I loved this article by the Nieman Journalism Lab, a project from Harvard University.
Here's a snippet
“A Moment in Time” (and, with that, I’ll try not to use the project’s name again in this post — so that you won’t, as I did, get something unfortunate stuck in your head as a result of repeated exposure) is aesthetically compelling and socially revealing. It also suggests the Times’ openness to exploring avenues of documentation and expression that don’t fall into the neat categories of traditional journalism.
“I was driving to work, and it just hit me: Okay, we’ll get thousands of people around the world to take a photograph at the same moment,” Estrin told me of the project’s inception. And the goals of the project mix the artistic and the journalistic to the point that it’s difficult to tell where the journalism ends and the aesthetic begins: first, to produce a valuable document, one that records — to an extent — a particular moment as it’s lived out across the world. Second, from the social media angle, to facilitate the sense of shared identity that comes with “doing things as a community around the world — doing the same things at the same time.” Ultimately, Estrin says, the project was about “the intentional profundity of the moment.”
Whether the feature represents journalism, or something more, or something less, the reaction it’s received from Times users offers a lesson for news organizations chasing after the holy grail-and-sometimes-white-whale that is reader engagement. If the project’s participatory outpouring is any indication, it has struck a nerve with Times users. In a good way. And the ‘why’ in that is instructive. The project involved an assignment with specific instructions; users weren’t merely being asked for something — a hazy invitation to contribute — but to provide something specific, and easily attainable. And to provide something, moreover, that would be part of a project with a clearly defined, but also inspiring, purpose: to document the world, via its many corners, at a particular moment. That mix of depth and breadth, of pragmatism and idealism, can be a potent incitement to action — a fact evidenced by the thousands of images currently blanketing the globe over at the Lens blog.
