A new project out of American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop, called Investigating Power, is touting itself as the first comprehensive visual history of America’s most significant reporting of the last 50 years.

The website features a rich collection of video interviews with journalists like Christiane Amanpour, Bob Woodward,  Carl Bernstein,  Ben Bradlee,  Bill Kovach and many more. You can filter down to timelines by “Moments of Truth” — McCarthyism, civil rights, Vietnam, Watergate, Corporate Power and Post-9/11.

According to the Investigating Power website, the number of entries for the Pulitzer Prize in the Gold Medal public service category dropped 43 percent from 1985 to 2010. In roughly the same timeframe, the number of public relations specialists doubled.  Thus, it’s a critical time to reflect on the powerful journalism that has created change:

At this critical juncture in the history of American journalism, as the news media and the nature and extent of original reporting itself undergo a very difficult transformation, we must reflect on the inherent, incalculable value of original, independent reporting in our nation and in the world. Facts are and must be the coin of the realm in a democracy, for government “of the people, by the people and for the people,” to quote President Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address, requires and assumes to some extent an informed citizenry.
– ᔥ Investigating Power

They plan to grow the collection over the next decade. Explore the full project here.

We’ve long-touted Dipity as a great tool for making timelines, but the days of free, online tools are quickly being replaced by an era of free open-source tools.  While Dipity is still great if you want an easy-to-use interface and are willing to shell out $50/month for unlimited use, open source timelines give you ultimate control and ownership of your content. Read more

Timelines are an effective storytelling tool that can display information that occurs over time in an attractive, easy to follow format.

While there are many tools available to do the trick, one stands out for its power, and that’s ProPublica’s open source TimelineSetter.

The introduction to TimelineSetter reads like this: “TimelineSetter creates beautiful timelines.”

That’s an understatement.

The timelines created by TimelineSetter are sleek, can incorporate rich media like Google Maps and YouTube videos and can be easily modified. Read more