Some 98 people died when a 12-storey apartment building collapsed last June, just down the street from Miami Herald Investigative reporter Sarah Blaskey’s home.

“It was a life-altering event for me and my colleagues, because the beachfront – where a lot of us live – is a kind of close colony, and these were our neighbours,
 she says.

Blaskey became one of a Herald team whose coverage of the deadly collapse – which included an interactive narrative that used 2D and 3D animation along with photos and videos from the collapse to illustrate what happened and explain why the tower fell – went on to win a top INMA award.

In a blog for the group this week, she explains the background to ‘House of Cards’ project.

Blaskey was assigned to a team tasked with explaining why a ‘condo’ that was not extremely old – or under construction or the victim of a natural disaster – pancaked down on itself in the middle of a totally unremarkable night.

“Covering the collapse of a Miami condo required months of investigation and writing,” she says. “It also taught the Miami Herald team several new lessons about covering such a massive disaster.”

Six months of reporting, ten eyewitnesses, thousands of pages of public records, and a partnership with one of the leading experts on reinforced concrete structures in the country, uncovered not just one cause, but a sequence of failures that resulted in one of the deadliest collapses in modern history.

“We published the findings as House of Cards, an interactive narrative that used 2D and 3D animation along with photos and videos from the collapse to illustrate what happened and explain why the tower fell,” she says.

“Although some of my observations about our process might seem obvious, I hope that they might be helpful to others engaged in both non-traditional and traditional forms of investigative storytelling.”

Blaskey presents five big takeaways:

-choice of a ‘scrollytelling’ format helped enhance understanding of the causes behind the collapse, while “also helping them understand why such nitty-gritty, technical details were something everyone should care about”. A narrated animation – the first choice – was left in favour or ‘scrollytelling’, which allows readers to absorb information at their own pace;

-animated visuals were helpful for explaining directional orientation, proximity and vantage point of eyewitnesses. A written explanation would have taken at least a paragraph and still not given the audience the same level of understanding.

-visual metaphors were also useful for explaining complex engineering concepts without hundreds of extra words. For example, animated hands holding something up by applying pressure from two sides was probably more effective than just a written explanation of the restraining forces applied by the perimeter wall to the pool deck.

“The foundation of our success was the truly collaborative, interdisciplinary approach we took to investigative reporting,” Blaskey says. The Herald worked with Dr Dawn Lehman and her team at the University of Washington, who interpreted building plans, looked through thousands of photos and videos of the collapse, and ultimately used cutting-edge computer modelling techniques to test theories of collapse.

Meanwhile, reporters were able to put together timelines and interviews that guided Lehman’s process and allowed her to refine the model and ultimately come up with a plausible theory of collapse.

“Every detail mattered in both the animations and the text – from correctly depicting the size and placement of all columns, to colour choices that reflected reality. When House of Cards launched, the peace of mind that came from knowing how carefully it had been constructed was worth all of the sweat, anxiety, and devotion to detail and precision along the way.”

The project ­ which was ‘best in show’ winner of the 2022 INMA Global Media Awards – took a huge team. “Reporters, editors, animators, illustrators, front-end developers, designers, sound engineers, and experts dedicated an extraordinary amount of time and energy to this project.

“Without each one of them, it wouldn’t have been possible.”

Blaskey adds a “special shout-out” to co-producer Sohail Al-Jamea and his team, editor, Casey Frank, reporting partners Aaron Leibowitz and Ben Conarck, and art director Eduardo Alvarez, who were all on this project from day one.