Gun Wars: A News21 investigation of rights and regulations in America from News21.

The telling of a story is no longer simply a story, but journalism woven with a richness that cannot be captured in words alone. In this year’s Carnegie-Knight News21 project “Gun Wars,” an investigation of gun rights and regulations, we challenged fellows to engage our audience in one of America’s most polarizing debates — and in ways we never have before.

It started long before the project launched with an ambitious multimedia-driven blog and a new partnership with the Public Insight Network, developed by American Public Media and supported by Knight Foundation. The blog included posts and discussions designed to engage our end user and help inform our reporting. It also attempted to build an audience for our content while increasing transparency for what — and how — we reported. Our goal was to create a conversation.

The blog combined with Public Insight Network to target specific sources and audiences with questions about guns in America. This helped to identify what we called the “middle ground” on a divisive topic.

The student work began in January 2014 with a video-conferenced seminar that included reporting and research led by Leonard Downie Jr., the Weil Family Professor of Journalism at Arizona State University and a vice president at large of The Washington Post. In May, 29 fellows from universities across the country began the 10-week fellowship reporting project, traveling to 28 states to capture the sounds and images of people and places across the nation to produce an immersive reporting experience.

Sometimes stories were best told in long-form articles augmented by audio, photos, video and data visualizations. Other times, stories were told entirely in a data-driven graphic or through video or photos. Our goal was to reach an evolving audience of news consumers who read, listen and watch content in different ways.

Photo: News21 reports included profiles of American gun owners, their families, churches and organizations.

This was especially true in our attempt to identify the underlying culture of guns in America. We sent 10 teams of multimedia reporters across the U.S. to capture, in gun owners’ own words, how their use of guns is based on where they grew up and how long-held traditions shaped their views. We called this section “Americans and their guns.” It included 10 multimedia stories with one or two paragraphs of text. The stories ranged from a citizens militia group in Mississippi and family hunting traditions in Montana to helicopter expeditions to eradicate wild hogs with semi-automatic weapons in Texas.

Our newsroom approached website presentation in much the same way. We used words, photos and video in the Northwestern University Knight Lab’s Timeline.js and StoryMap.js tools and embedded audio in the text of stories using the lab’s SoundCite. All of this was done in addition to traditional standalone photos, galleries, video vignettes and video packages.

News21 also compiled or analyzed nine databases for the “Gun Wars” project, which included an examination of gun suicides and homicides among children, teens and domestic violence victims — as well as a review of firearms laws in every state in the nation. Seven of those databases were incorporated into our website through interactive visualizations that allow the audience to explore the data on their own.

Since the News21 site launched Aug. 17, the fellows’ stories and videos have appeared in print and on 140 unique URLs across the country. More stories than ever were picked up by new and longtime partners, including The Washington Post, Scripps, Gannett/USA Today, The Philadelphia Inquirer, NBCNews.com, the Center for Public Integrity, The Sacramento Bee, Yahoo! News and Mashable. This represents the greatest reach and impact of any News21 project to date.

Among the most popular stories: An examination of the political differences and reactions to shootings in Connecticut and Arizona, laws that allow guns to be carried on K-12 campuses, firearms deaths among children and teens, and urban gun violence in Camden, N.J., told in both print and video.

The News21 summer fellowship is based out of a newsroom at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. News21 is supported by grants from the Carnegie Corp. of New York and Knight Foundation as well as the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation, the Hearst Foundations, the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation, the Peter Kiewit Foundation of Omaha, Neb., and Women & Philanthropy, part of Arizona State’s Foundation for a New American University as well as by individual universities and their contributors.