Zach Seward is Outreach Editor at The Wall Street Journal, former assistant editor of the Nieman Journalism Lab and 2010 Mirror Award finalist. He spoke with me on April 7 about the Journal’s “Into Port-au-Prince: Finding Marc’s Family,” a series of blog posts linked to a Facebook page of the same name. The project chronicled the journey of Marc Henry Bigot of Miami, Florida, to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to rescue his wife and daughter after the January 12 earthquake.

Concept

“The project was originally cooked up by the Foreign Desk as a Page One story soon after the earthquake in Haiti. I wouldn’t want to put words in other editors’ mouths, but I think they were looking for a compelling human angle to the story and got onto Marc Bijoux’s story.

Rebecca Blumenstein [Deputy Managing Editor for International News] saw in this story the potential for not just telling the story once it was over, but to narrate [the journey] as it was happening. Then the question was: What’s the best way [to do that]?

With a blog, of course, there’s the option of RSS—a reader could subscribe to the feed … but we know that RSS adoption is not very high on the web … so that led to the Facebook page idea. And from there we expanded what the page could contain beyond links to the blog posts that Gina [Chon] was filing; the page itself would essentially narrate the story. Read more…