Naka Nathaniel is a multimedia journalist for The New York Times, based in Los Angeles. After graduating with a degree in broadcast journalism from the University of Texas at Austin in 1995, he joined The New York Times as an intern. At The Times he became a leader in the new media revolution that brought audio and video to the paper's Web site. Since 2003, Nathaniel has collaborated with Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, traveling to such places as Kuwait in the days leading up to the war in Iraq, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to report on proposed oil drilling, and Darfur to tell the region’s stories of genocide. His video work has also appeared on such television news outlets as Anderson Cooper 360° and in the Darfur documentary, Sand and Sorrow, which appeared on HBO in December 2007. His most recent Times reporting trip to the south of Sudan in March will be his last. Nathaniel has decided to end his 13-year career with The Times in May and plans to work with students, helping them develop their web journalism techniques.

You cover topics like genocide, disease, poverty and other social issues that some might say are generally underreported by the media, what draws you to these stories?

It’s basically what you said. It’s the fact that these are underreported stories. These are things that we should be paying more attention. We should be paying more attention to what’s going on in the world than what’s happening with Hollywood starlets. It goes back to that old news axiom that says if the most important news of the day was always on the front page it would be that 26,000 children under the age of five died today because of starvation or malaria or disease. It’s almost a luxury, in a perverse way, because while everybody else is covering you-name-it, we’re given this angle to cover stuff that we think should be covered. If stuff is underreported, that gives us the opportunity to go out and do it. It becomes the reason why: Because nobody else is doing it, we’re going to do it.

You’ve talked about wanting to remove the “multi” from multimedia. Can you tell us what you meant by that?

I feel like people would be much better off if we weren’t defined by—I’m going to use the term that people use—“silos,” where you do one track. You do either a magazine thing, or an audio thing, or a newspaper thing, or a television or broadcast thing. I draw from every single one of those elements for a given story and I just feel like that’s what I need to do to properly tell a story. I don’t need to be limited by the media or by the method of delivery. It’s just what’s appropriate to tell the story. A lot of people think I’m involved solely in video and yeah, that’s what happens to be the vogue thing right now. But before that I was doing audio slide shows. That was the thing at the time. And before that, it was audio interviews and before that it was slideshows without the audio. So there’s always little things that we’ve been involved in. It’s just a matter of progressing. And video happens to be the new thing, and I think “community” is going to be the next thing that comes after that. It’s going to be more than user-generated content. It’s going to be more about full-fledged media projects that people are going to be doing that are going to be feeding into your work, and everybody is going to be kind of working off of each other. So I’m excited to see where that goes.

Can you talk about how you determine the proper medium for the story?

When we’re doing the original reporting, the things I’m looking for are what makes sense. I’ve made a lot of mistakes along the way, choosing the wrong way to tell a story, so that’s what I’m seeing in those little elements that make me think, ‘Let’s do this as video or audio.’ We’ve kind of fallen into doing a lot of video. That’s been the popular way to do things recently. But I think there will be more opportunities to be a little more selective and try to pick out the right way to do things. I think a big thing too that we’re embarking on when I talk about community is the possibility of doing more lectures. The New York Times has this brand new building in the heart of mid-town Manhattan. They have this 200-seat auditorium. I think it would be incredibly interesting when we return from a trip to debut a mini documentary, 12 minutes or so, at a place like that and open it up for questions. I think the more you’re able to draw in the audience, the better off your story is going to be.

What’s the process you go through to conceptualize a story when you’re working on multimedia projects?

The conceptualization of a project – a lot of it is scribbling down notes and scribbling down storyboard ideas and trying to get to a point where I think, ‘OK I think I know where I’m going.’ And a lot of it is talking it through with Nick (Kristof). We’ll just kind of start bouncing through ideas and he’ll ask me, ‘So what do you think of this one?’ And I’ll say, ‘Well, you could do it this way or we could do it that way.’ And then he’ll show me his column to see what I think about it, and I’ll start to develop the idea for the multimedia aspect a little more. Then we’ll talk through it a little more. So it’s truly a collaborative process. Eventually when I sit down at the computer and start editing, that’s when I can really make the true decisions. But for the most part it’s very collaborative.

Can you explain how you go about storyboarding?

I carry around reporters notebooks just like everyone else does and mine are full of just these little scratch marks and drawings. We used to have to sketch out the storyboards in Flash. I would have to sketch out exactly what I wanted to have happen and then I would sit down at the computer and work with the software to make that happen. In essence, it’s a matter of understanding how you’re going to get from point A to point B rather than just barreling down the side of the mountain. It’s nice to know what direction you’re going in, so that’s why we do storyboarding.

You’ve mentioned drawing inspiration from novels or literature. What might you draw from something like that and how might it apply to multimedia?

Especially with literature, you see little twists and turns in the way a story is told. For instance, the beginning of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, by Thorton Wilder. It opens when the bridge snaps, and everybody plummets to their death. And you think, How did those half dozen people get to that point on the bridge? Then they go back and trace the paths. Often we’ll do the same thing. We’ll start off with this stunning moment and then loop back around and say how exactly we got there. You know how the story ends at the very beginning but you’re wondering how in the world did everyone end up here. You’re curious. So that’s one example of how I would draw something from a novel and put that into play.

It seems like a lot of the work that you and Nick Kristof do is with shorter pieces, two to three minute pieces. Are you able to incorporate those narrative elements into short pieces like that?

Most definitely. When Nick Kristof and I work together it’s often a part of a much larger package that we’re trying to pull together. It’s not the one video element or the one 800-word column or the one blog post. It’s part of this bigger idea. Because of the way a story develops, we end up covering the same subject matter again and again over a longer period of time. We use little bits and pieces here and there for incremental development. And we try to pick what’s appropriate for that piece of the story. Each time we try to get something that hooks people into the story—whether it’s a video or Nick’s column. He writes something that really gets somebody’s attention, and he’ll say, ‘If you want to see what this person looks like, check out this video.’ It’s all part of creating this—for lack of a better term—“package of stories.” There are a million different ways to tell a story. We try to pick out the one or two ways that are best and tell it that way.

To play the devil’s advocate, writers like Talese or McPhee or Didion didn’t need multimedia to tell their stories. Why should writers today pay any heed to it? Isn’t it just a fleeting infatuation with new technology?

I don’t know about McPhee necessarily, but I know Talese was a reporter for The New York Times. He was writing short-form newspaper articles, and then he goes off and starts writing books like, The Kingdom and the Power. I love that book. That was my first introduction to The New York Times. It’s the sort of journalism that Tom Wolfe was doing. Didion was also doing screenwriting, so she likes to dabble in this stuff too. And often after a tremendous broadcast television reporter passes away, when they write the obituary, one of the very first things they say is, ‘Sure, he was great on camera, but really he was a tremendous writer.’ And that’s the thing. A journalist can do any number of things. They are people who just have an urgency to tell a story. Unfortunately, so many people have been pigeonholed into doing one thing or another.

In the spirit of this conversation, I’d like to ask what websites are you following?

Of course, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. And I’m always checking out what the Guardian is up to. I spend a lot of time on my hometown newspapers, the San Antonio Express-News and the Austin American-Statesman. But to be perfectly honest, I’ve started to step away from using a lot of websites. I’m getting a lot of my news from the mobile phone. I hate getting caught spending a lot of time sitting down in front of a computer. I love to be out and about, and that’s the great thing about having a mobile phone where you can just go to the website. I find myself reading a lot more often off the mobile phone. And that’s the way things are going. People are, fortunately, going to be tethered less and less to their computers. You’ll be able to go out and about and have your news read to you. If I’m cooking at the house, I love to have a podcast on in the background. It’s such a pleasurable thing to have something fun to listen to while you’re doing something else, whether it’s your commute or mowing the lawn. You have that sense of accomplishment. I’ve gotten something done, and I’ve learned something.