Web site?

That’s what we did at The News Tribune earlier this month in what has turned out to be a fantastic experiment in nontraditional, long-form journalism produced exclusively for an online audience.

Sean Robinson approached his editors in late 2006 with an idea to chronicle a case of stolen identity that afflicted a friend. He was determined to write it in a magazine style, which meant it was too long to publish in print (since the TNT doesn’t have a magazine). So he came to me and asked if we could publish the entire work – some 12,000 words – online. I jumped at the chance, if only to experiment with our audience and discover whether they would read a lengthy, first-person investigative narrative. The web, of course, has a reputation for only attracting readers with short attention spans who want “quick hits.”

With this series, A Case of Identity, we were able to dispel that myth (at least in part). The first chapter of the series will finish the month of February as the most popular story on our site. The total traffic for the series would rank it in the top 20 sections on the site, in the same neighborhood as our coverage of crime, Mariners baseball and Sonics basketball.

We used the print product to drive traffic with high-impact teasers on A1 when the series launched and every day thereafter on the features front. (The series launched on a Monday and a new chapter was made available every day through Friday.) Robinson also produced a condensed version (less than 3,000 words) which ran on Friday in the features section so that readers without web access or interest would get a shot at it, too.

The feedback was enthusiastic, including one disappointed email at 4:17 a.m. when the next chapter wasn’t yet available. Readers appreciated the conversational, blog-style form of the series and asked why more of our news coverage couldn’t be done this way. 

The story has a happy ending, too. After the alleged identity thief was (finally) thrown out of his apartment when his cover is blown, he disappeared under the cloud of potential criminal charges. He ended up working at a Bed, Bath and Beyond about 60 miles north of Tacoma where he stirred up suspicion about his character. So his boss googled his name and found our series online. The police were notified of his whereabouts and, yesterday, he was arrested on suspicion of identity theft.