5. Case History

3.

Certainly all the decision-making was difficult, taking large amounts of time and consuming many people’s energies. Part of this was due to the newness of the medium and our collective lack of Web experience, but also because of our ambitiousness. Rather than publish the conventional photographs of war we were attempting to understand how peoples viciously killing each other for years arrive at peace, and provide forums to discuss strategies of resolution; rather than circumvent the photographer freshly back from extraordinarily intense experiences and highly invested in his own work we gave him center stage; rather than produce the site primarily relying on the authority of the New York Times we were, by creating a dialectic among photographer, subject and reader, seeming to almost undermine it. Computers were set up at the Hague where a war crimes trial was beginning, at the United Nations, and through the Soros Foundation in Sarajevo so that non-Times subscribers could more easily participate (the Times sent out 200,000 e-mail messages to its subscribers announcing the site, and made it free to anyone with Internet access who wanted to enter). 1

Certain of our desires for the project were not accomplished. We were enchanted for a while with the idea of keeping track of a reader’s movements so that more mixing of pathways could occur and each reader might reenter the site differently, building upon what each had already seen (one reader told me that it took her four hours to go through the site), but it would have involved too many demands upon the Times server. I had wanted to engage the subject’s point of view as a prime navigational metaphor, so that if a reader clicked on a picture of a Muslim woman unbeknownst to him he would later on be prohibited from selecting pictures of Serbs, perhaps rejected from some of the Serbian enclaves represented on the Web, as happened to the inhabitants of Sarajevo who were continually being circumscribed by their own ethnicity.There were problems setting up computer access in Sarajevo - a new medium, it was not a priority for many in Sarajevo, and the discussion groups were largely dominated by pro-Serbian commentators living in the US who felt vilified by the conventional media. Also, the complexity of experiences available to the reader through the photography was not nearly as great as we had initially wanted, but then again we had to weigh that against the fact that this site was already much more complex than almost any photojournalistic foray ever attempted in any medium.

1. Many others contributed in important ways to this project, most especially Times forum moderator and senior editor Bernard Gwertzman, design director Ron Louie, content development editor Elizabeth Osder and online news editor Jean-Claude Bouis who did the audio interviews, international forum producer Alison Cornyn (IBM helped installing computer terminals in the Hague and the UN), and Indigo Information Design's Lucy Kneebone, Melissa Tardiff and Amnon Dekel--the latter's early input was essential to the interactive design.