Story by Spencer Gordon
Photos by Blake Hamilton
Gabriel Dance, art director for The Daily, the exclusive news source for Apple’s iPad, spoke with students at the Erb Memorial Union last Friday. Dance’s successful career began as an undergraduate at Colorado State University and has since included time as a New York Times art director and now staff member of The Daily.
As a junior interested in computers, Dance discovered that becoming a programmer or computer builder wasn’t as appealing as it used to be. Although he was already a junior in college, Dance enrolled in the school’s journalism program and eventually graduated with two degrees: one in journalism and the other in computer science. Dance then went on to graduate school at the University of North Carolina where he earned a master’s degree in multimedia journalism. It seemed the perfect degree for Dance as it combined both of his interests in one job.
“I was very fortunate while I was at North Carolina because multimedia journalism was starting to take off,” Dance says. In school he made some contacts with the multimedia journalism industry, which eventually helped Dance begin work at The New York Times shortly after graduate school. After five years at The New York Times, Dance left his position as Chief Multimedia Producer to begin work at The Daily, which launched its first edition on February 2 and attempts to combine journalistic storytelling with the capabilities of the iPad.
Dance was invited to come speak at the UO by photojournalism instructor Sung Park, who contacted Dance through a mutual friend.
“[Dance’s job] is amazing because it is exactly the type of innovative journalism that I want to pursue here at the [School of Journalism & Communication],” Park says. “[Dance] is able to show us what is possible and what is cutting edge, it gives us a sense of what we need to do as a school to push forward and do that type of innovation.”
While at The New York Times, Dance created graphs such as What One Word Describes Your Current State Of Mind?. This piece was published during the last presidential Election Day and allowed users to type in their own words for how they felt as the historic day played out. Dance also created a panoramic picture taken at President Barack Obama’s speech in Denver two years ago when he accepted the Democratic nomination.
Dishing with Dance
Spencer Gordon: What possessed you to come and do this presentation for us today?
Gabriel Dance: Sung [Park] invited me, but the reason I wanted to come was because I think it’s just an incredibly interesting and exciting time for journalism. Sometimes I worry that’s not communicated very clearly to college students, that sometimes there’s a little too much doom and gloom that is conveyed by people in the industry. I feel like it’s a golden age of journalism. There are so many possibilities and there are so many things you can do. It’s just so fun and interesting that any chance I get, I come and speak with college students.
There was one that came up to me afterward and said to me, ‘Oh, I’m so inspired. I want to try this new project.’ Just having that one student do that makes it all worthwhile for me. If I can set the spark for another interactive journalist or someone who wants to push the boundries, I’m always happy to do that.
SG: How different is The Daily going to be from journalism today?
GD: The different thing about The Daily is really the form factor, and by that I mean the tablet. The idea that you are using gestures now instead of mouse clicks. The idea that we have access to your GPS location, if you let us, so we can automatically highlight where you are on a map maybe in relation to where Tahrir Square in Egypt is. There are all these inherent things to the device that make it so that we can leverage journalism in a way that isn’t necessarily possible on a desktop computer.
That said, the fundamentals are still the same. At The New York Times the thing that gets more hits than anything else are articles. The written word isn’t going anywhere. Written word is the best way to tell a story, most of the time, the easiest way to communication, the easiest thing for a consumer to read or digest. The Daily is absolutely going to continue to have just as much writing as it does anything else.
The difference is that they are a little bit more interested in having multimedia for every single story they’re doing and then maybe what happened at The New York Times. And the only reason for that is that The New York Times has a hundred times more content coming through and it would just be impossible to get multimedia with every single one of those things coming through.
SG: How is The Daily going to try and use itself to become one of the most prestigious journalist sources, compared to saw The New York Times or an online Wall Street Journal?
GD: I think The Daily is trying to do something new. Again, I go back to the tablet thing. They’re trying to really focus all their energy on leveraging the tablet. The New York Times has to worry about, as I was talking about earlier, four or five different ways that any given story might be consumed. Because of that, they have to design or develop it in a way that’s accessible to all these different devices.
The Daily isn’t faced with that challenge. They know how things are going to be consumed. They know how things are going to be read or interacted with. It gives them a little bit more control over how we develop those stories or how we design the multimedia or how we do those kinds of things that just isn’t possible with a website whether its The New York Times or the things we see with the Washington Post. That doesn’t have that same kind of flexibility.
SG: How do you think journalism schools are going to change if this new medium becomes more popular?
GD: My hope is that journalism schools don’t change based on the tablet or anything like that, but that they just keep pace with multimedia, which is to say they focus a little more on infographics or interactive storytelling or narrative storytelling. A lot of journalism schools still have print tracks, broadcast tracks, and then PR and advertising tracks. Not very many have developed multimedia tracks or video tracks or graphics tracks or those kinds of things.
So it’s not necessarily any one technology, like the iPad or the iPhone or any of those, that encourages J-schools to push things further, but it’s the development of the technology as a whole that helps move things further.
