By Sree Sreenivasan
DNAinfo Contributing Editor
During the World Cup, I wrote a column about how coverage of the month-long event was a showcase for new and new-ish ways to present digital information.
Turns out the Gulf of Mexico oil spill has provided another array of interesting ways news organizations are covering an ongoing, complicated story, using video, photography, maps, interactive graphics, animations and more.
This week, we crossed two milestones: 1) it's been 90 days since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, killing 11 workers, and, 2) for the first time since then, there's no new, visible oil leaking into Gulf — for the moment at least.
In fact, the temporary cap that appears to be holding as I write this has created a minor dilemma for journalists: how to keep viewers and readers interested now that the compelling sight of oil gushing out has stopped for now.
In the meantime, there's plenty of journalism to be done about the nearly 200 million gallons of oil that's already made its way into the waters and the lives of people and wildlife along the coast.
Here's a roundup of digital presentations worth noting:
* AP coverage: The Associated Press has done a superb job covering the story, using traditional reporting and video and photography. Its AP and the Gulf Oil Spill page provides a single-stop to see all the news cooperative's work. You'll find highlights of the coverage, including video, slideshows, investigative stories and various interactive graphics (including this spill meter). The AP has a virtual army of journalists working this story, as it has "deployed more than 50 reporters, photographers and videographers to the scene of the worst oil spill in U.S. history," the organization says on its site's mission statement. That's in addition to the two dozen reporters they already had working in the area. “It is a story without an end in sight, and we will follow it,” AP President Tom Curley said in a statement.
* Social media and the spill: As with any story these days, sites like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have become major players in how people learn about major (and minor) developments. Mashable, as always, has been good at highlighting the social media aspects of this story. Its collections, How to Monitor the Gulf Oil Spill Using Social Media and 4 Social Media Efforts to Aid the Gulf Coast are worth a visit. Mashable also tracked some creative ways that advocates are trying to keep attention on the disaster, including a way to make any website appear to have an oil spill, via InstantOilSpill.com.
* NOLA.com's 2010 Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill: NOLA.com, the site of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, did heroic work during Hurricane Katrina, and has once again become a must-visit site for another disaster. It is particularly good at providing the local angles that some of the national media might miss.
Speaking of national media, here are several major "micro-sites" or collections of coverage that I check regularly.
* CNN.com's Gulf Coast Oil Disaster: CNN's page about the crisis is, as can be expected, video-heavy, and includes coverage from various angles, including the environmental and health effects of the disaster.
* NYTimes.com's Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill: The New York Times' page includes an archive of the paper's reportage and extensive multimedia, as well as links to various NYTimes.com blogs and headlines from around the Web.
* WashingtonPost.com's Gulf Oil Spill: Especially noteworthy here are the site's collections of photos, interactive graphics and online chats with experts.
* PBS NewsHour's Gulf Coast Oil Leak: Unlike most of the other sites, this runs in a blog format, highlighting the video interviews the nightly TV show is known for. Also featured are widgets, such as one that counts how many gallons have leaked, and a video feed that allow any website to embed them.
* Yahoo! News Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill: Yahoo! News offers perhaps the biggest set of links to news about the spill, tracking more than 26,000 stories from around the Web, with several added every hour. Another way to keep track of breaking news from around the web is this particular search on Google News.
What did I miss? Let me know in the comments or via Twitter @sreenet.
Every week, DNAinfo contributing editor Sree Sreenivasan, a Columbia Journalism School professor, shares his observations about the changing media landscape.
