Tripp Mikich is the former director of photography for the award-winning Parenting magazine. Along with Amy Howorth, formerly picture editor of Wired magazine, and Chuck Gathard, a photographer, Mikich founded Focal Point, a group dedicated to interactive journalism, using the new media to showcase innovative photography.

At first the group considered using CD-ROM as a platform, but then changed course after they made contact with Gary Matoso, a Paris-based photojournalist who proposed a photo documentary of a journey across post-communist Russia. Focal Point decided that the Web would be the ideal medium for this project. Not only did it solve the problem of distribution, but they could update the site regularly as Matoso made his way across Russia. In September of 1995, with support from World Media, Sprint, Leica, and Kodak (who donated a digital camera), the site was created and the journey began. The trans-cyberian adventure took Matoso and Lisa Dickey, his writer traveling partner, 5000 miles from Vladivostok to St. Petersburg and ended three months later. The “Russian Chronicles”, found at Focal Point’s Web site (www.f8.com), is a record of this journey. The site has received a 4 Star rating (the highest) by the Magellan/McKinley review. They wrote in their review: "Stunning photography, insightful commentary, and a smorgasbord of hypertext make Focal Point the leader in the burgeoning interactive photojournalism movement."

Mikich:

We wanted the site to be graphically simple. We created four main sections: “In Their Words,” “Daily Chronicles,” ”Atlas,” “Trip At a Glance,” and “Road Stories.” We chose small file sizes so the images would only take 10-20 seconds to download using a 14.4 modem. Every week we’d receive a transmission from Matoso and Dickey. Because the phone lines were so bad, it would take 4-10 hours to download 20-40 photos and 6-8 pages of text. Then we’d process and tweak the photos on this end (San Francisco), edit the text, and place the results in the appropriate section. Sometimes Matoso would send sound files and we’d link them to relevant words or text.

We wanted the site to be more than informative. We wanted to create a personal narrative, something that not only brought people in, but enveloped them and sustained a level of engagement. Viewers of the site were encouraged to email their comments to Matoso and Dickey, to give them real-time feedback. One Russian emigrant living in Canada emailed them and asked them to look up his family. They did and we posted pictures from the meeting and sound files from the kids. We like to think that we have taken photography from being a window into the world that evokes sympathy to being a door to the world that creates empathy and motivates people to action.