PTSD:Reporter, readers and the man in the story meet online

Readers' Representative Journal
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Reporter, readers and the man in the story meet online

Reporter Jia-Rui Chong's Column One story on Mitch Hood, a former Marine whose two tours in Iraq left him facing, as Chong wrote, "a new enemy: sleep," included at the end this invitation: "Join us for a live Web chat at noon today as two Veterans Affairs experts discuss the influence of war on sleep and the ways that physicians try to treat the resulting problems. Go to www.latimes.com/sleepchat."

It was a new dimension for Chong and offered a chance for readers to meet Hood, the subject of her profile, online. The veteran showed up as well as the two experts, Dr. Thomas C. Neylan of the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and Steve Woodward of the Sleep Research Laboratory at the VA's National Center for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in Palo Alto.

Chong's carefully crafted published story, published Aug. 5, seems a contrast to the sprawling conversation online that involved as many as five people e-talking about different things at once, over the course of about an hour.

Lindsay Barnett, the online editor who moderates the chats for latimes.com, notes some limitations to holding chats. There’s that overlap in conversation when one person is typing an answer while another person has posted an entirely different question, for instance. But a live blog offers “a unique way for the reader to be able to interact directly in a way that you can't so much reading the story or e-mailing the writer of a story or commenting on a message board. There’s something about the immediacy, knowing they're there reading it at the same time you’re writing it."

As its own form of storytelling, it is time- and resource-intensive, involving at least one reporter, editors, sources and technical help all available at the same time. The number of people involved in producing the chat has to be measured against the number of readers who benefit (Barnett says that a chat might typically have about 20 to 50 participants; a celebrity- or sports-driven one might have 100; this one had about 60). But Barnett judges the success of a chat not just by the number of participants but by quality of the questions, and “if people are getting something from it." Many of the four or five chats a month The Times offers are for sports- and entertainment-related stories. Barnett says, “Sometimes the comments we just get are ‘omg, I love you,’ that sort of thing. For this one, there were thoughtful comments and opinions; people had interesting ideas to offer.”

The online doors were thrown open a bit before noon on Tuesday for a conversation that lasted more than an hour. How do Chong and the editor on the story, Steve Padilla, think it went? Their answers follow.
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I managed to participate in this the other day. I arrived late in the chat because things were crazy online. Considering it's now only the 7th day of the month and there have been 134 posts on this blog alone, I never seem to be able to get much time to do anything else. I was happy for the little time I could spend on this chat. There were some great questions and good information provided. I hope the Times, along with other online publications manages to do more of these. It will go a long way in helping people understand what veterans are going thru.