“Pre BitterCold” by Vinny Minton (via @bobsacha). More cool montage than story, Minton follows wheeled warriors at the Modern Skate Park in Royal Oak, Mich.

“Big Vinny” from Drea Cooper and Zackary Canepari of “California is a Place.” Meet Big Vinny, a used car salesman who remembers how it used to be.

“Undesired” by Walter Astrada. This MediaStorm-produced video looks at the ways in which girls are at risk in India, starting from even before they are born.

“Our Brother’s Keeper” by Edmund Fountain of the St. Petersburg Times. Mentally ill inmate Leon Adams avails himself of a community program to get his life together. This came out a while ago, but we missed it the first time around.

“Junkyard Pilates” from McKenna Ewen of Minneapolis’ Star Tribune, who recently won an Emmy for work featured on the Storyboard last March. In an effort to prevent injuries, an unlikely workplace starts up a weekly Pilates class.

“Looking for Superman” by John Maeda, president of RISD, from a speech at the 99% Conference (from @letsfu). A sometimes dry but clever look at living with ambiguity as a creative type in less-than-creative circumstances. “How do you lead an institution through crises as someone who is trying to stay true to their core…?”

Now Minneapolis Star Tribune investigative reporter James Shiffer and multimedia freelancer McKenna Ewen have teamed up to tell the story of the slain journalist. Their project, “Rubbed Out,” has its own site, with a short video, print pieces, interactive maps, police reports, and even a poll inviting visitors to pick who they think is the killer.

The journalists partnered with the Star Tribune, which posted a story from Shiffer online and ran a print piece on Saturday about the murder.

We saw the project on the Online News Association’s Interactive Narratives site this week and called Ewen up to discuss it. “Rubbed Out” turns out to be part of Ewen’s senior thesis—he graduated in December with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and political science from the University of Minnesota. His resume lists internships with the Star Tribune and Bloomberg News, and he has recently launched his own company, Ewen Media.

Ewen described the project as an experiment:

Instead of telling people the story of Arthur Kasherman, we wanted to make it interactive. We wanted people to engage on the site, and we did that by presenting the information as we knew it. We still don’t know who actually killed Arthur Kasherman, but based on the information, we have a fairly good idea. What we wanted to do was to open it up and see what other people thought, and let them go through the same journalistic process that we went through—but with less noise.

Kasherman’s life and death make a compelling story—the killing was the third in a series targeting independent reporters, who sometimes went to jail themselves for their own dubious tactics. (Kasherman spent three years behind bars for blackmail.) 

“Rubbed Out” reminds us of “L.A. Noir,” which ran in the Los Angeles Times in 2008. Both use music and images from the era to evoke a Raymond Chandler-meets-the-Mob atmosphere, but where the Times project was epic and tentacled, the Kasherman story is smaller and more focused.

The average time on the site thus far is a whopping eight minutes, which Ewen struggles to explain. “I have no idea how we got those numbers,” he said, “because I’ve done a few of these sites where we’re lucky if we can hit two.”

Ewen notes that in addition to working with the Star Tribune, creating their own site, and posting video to Vimeo and YouTube, they promoted the project on public television. “The idea is that it’s a really good story,” he says. “We want people to get it whatever way they want.”