Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

citizen k street

We’ve just launched an ambitious new project at work: Citizen K Street. Written by associate editor Robert Kaiser, Citizen K Street is a 27-part series about lobbyist Gerald Cassidy and the rise of lobbying as a big-money industry in Washington, D.C.

The series introduction ran in the Post today, and Chapters 1-25 will run, one a day, Monday-Friday over the next five weeks. The series concludes with a wrap-up in the paper on April 8.

On the online side of things, we’ve put a lot of work into this project. (Kudos to everyone involved.)

I’ve spent the past couple weeks working on the design and building out the package. With the series name (and some of its storyline) a play on the movie Citizen Kane, I’ve tried to work in some design motifs from the movie itself: The type treatment of the title borrows from the outline treatment of the movie title in the film’s opening credits, and I’ve tried to pull in a bit of a newsreel title style into the still images in front of each video.

(On another design note, frequent visitors to this blog may recognize this photo of the Capitol worked into the design.)

Other niftiness: We’re experimenting with Lightbox JS 2.0 for photo enlargements. It’s a little fussy when it overlaps Flash elements, but otherwise, I think it’s a really clean, classy way to offer a larger view of an image without spawning a popup window.

The Lightbox treatment of photo enlargements also works really well with this package because we’re going for a super-integrated approach to presenting this story online. Photos are sprinkled throughout the text, displayed alongside relevant paragraphs. And videos (and graphics) are displayed inline as well, tied closely to the text, where ideally you’ll have a paragraph introducing a topic, then the video clip of a person commenting on that topic, and then the following paragraph picking up where the video left off. (There’s only one video in the introduction, but other chapters will have more.)