“Today, the news is almost always caught on camera. We break down every decibel, pixel and frame to reconstruct the events you’ve heard about — and to expose the truth.” .The first installment of the “Killing Khashoggi” reporting was a print story that shifted focus onto the Crown Prince and his agents just as President Trump appeared to embrace the false Saudi narrative that a rogue agent was responsible for the journalist’s death.
Before humans learned to write, they documented their lives through
images with technologies fashioned from materials at hand. To create the
renowned galleries of animals — objects of fascination, dreams of
conquest — in
the Lascaux Cave, painted in southwestern France 17,000 years ago,
artists used minerals dug from the dirt to create a palette of earth
tones, etched the rock with stone tools, and even invented airbrushed
pigment through reeds or hollowed bones.
In our age of cyber-surveillance and social media, a new breed of
storytellers wield a modern palette, culled from technologies that
document and, many complain, intrude on our daily existence, to weave
narratives that investigate wrongdoing and dissect staggering tragedies
of our time, second by second, frame by frame, pixel by pixel.
At The New York Times, a pioneering band of investigative journalists
probes horrific events to discover hard and — for oppressive regimes
and ill-trained police agencies — unwelcome truths.
Last January in The New Yorker, Harvard historian and author Jill Lepore gave a bleak answer to the question “Does Journalism Have a Future?”
She described the field as “addled as an addict, gaunt, wasted, and
twitchy, its pockets as empty as its nights are sleepless.” But Lepore
did manage to detect a few bright lights. Among them, she wrote, “no
shortage of amazing journalists at work, clear-eyed and courageous,
broad-minded and brilliant, and no end of fascinating innovation in
matters of form, especially in visual storytelling.”
While Lepore didn’t cite examples, she might well have pegged the Times’ “Visual Investigations”
feature. Since 2017, the paper has produced an impressive series of
powerful storytelling based on an array of visual evidence, most of it
trawled from open-source information. Whether it’s CCTV, satellite or
drone footage, videos from Facebook, YouTube or police body cams, or
photos and video fragments from eyewitness smartphones, there’s a wealth
of visual and audio evidence for reporters to cull, analyze and compile
into extraordinary investigative and explanatory visual journalism.
These so-called data points — often grainy black-and-white images — are
then painstakingly studied and connected using “video forensics,” a
relatively new form of investigative reporting developed in recent years
by human and civil rights groups, chiefly in Europe.
This microscopic attention to that bounty, bolstered with traditional
reporting, coupled with cutaway graphics, mapping and motion video, and
underscored by deft narrative and soundtracks, has enabled the Times’
Visual Investigations team to produce a stunning gallery that embodies
the unit’s mission statement: “Today, the news is almost always caught
on camera. We break down every decibel, pixel and frame to reconstruct
the events you’ve heard about — and to expose the truth.”
Among them:
Showing how Stephen Paddock planned and carried out the worst mass shooting in modern American history
at a 2017 outdoors concert in Las Vegas, killing 58 people and wounding
more than 700 others before turning a--- gun on himself. The Times’
team made its case by stitching together seven days of hotel and concert
footage, maps and graphics of Paddock’s hotel rooms, and video showing
the terror and carnage below.
Deconstructing the 23-second sequence when two Sacramento police officers decided to fire 20 bullets at unarmed Stephon Clark, a vandalism suspect, hitting him six times in the side and back, killing him in his backyard on March 18, 2018.
Using 3-D modeling to determine whether Syria and Russia told the truth in 2017 when they denied responsibility for a deadly sarin gas attack on a Syrian village. (They didn’t, the Times found.)
Demonstrating how a bullet fired by an Israeli soldier killed Rouzan al-Najjar, a 20-year-old Palestinian woman working as a volunteer medic during Israel-Gaza border protests in 2018.
Visual investigators are motivated, says Malachy Browne, the award-winning team’s senior story producer,
by a desire to expose wrongdoing and disrupt false official narratives
through accountability journalism. “To expose disinformation. Solve
problems,” is how Browne described his role to me. “You know, stick it
to the man if there’s somebody to stick it to.”
“There is an incredible amount of documentary evidence hiding in plain sight,” Browne told a Reddit forum
in November. “When you gather and analyze it, you can answer key
journalistic questions like when and where did an event happen, who was
involved, what happened and how. In an era of contentious ‘he said-she
said’ narratives, that evidence is valuable in supporting one side of a
story, or explaining to our readers in a transparent way how an event
happened.” Browne, an Irish native, is a former computer programmer with
years of experience in social media reporting on global issues for Storyful and other online news agencies that use information culled from social media to enhance traditional reporting.
Using traditional news writing strategies, he and his colleagues
alternate their visual tool chest with complementary voice-overs. The
result: stories based on a collection of air-tight evidence that hold
the powerful accountable and, frequently, prompt change.
With no precedent for this particular type of investigative
journalism, its makers rely, Browne told me, on time-honored traditions
of print journalism to craft their narratives. These include headlines
and thumbnails--- to draw in readers, tick-tock chronologies, and nut grafs,
where, he explains, “you tell the reader what you’re buying into if
you stay with us with the story.” Kickers present the solution to the
problem posed at the story’s beginning. And like print reporters, visual
investigators juggle the competing demands of the nut graf, how much to
give away, how much to tease. “We try to find a balance,” Browne said.
I was drawn to the Times’ work by a story published online in November 2018: “Killing Khashoggi: How a Brutal Saudi Hit Job Unfolded.”
With chilling precision, it reconstructs the movements of a Saudi hit
team accused of killing and dismembering the Saudi dissident and
journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the country’s consulate in Istanbul,
Turkey, last October. Videos of an autopsy expert, a lookalike and a
black van are the key ingredients, along with a visualization of time
that relies on the calendar and the clock to track the weeks, days and
hours leading up to the gruesome murder and its aftermath of outrage and
lies.
From its opening seconds — a montage of faces and a steely
voice-over: “There were 15 of them. Most arrived in the dead of night,
laid their trap and waited for their target to arrive” — the video
unfolds like a mystery. It is told as a whodunit of suspense, treachery,
murder, and a grisly cover-up that unfolds in just 8 minutes, 33
seconds. It reveals a homicide with global implications as it makes a
convincing case that the villain behind the crime may well be Mohammed
bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, who
sought vengeance against the prominent dissident. (The Saudi government
has maintained that neither bin Salman nor his father, King Salman, knew
of the operation to target Khashoggi. President Trump has supported the
Saudi stance.)
To create “Killing Khashoggi,” more than a dozen Times reporters,
producers, researchers, and visual journalists employed a battery of
data points to make the case against the Saudi killers, and, by
implication, the Crown Prince, that they extracted from CCTV and news
footage, and by tunneling into the social media universe to identify the
perpetrators. Video fragments (which are the form’s version of a
broadcast audio soundbite), graphics, and maps are juxtaposed with a
1,250-word staccato narrative by Browne and his colleague, David Botti,
that tracks two journeys: Khashoggi’s prosaic effort to obtain
documents at the Saudi consulate needed to marry his fiancé, and the
sinister movements of the Saudi hit team in what the Times demonstrates
was a botched effort to cover up the crime.
What makes the “Killing Khashoggi” and other Visual Investigations
such riveting journalism isn’t so much the visual storytelling (of which
one could argue there are more artistic examples)
as it is the wide-ranging, innovative, meticulous reporting;
state-of-the-art visual strategies; and the tight, elliptical writing
that distills complex evidence. Like the finest narrative writers,
Browne and his colleagues rely on short sentences and scenes. They seek
out and highlight vivid, burden-of-proof details, whether the closeups
of the badge worn by a murderous Nigerian army unit or the sneakers the
Khashoggi lookalike fo
As a former newspaper reporter with an investigative reporting
background, I wanted to understand this new journalistic form by
focusing on “Killing Khashoggi” and studying the unit’s other stories.
To grasp how they tap into the products of ever-present surveillance and
social media to craft these narratives with words and imagery, I
reached out by email to Browne, who discussed the role played by
numerous Times colleagues and outside experts, and brought Botti into
the conversation to discuss writing issues. I followed up with
additional questions during a phone call with Browne.
In exacting detail, Browne and Botti schooled me on how the team —
aided by local eyewitnesses, social media mavens, and 3D modeling
virtuosos, as well as academics and scientists — produced their stories
and the storytelling strategies and structures they employed. Browne
also described the emotional toll that watching violent videos can take
and provides a wealth of resources for writers who want to learn more.
The teams’ stories have already prompted responses from those implicated in the reports. The first installment of the “Killing Khashoggi” reporting
was a print story that shifted focus onto the Crown Prince and his
agents just as President Trump appeared to embrace the false Saudi
narrative that a rogue agent was responsible for the journalist’s death.
The findings of the investigation into the chemical weapons attack in
the Syrian town of Douma was supported in a forensic report later
published by United Nations investigators. The Gaza story prompted the
Israeli Defense Force to fully accept responsibility for killing Rouzan
al-Najjar, while the Nigerian government launched an investigation after
the Times showed that an elite group of soldiers fired indiscriminately into a crowd of protesters, killing dozens.
Browne led the Douma and Las Vegas mass shooting investigations (the
latter won an Emmy Award), among many others, including one that
identified Turkish security guards who assaulted protesters a mile from the White House.
In April, “Killing Khashoggi” was named video of the year and best news
feature by the Society of Publication Designers. Browne and Botti were
among a team of 16 Times journalists that won the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award in international journalism for its coverage of the war in Yemen.
“For me,” Browne said, “visual investigations are a natural evolution
of that kind of work: scouring the open web for clues, analyzing visual
content, using free tools to solve problems and organizing factoids
into buckets. And combining this with traditional reporting and common
sense.”
Our conversations have been edited for length and clarity. The
Q&A is followed by a list of Browne’s recommended sites and
resources.
Could you start by describing the process by which “Killing Khashoggi” was conceived and executed? How long did it take?
MALACHY BROWNE: We started reporting in New York at
around 7 p.m. one evening, as soon as Turkish media published the names
and blurry photographs of 15 suspects. We published in a variety of
formats — print stories, a graphics reconstruction, and finally, the video that combined all the clues we unearthed. The print stories began within a day; the video investigation took us around a month.
Initially we whipped up a shared document to establish who these men
were, their positions and affiliations to Saudi government agencies, and
their links, if any, to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. We also began
to map out the suspects’ movements using flight records, security
footage, the location of the consulate, and the hotels where they
stayed. And much more.
As the credits roll, 18 other names appear. What are the
disciplines they represent and the roles they played in creating the
story?
BROWNE: The reporting encompassed a broad swath of the newsroom.
David Kirkpatrick, Ben Hubbard, Hwaida Saad, and Carlotta Gall in
Beirut and Istanbul were integral to the reporting. They searched across
Arabic media, worked sources close to the respective investigations
being conducted in Turkey and Saudi Arabia, and collected a daily
dossier of information published by Turkish media. Christiaan Triebert
and I started to collect information from social media and the open web
about the suspects, their movements and activity at the consulate. We
also vetted information with members of the Saudi Twittersphere who were
doing the same.
For example, we found an email address linked to social media
accounts used by the autopsy expert, Salah al-Tubaigy. From this we
found academic papers he had written, conferences he attended, state
committees he sat on, news articles, a forensic pathologist fellowship
he undertook in Australia, and other biographical information confirming
that he held a senior government position.
Anjali Singhvi, a graphics editor and former architect, tracked down
footage taken inside the consulate and interviewed the photographers to
model the building’s interior to annotate what David Kirkpatrick had
gleaned about where Khashoggi was taken. In Brussels, Steven Erlanger
confirmed through diplomatic sources that one of the key suspects, Maher
Mutreb, was once a Saudi diplomatic attaché in the United Kingdom.
David Botti and Barbara Marcolini found archive photographs of Mutreb,
identifying him as a top aide to the crown prince during several visits
overseas.
In France, Alissa Rubin found sources who had worked with the royal
family and could identify another suspect. In Washington, Adam Goldman
pressed his national security sources, who confirmed some of the leads
we had gathered. And national reporters in Seattle, Silicon Valley,
Houston, Boston, and New York were all trying to work their sources to
find out what we could about the suspects who traveled with the crown
prince on his global and US tour.
What technological developments make a story like “Killing Khashoggi” possible?
BROWNE: The ability to track planes using their tail
number, to geolocate them on a runway by comparing airport security
footage with satellite images. The abundance of stills and footage taken
inside the airport terminals allowed us to confirm where the suspects
passed through passport control. A smartphone application popular in
Saudi Arabia allowed us to corroborate phone numbers we received for
some of the suspects, including the positions they held in Saudi
government agencies. We tried facial recognition software on some of the
suspects, but the results were inconclusive; our own comparisons of
distinctive facial features proved more fruitful.
How do visual storytellers use evidence like GPS
coordinates, body camera video, facial recognition, and forensic mapping
to construct a narrative? How different is what they do from the way
that narrative writers use their reporting materials, structure, and
language? What can they do that print dogs can’t, and vice versa?
BROWNE: Nowadays, there’s an abundance of
audio-visual evidence available to us as investigators — a cell phone
video, an Instagram post, a satellite image, maps, Google Street View,
police scanner audio, a LinkedIn profile. Visual Investigations rely on
parsing and analyzing this kind of information to connect dots and
answer basic journalistic questions.
So, a print reporter may quote witnesses or unverified social media
reports that say a chemical attack in Syria occurred at around 8 p.m. on
a Saturday evening. The Syrian regime may forcefully challenge that
story, and the truth becomes muddied by opposing narratives. But a forensic analysis of video evidence can prove when, where, and how that attack happened, and expose the government’s deceit in a transparent way.
A print reporter can write about those conclusions, but essentially
there’s a difference between reading and seeing the visual evidence. In
our stories, we use graphics, annotations, script, and careful narrative
structure to distill complex evidence into a story that’s explanatory
and easy to follow.
What storytelling models do visual storytellers draw on? Do
visual investigations attempt to follow the classic narrative arc of
exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution?
DAVID BOTTI: It really depends on the story. Our
videos tend to the more analytical, so typical narrative arcs found in
features or literature don’t always seem appropriate. That being said,
we often start with a question, and hopefully by the end we resolve that
question. For the most part we tell stories along chronological lines,
or in a structure that builds revelations through the evidence. This
seems the best method for laying out a complex investigation and keeping
it easy to follow.
How and why did you use the calendar and clock — 4 DAYS
BEFORE KHASHOGGI DISAPPEARS, 12 HOURS BEFORE KHASHOGGI DISAPPEARS, 9
DAYS AFTER KHASHOGGI DISAPPEARS — to serve as lines of demarcation that
seem to be the story’s architecture?
BOTTI: There are so many names, places, and
timeframes in the story that we didn’t want the viewer to start getting
confused. The most crucial and memorable moment of the story is
Khashoggi’s disappearance. So we hoped that orienting the structure
around this moment would help people keep track of where they were in
the saga.
How do you separate, or think differently, about visual storytelling vs. visual reporting?
BROWNE: Visual reporting is many things, but for our
purposes, it’s analyzing visual evidence to reveal new insights. It can
involve audio analysis, or creating 3-D reconstructions to help our
team understand the details or nuances of a particular situation. It can
also be the use of maps and data over time to illustrate a phenomenon.
Visual storytelling is using that information to help our audience
understand a complex story, reconstruct an event, immerse viewers in an
experience, or transparently prove or disprove a point.
The narration, by my count, is 1,250 words? How do you write
narration, and what governs the way you juxtapose the words with the
imagery?
BROWNE: David and I wrote a few initial versions of the Khashoggi script and tweaked it as the story evolved over time with our editor, Mark Scheffler,
to cull extraneous reporting and to keep it tightly focused on the most
salient points. Most of our visual investigations open with a nut graf
recapping the story and explaining what you, the viewer, are buying
into. We write very much to the imagery and the graphics to
make it as explanatory as possible. Often we want to transparently
present the reporting we’ve done so that viewers clearly understand how
we reach conclusions. We include on-the-ground reporting for some
stories.
Conventional wisdom has it that people won’t watch a video
that’s more than 90 seconds. Yet The Times routinely blasts past that
threshold. How long, in your experiences, will audiences watch?
BOTTI: It’s true that for a time we (in the digital
video community) believed shorter was better. This was in the era of
things like text-on-video Facebook videos. But greater lengths seem to
be less of a concern now, thanks in part to YouTube, where long videos
are favored by the site’s viewers (and algorithms). And on The Times’
website, we’ve found our audience is more open to sitting back and
watching. The Times routinely publishes 10 minute-ish videos when the
story warrants it and we are seeing very high retention rates. Pacing,
robust original reporting, and tight storytelling seem to be the key
ingredients.
Besides technological innovations, what led to the shift
from traditional imagery — photos and graphics — that illustrate stories
to stand-alone video projects like the Times’ Visual Investigations?
BOTTI: Publishers started to focus on video for a
variety of reasons, from advertising revenue to keeping up with social
media trends. We also believe that video is a powerful way to tell
stories and is a medium that should be leveraged in our reporting for
that reason. In the Visual Investigations line of work, the shift
probably came with the ability for virtually anyone, anywhere to film
video and take photographs. There’s a tremendous wealth of imagery
capturing newsworthy events from all perspectives. That’s fertile ground
for digging. Also, improvements in the satellite industry mean more and
more people have easier access to satellite images. That means more
eyeballs poking around —more information sharing.
What do you think gives “Killing Khashoggi” and other Visual Investigations such narrative power?
BOTTI: Just by virtue of the stories we cover, they
tend to feature subjects with great amounts of tension and high stakes.
So there’s an inherent narrative power already built in. But that’s just
a small part. We pose a question or set up a problem at the beginning
of all our videos, telling the viewer we’ll take them along in the
process of diving deeper. We’ll present them with images and show them
the importance of things hiding in plain sight (like the shoes worn by
Khashoggi’s body double, or the insignia worn by an army battalion). All of this serves to keep surprising viewers and hopefully keep them watching.
Finally, many of our stories try to speak truth to power — debunking
official lines and coverups. These are the kinds of stories that really
seem to resonate with audiences.
What lessons can narrative writers learn from this new breed of storyteller?
BOTTI: Right up front, tell viewers exactly what
they’re going to get out of watching your video — and why they should
care. Involve them in the reporters’ process of discovery, letting the
story unfold revelation by revelation. Don’t be afraid to state and
restate the obvious as you go — it’s important to make sure your viewer
doesn’t get lost.
But perhaps the key lesson lies in what happens before you even start
writing: story selection. Make sure it can have an impact, good
visuals, and the opportunity to bring new insights to the table.
When the Stephon Clark story opens, the narrator says,
“Warning: It can be hard to watch.” This is true of so many Visual
Investigations. How hard emotionally is it to carry them out?
BROWNE: It can be quite difficult at times. When we rebuilt the apartment block in Douma
(the site of the sarin gas attack), what we had were 5- to 6- to
7-second clips. It was heartwrenching to go through those awful videos
repeatedly. It’s not like it’s experiencing it firsthand, but vicarious
trauma has been studied. You look for warning signs as a large team and
check yourself.
But seeing innocent people killed or lives destroyed by this type of
violence motivates you as well to solve the problem and tell the story.
Your colleague Adam Ellick recently predicted for Nieman Lab
that video forensic reporting will move mainstream and local as “the
toolkit of social intelligence and listening devices” becomes
increasingly “accessible for DIY video makers, lean local news
departments, and international organizations in countries where press
freedoms don’t exist.” What advice would you give this new generation,
especially as they use these tools to tell compelling narratives with a
small team and a shoestring budget?
BROWNE: Open-source skills are developed through
practice and repetition. Learn from the OSINT community on Twitter.
Research the tools you need to use from Bellingcat’s toolkit, and the tipsheets shared by GIJC (the Global Investigative Journalism Conference). Set up a digital workstation of tools and links using start.me or a Google Chrome profile. Absorb what open-source verification means from the VerificationHandbook.com or the case studies on FirstDraftNews.org. Test yourself daily. Learn and adapt storytelling techniques from journalists you admire.
Malachy Browne’s recommendations for sites to watch, tools to use, and sources to learn from:
“We follow the work of several groups in architectural, human rights,
and investigative reporting who apply these practices, and we
occasionally collaborate with some of them. The London-based agency Forensic Architecture and Brooklyn-based SITU Research have brought forensic reconstructions of time and space to a new level.
Around the same time we were doing investigations at Storyful, the British reporter Eliot Higgins was building the early stages of what would later become Bellingcat, a collective of open-source investigators who almost exclusively apply these techniques. In 2018, Bellingcat named the Russian GRU agents suspected of poisoning Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, UK, and they also did reporting that informed our Syria investigations. They do terrific work and are now moving into the justice and accountability realm.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch also apply these methods and have especially advanced the use of satellite imagery in investigations.
Some of the most powerful accountability work is often done when
groups collaborate, e.g. Bellingcat, Human Rights Watch, and Forensic
Architecture’s reconstruction of the US bombing of Al-Jinnah Mosque
in 2017. And Amnesty sometimes works with a group of investigators led
by Alexa Koenig at the Berkeley Human Rights Center to document human
rights abuses. BBC Africa Eye is also adapting these practices and working with the open-source community.
ProPublica has taken an interest too, launching a similar visual investigations unit.
Our own team comprises former members of Storyful, Amnesty, Bellingcat, and, soon, Berkeley’s Human Rights Center.
In terms of visual storytelling, it’s hard to make comparisons
between our brand of work and others. And because I’m far from a video
purist, I feel slightly unqualified to cite influences. However, the
2015 video reconstruction of Farkhunda’s unseemly killing in Afghanistan
by John Woo and Adam Ellick is a forerunner of this kind of work, so I
absorbed and learned from that. Journalistically I’ve long admired the
reporting of the Channel 4 News team in the UK, including their documentaries on Syria using eyewitness footage.
Other strong examples of this material being used in documentary form are Sebastian Junger’s “Hell on Earth” (2017), “The Square” by Jehane Noujaim (2013), and “Karama Has No Walls” by Sara Ishaq (2012).
Our pieces tend to have a distinct feel, so I’m quite reliant on the
creative talent working with me: David Botti, Natalie Reneau, Drew
Jordan, Anjali Singvi, Mark Scheffler, and Nancy Gauss, among others.
I’ve also learned from Jonah Kessel, one of The Times’ most creative video storytellers.”
***More:
https://gijn.org/2019/06/21/how-the-new-york-times-tracked-public-data-to-produce-killing-khashoggi/
***This article first appeared on Nieman Storyboard and is reproduced here with permission.
rgot to change when he swapped clothes with the
doomed man.
Chip Scanlan
is an award-winning journalist whose credits include The New York
Times, NPR, The Washington Post Magazine, and The American Scholar; two
essays were listed as notables in Best American Essays. He taught
writing at The Poynter Institute from 1994-2009 and lives and writes in
St. Petersburg, Florida.