“Japan Earthquake Aftermath” and “Libya’s Escalating Conflict” from Alan Taylor of the Atlantic’s “In Focus.” Ongoing curation of unforgettable single photos – a moving combination of human and epic images.

“Satellite Photos of Japan, Before and After the Quake and Tsunami,” by Alan McLean, Matthew Ericson and Archie Tse of the New York Times. Dramatic interactive sliders use GeoEye imagery to show before-and-after damage done to six Japanese cities as a result of last week’s earthquake and tsunami.

“Street-Level Footage of a Town Washing Away,” from Japanese television (via @geneweingarten). Gene Weingarten writes, “The anonymous videographer here is going to be remembered as a modern Zapruder.”

“12 Must-See Stories about Covering Conflict,” from MultimediaShooter.com. A roundup of links to Magnum, VII, and other photojournalists and organizations reflecting combat in Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq.

“Coming Home a Different Person,” from The Washington Post, winner of the Documentary Project of the Year Award from Pictures Of the Year International (POYi). Dramatic visuals, personal stories, and a lot of context fill out our developing understanding of traumatic brain injury and its effects on those fighting in battle or caught in the crossfire. (Those credited for the project include Whitney Shefte, Marvin Joseph, Alberto Cuadra, Christian Davenport, Kat Downs and Marc Fisher.)

And in a quick switch from suggested viewing to suggested reading, those reporting on Mideast unrest or the aftermath of the earthquake might want to return to Nieman Reports’ Winter 2009 issue “Trauma in the Aftermath,”a thought-provoking take on covering conflict and tragedy.

Building a story from social media, NPR senior strategist Andy Carvin started a Storify timeline just two hours after the shooting began. Early on, NPR and several other outlets mistakenly posted that Giffords had been killed, which is reflected and then corrected in Carvin’s Storify account. (There has been a lot of discussion of the error since, including criticism of NPR and the station’s apology.)

The next day, The New York Times and The Washington Post sites posted text narratives of that deceptively sunny morning outside a Safeway in Tucson. In “Tucson shootings: How Gabrielle Giffords’s event for constituents turned to tragedy,” the Post’s Philip Rucker and Marc Fisher give readers some background on Giffords and her normal schedule, recapturing the feel of what started as a mundane event. When the shooting begins, readers feel the shock and horror of the moment. “A Single, Terrifying Moment: Shots Fired, a Scuffle and Some Luck,” Adam Nagourney’s piece in The New York Times, focuses more tightly on the chaos and violence, opening with a dramatic struggle between bystanders and the gunman as he attempted to reload.

And hours before the Post and the Times had posted their narratives, The Arizona Republic’s Jaimee Rose and Mary Jo Pitzl had turned on a dime to get their own angle by following Daniel Hernandez, Giffords’ brand-new intern, who may have saved her life. “Daniel Hernandez, intern, stays by Gabrielle Giffords’ side,” the brief story of events from Hernandez’s view, added a new perspective on not only the shooting but our understanding of Giffords’ condition in the moments just afterward.

[Update: Here are some comments from Jaimee Rose of the Arizona Republic on getting Hernandez's story just hours after the shooting:

We got lucky. Reporter Mary Jo Pitzl was working her sources in Phoenix and got tipped that there was a young man who helped Gabrielle Giffords immediately after she was shot. I was at the hospital in Tucson, and my editor texted me to look for "someone young named Daniel." While I was interviewing Giffords staffer Mark Kimble at about 7 p.m., Daniel Hernandez was mentioned and happened to be standing a few feet away. He agreed to speak with me. I sat with Daniel Hernandez in the hospital cafeteria while he told his story to his fellow staff members for the first time. It was so early that no one had heard his full tale.

The narrative style was a natural outcome of the way Daniel told his own story that night, with myself and Giffords' staff members huddled around that cafeteria table. We were riveted, asking "and then what, and then what," which of course is the narrative base. Chronology is also the fastest way to tell a story, and we were on deadline. I circled back for a few details to help readers see, such as the image of him checking the pulse first on the neck, and then the wrist. He also recalled that great detail about squeezing her hand, and feeling her squeeze his back.

At that point, Daniel's account was the first we'd heard of Giffords' condition on the way to the hospital, and we wanted it out there as soon as possible. Next, I called my editor, Laura Trujillo, and we wrote it together on the phone: I talked, she typed, and it probably took 20 minutes. I think it was online by 9 p.m. The next day, we had the exclusive, and Daniel's media circus began.]

We’ll continue to compile storytelling approaches to the tragic events of this weekend. Please send us links to any related narratives you see.

Here’s a glimpse of what the story looks like online:

I spoke with the story’s editor, Marc Fisher, this morning about the project. Here are excerpts from our conversation:

Where did this story come from? How did you first find out about it?

The reporter for the story, Ian Shapira, heard about it through his wife, who heard about it through her work.

What did you use to put the story together? Was it an existing tool, or something the Post’s developers put together?

We actually had to develop something expressly for this, so it took an enormous number of work hours on the part of both the designer for the web and the print designer as well. So neither was done with any template, really. Both had to experiment to get the Facebook look down right.

The challenge with print was to make it legible. That went through several iterations. And the challenge online was to make it look plausible and recognizable. We struggled with how much in the way of links to have in there. We couldn’t pick up the entire Facebook page as is, so we had to recreate the links on that page.

It’s a story told via a Facebook feed. Does that feel fundamentally different than the long-form narrative the Post has done so often and so well in the past, or is it just a question of presentation?

It is fundamentally different, because the narration is provided by the original source. We had a little bit of a struggle early on in the project about just how much of our voice would be in the story. I was pushing all the way through for us to be very much on the sidelines and providing just the necessary bits of context, so that people understood who these characters were.

One of the gifts that Shana left behind was this extraordinary narration that she provided in great detail. This is the blessing and the curse of Facebook in that people are narrating their lives in this very intimate and granular sort of way, which creeps out some people and is literally fascinating to many others. That really was one of the main reasons we did the piece.

It was a way to get people talking about how people are portraying their lives on Facebook. The story in and of itself has a power, and there’s almost a voyeuristic appeal to it. But I think what makes it worthwhile beyond that is the questions it raises about just how much we’re living on Facebook and whether and to what extent that displaces human contact.

Did you at any point consider doing the story straight and just quoting some sections of the Facebook feed?

My thought from the beginning was that we would do it in the form of a Facebook page. The reporter wanted originally to do it as more of a traditional narrative, and then he very much embraced this idea. There was definitely debate about it in the early stages, all with an eye toward how to tell the story best and how to push the envelope on using Facebook as a storytelling tool.

It’s a story about a death. Social media has a reputation for being light and entertainment-focused. Did you worry about bridging those two ideas, or were you hoping that any tension between them would heighten the impact of what is ultimately a heavy story?

It is a heavy story, but it isn’t so much a story about death as it is love and loss. It’s a tough story, and we’re hearing from a lot of people that it hits them hard. We debated over quite some time whether to leave the death as a surprise in the narrative or to give it away at the very top, and we decided to let the story take its natural course, the way it had in real life, that that was truer to the story.

There is an inherent power to this story, but I think what was equally appealing to us was the chance to talk about what Facebook means and to use this as a vehicle for getting people to think about what kinds of stories we tell on Facebook.

There are real issues about what happens when someone dies on Facebook and who owns the page and how long it stays up. There are lots of users who believe that the page belongs to the person’s friends and should stay there as a memorial, and there are relatives who in a number of cases are fighting with Facebook to get control of someone’s page or to take it down. These are real issues about who owns someone’s story. That came up in the construction of this piece.

We decided we would not do the story unless the family endorsed our doing it in this way. They were totally on board and supportive, but they might not have been.

I was just predicting last week to our sister site, Nieman Lab, that we’d be seeing a lot more stories built out of Twitter and Facebook feeds in 2011, and here you didn’t even wait for January. I was also hypothesizing that these new forms of storytelling might be clumsy for a while. Did anything about the process or the end product feel messy or awkward to you?

It’s a little different, because the restrictions of the form made it more difficult. You can’t go in and edit or change the basic text of the story, because it’s her words, and we didn’t feel we had the right to play with that the way we would with our own copy. The version that’s in the print paper is heavily condensed, but we didn’t change anything that she wrote. The version online is much more full, though it, too, is shorter than the original. It is a more difficult and more time-consuming form to work in, because what we can bring to the story really had to be super-condensed into these little annotations we included between her status updates.

It’s a restrictive form, but if you have the right kind of story – and it has to be a narrative; it has to be something that is very tightly told. Not every story lends itself to this, but I think there are these human dramas and revealing tales that take place on Facebook, and we should be exploring ways to use them to tell them in a compelling way online.

Telling it in print is probably not going to be an everyday kind of thing because of the space considerations. But as an online storytelling tool, I think it has tremendous power and promise.

What else should we know about the project?

For people trying to do this at home, it really was remarkably time-consuming, and the designers – Grace Koerber on the online side and Greg Manifold on the print side – put in lots of long nights trying to make this work. There is no template for this. The upside is that no one can steal our copy on this because it doesn’t transfer, so they’re actually going to have to link to us. But the downside is that it was many dozens of hours of work.

Story Lab's Twitter mascot

“We’re hoping,” says Fisher, “to demystify the work of a big, sometimes-anonymous institution and give readers a way to connect with the people who report and write the news.”

In its initial post, the Lab says it will offer four “elements”:

• Readers can contribute to story concepts in development.
• Readers can follow how stories are made: seeing what gets put in and what gets left out, and why.
• A regular feature called “The Blowback” will follow what happens after a story runs in print and online.
• A “Pick Story of the Day” provides a list of recommended reading (some Post stories, some not).

There’s not much yet to judge the site on. They’ve made some nice choices for visitors looking for good reading (especially Neely Tucker’s four-star profile of the quirky genius Edward Jones) and posted an initial call for input on a tattoo story assigned to Steve Hendrix.

In the long run, however, the Lab setup could provide insight into storytelling, from ethics to structure, and allow for a kind of open-endedness that lets stories evolve or continue in unexpected ways. My sense is that that its success will depend on how aggressively Post reporters work to engage readers via new channels (the brief profile of contributor Paul Schwartzman says “he does not tweet”), and the degree to which visitors want not only to know how the process works but also to dive into sausage-making themselves.

Read my brief interview with Fisher from this morning.

Can you tell me a little about the genesis of the Story Lab?

We restructured our whole newsroom last summer. As part of that, my job was created as one of two in the newsroom to promote more enterprise reporting, to encourage deeper and more creative kinds of aggressive reporting, with an emphasis on narrative.

Marc Fisher

It’s a group of people who care deeply about writing. We put our heads together and think of ways to take a steamship of a news organization like the Post and make it more accessible and more open to some of the new cultural mores of the Web.

Story Lab is a way for us to enter the world of crowdsourcing and also lift the veil on the way we do journalism, opening up a window onto reporting and why some stories work and others don’t.

It’s an interactive place where readers can help us formulate stories at every stage, from conception to publication. Also a place where we can show readers how the sausage is made and also give them a place to discuss with us some of the ethical and logistical issues in journalism.

Our reporters will go on and talk about the response to their stories, such as what happens when you do a story and the subjects become the object of massive media attention when they never were before? We have a piece on just that coming up.

We have a writer writing about blogging for the first time after years of doing more traditional journalism. Tomorrow, there will be piece on “how I got that story” from a reporter who recently wrote about the new openness on pot-smoking. He’s written a piece for us on how he got people to go public with their names.

It’s a way for writers to also get into some of the material that doesn’t make it into the story. We’ll be picking some stuff off of the cutting room floor and putting it onto the blog—some of the pieces of the story that were interesting but not necessarily on point for the print piece.

What are you hoping Story Lab will do?

We’re hoping to demystify the work of a big, sometimes-anonymous institution and give readers a way to connect with the people who report and write the news.

We’re really going to try to have a number of stories each week that are, from conception to finish, formulated on Story Lab. A reporter says, “Here’s what I’m thinking of; here’s the story as we see it. What do you think?” I fully expect that stories will evolve.

Today’s post is from a reporter asking for help on tattoo etiquette. Maybe there’s a story there, maybe there isn’t. I’m not remotely wedded to our initial concept. But somewhere in that topic, I feel confident there’s an important story—people talking across generations within a workplace.

You have nine people currently involved in the project?

There are nine people, but in addition to that, we’re hoping that people all across the newsroom will use the site to take advantage of readers’ ideas and input.

Are those nine people full-time? Are any of them new media people, as opposed to coming from the print side? I know the dot-com and the newspaper are merging in January.

None of them were exclusively working for the Web site, but several have a lot of experience as bloggers and tweeters and folks doing a lot of online work.

I notice you’re aggregating a little yourselves, with a list of recommended stories.

We’re going to have a “pick story” every morning. Over the course of each week, some will come fresh from that morning’s news. We’ll also call folks’ attention to past articles: classics or stories that have new relevance. Tomorrow morning’s pick is going to be the Charlie Pierce profile of Tiger Woods that led Woods to stop doing real interviews.