About halfway through the online package on Lebrew Jones and the Death of Micki Hall when it became clear why the reporter was questioning Lebrew Jones innocence, I said “Oh my God” loud enough that someone in the next room wanted to know what was wrong.

I found this story riveting. It was easy to read and the online design did a wonderful job of pulling me through it. The writing was very strong while being concise.

There were some things that I thought would have improved my experience.

The first video told the same story written in the first two pages of the written story. This was a temptation not to want to open any more videos, or read further into the story. I could easily have made a choice at this point and simply done one or the other. Maybe that’s good, maybe it isn’t.

The videos also do not have a start and stop feature. People kept coming in and talking to me, and I had to start video segments over, instead of pausing.

I thought the handling of graphic material was tasteful.

The story was told in an in-depth fashion. I didn’t feel robbed of a good read. When I see succinct online writing, that’s generally what I think will happen. However, I did want a little more, but that’s me.

I wondered about the Christine Young’s role in the story. She is a part of it. There was a point when she was interviewing the sister, when her question interjected showed her desire to prove someone other than Jones was guilty of murder of the young woman. I wondered about the ethics of the story and found that Al Tompkin’s rave review of the work on Poynter’s site. However, I liked very much the credit page.

I also had some nagging questions about a point revealed in the telling of the story. This man had a 66 IQ – isn’t he mentally disabled or very close to it? Why wasn’t that point given more strength in the story? I also came away from this work with the strange feeling that maybe the author was suggesting that the van driver killed Micki Hall. In the opening, she pointed out that the driver didn’t like Hall. The forensic sources felt like they were pointing in that direction, with the character breakdown of how the killer might feel from the staging of the photos and the several times Young brings up how he left. Maybe it’s the narrative that begs a protagonist. But I found this kind of reaching too much.