If you’re familiar with slide-shows on the internet, you’re likely familiar with the fluff — the Top 10 lists that make you flip through each item as a separate page; the endless angles of ‘gadget porn’; the galleries of red carpet celebrity shots.
There are great slide-shows out there, collections of really awesome pictures, but they tend towards the easy-to-curate. That is, someone will put together a slide-show of images from the Olympics, or scenes from Haiti. Some of the photos can be jaw-droppingly good, but they sort of stand alone.
Well, msnbc.com’s Bill Dedman has changed the game. He’s an investigative reporter, but his latest work isn’t a 10,000-word opus, in fact it isn’t a story at all. No, Dedman’s latest work is an investigative slide-show.
With a staggering 47 slides, Dedman tells the story of Huguette Clark, daughter of what you might call a “robber baron” from the Gilded Age. Yes, the 1920s. He rivaled Rockefeller as the richest American, lived on Millionaire’s Row beside the Vanderbilts, and pretty much bought himself a U.S. Senate seat.
His daughter (from his second marriage — a scandal in itself) inherited something over a billion dollars, in today’s money. She has several mansions, owns the largest apartment on New York’s storied Park Avenue, and once bought a castle in Connecticut but never spent a night there.
In an interview on Poynter, Dedman shares how his investigative feature turned into a slideshow — and how it’s turned out great:
I like to talk stories through before I write them. As I was collecting photos of the Clarks, I kept showing them in a little slide show to my family, to my mother (81) and my daughters (7 and 10). It really helped tell the story.
I put the photos online to show our projects team at msnbc.com, and photographer Jim Seida said, why don’t we just publish it as a slide show? I was skeptical at first — would that crimp the writing? — but in the end I was advocating doing it this way when the photo team was skeptical. I thought far more people would read through it this way, and it would be worth an experiment.
We’ve done slide shows for years, of course, but the slide show is not our usual medium for telling an investigative or in-depth story.
I clicked through just so I could get a look at it and pitch the idea at my own newspaper, but I ended up reading the whole thing. As Dedman noted in the interview, he had to lose as a lot of depth and context from the story, because the captions were limited to about 50 words. But in other ways, that terse approach also focused him on what was most important or most interesting.
It’s a great tale about a forgotten famous family. And a great way to tell it. Check out the slideshow here: “The Clarks: an American story of wealth, scandal and mystery” (Click launch to launch the pop-up slideshow.)
Give the behind-the-scenes interview a read, too.
