About the Site

Rubbed Out is an experiment in digital history that draws on public and private archival sources to present in-depth, investigative material. It’s about a violent chapter in American journalism, and how to engage an audience by providing numerous entry points to a narrative. Investigative reporter James Eli Shiffer independently researched the project and collaborated with Ewen Media to present his findings on the Web.

Rubbed Out includes three short stories on Arthur Kasherman’s death, including his Hell-Raising Tradition, his Last Chow Mein and the Aftermath. The project’s short documentary is available on YouTube and Vimeo. There’s also an interactive map of Minneapolis at the time of Kasherman’s death.

McKenna Ewen worked with James Shiffer to build the independent investigation into an online multimedia project. Ewen used historical images from the Hennepin County Library and Star Tribune, in addition to historical footage from the Prelinger Archives, to produce the Rubbed Out documentary. He built the interactive map using UMapper, a web-based map application with the Yahoo maps framework. The site was powered by WordPress and designed by Graph Paper Press. If you have any further questions, you may contact McKenna Ewen at mewen@ewenmedia.com.

Help share Arthur Kasherman’s story

If you enjoyed this project, please take a moment to share and recommend it to others. You may also use the following promotional text and images if preferred. Ewen Media launched this project independently and needs your help to make it a success. We appreciate your support.

Promotional text:
Minneapolis, MN – In 1945, newspaper publisher Arthur Kasherman was gunned down on a snowy street. Was he a crusader for justice, or a low-life who angered the underworld once too many? Watch the video, read the stories and maybe you’ll solve a 65-year-old murder mystery.

Download the promotional images:
http://ewenmedia.com/rubbedout/rubbedout590x350.jpg
http://ewenmedia.com/rubbedout/rubbedout320x190.jpg
http://ewenmedia.com/rubbedout/rubbedout170x100.jpg

Here’s a link to the Almanac segment where I previewed the Kasherman project. I was also joined by professor Jane Kirtley and MPR’s Bob Collins to discuss the some of the latest media controversies of the week.

Interested in partnering with Ewen Media?

Ewen Media is a multimedia production company that uses interactive multimedia to share meaningful stories. The organization’s mission is to use purpose-driven journalism to explore the world in its current state and the world that it could become. McKenna Ewen would like to collaborate with local news organizations and nonprofits to help create similar projects. If you are interested, you may reach him by phone at 952-212-3013 or by email at mewen@ewenmedia.com. He is also available on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Thank you very much for your interest in this project and please let us know what you think. Thanks!

The Other Future of News conference took place on December 12, 2009, and was a response to MPR’s Future of News event that took place earlier this year. Other videos from the event are available here.

Learning online video from the “White Castle lady”

This summer, on the first day of my third internship at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, I was assigned to produce a video on White Castle customer Ariel Wade. Wade was upset because she tried to drive her motorized scooter through the White Castle drive-thru after the dining room had closed and the employees refused to serve her. She contacted the Star Tribune’s Whistleblower team and argued that White Castle had discriminated against her because of her disability (degenerative arthritis). The story ran here with a short video.

Ariel Wade showed me the power of online video after the story ran. First, Huffington Post linked to the video, which is essentially every intern’s dream, and Wade quickly became a viral celebrity. Dlisted, a raunchy celebrity site, embedded the video and it took off. Other similar blogs picked it up and Wade became an “American Hero” who was “fighting the fight.” However, because the Star Tribune’s video player did not allow any sharing or embedding options, a user ripped the video from the Star Tribune’s site and uploaded it to YouTube.

To me, this story demonstrated the powerful potential of local news video to reach new viewers when the content can be emailed, embedded and shared with others. In this case, the primary audience for a White Castle drive-thru story might be on Dlisted rather than unique visits to the Star Tribune. The easy embeddability of the YouTube player allowed new viewers to see the story without any additional cost to the news organization. It also significantly expanded the potential viewing audience by targeting a new set of news consumers.

Shortly after the initial launch, the Star Tribune added the video to its YouTube channel and brought in an additional 25,000 video views, plus 20,000 video views from the previous user (who was asked to remove the video). From the YouTube channel, the video was embedded on nine different channels and even inspired a spin-off video.

In this case, YouTube appeared to be an effective way of distributing video content. However, if the Star Tribune’s video player allowed for sharing and embedding, the 45,000 views would have been added to site’s video traffic and helped maximize pre-roll advertising from the content. While loyal visitors might be easier to monetize, this example showed that this video’s value, along with many others, were not limited to a particular news site.