Miami Herald special reports

The Miami Herald occasionally runs special reports, like this recent one on shady lending practices and how borrowers are paying for it.

The package features a three-part chunked article, videos, a photo slideshow, graphics and a discussion forum for readers, presented in a Flash interface.

Special reports like this are a good feature for newspapers trying to compete with multimedia engines like CNN, but take a huge amount of time and other resources.

Unfortunately, this means they only appear once every few months. I remember seeing this one over the summer, and it's still the most recent one posted. With more effort exerted in covering the election, maybe these special packages get pushed aside.

But if newspapers wish to continue to compete, they'd better crank out more pieces like this one or they'll quickly find their website traffic leaving in favor of those outlets who do.