We want you to be smart around the water cooler. And making you clever, well-informed and witty as you chat with your compadres requires great reporting, great stories and great graphics.

During the past decade, newspaper graphics have become more and more sophisticated, thanks in large part to computers that allow graphic artists to create elaborate graphs, charts and illustrations in a short time.

During the past two weeks, readers of The Salt Lake Tribune have seen a number of staff graphics that helped tell the terrible story of the desperate search underground for six coal miners trapped when the walls of a tunnel buckled and flung rock and coal, blocking the way out. Cross-section illustrations showed readers the location of holes bored into the rock, the difficulty of drilling though almost 2,000 feet of rock to reach voids in the mine and depictions of the mining machines moving though the rubble-filled tunnel.

And now that the mine has killed three rescuers and injured six more, the story needs graphics for depth and breadth.

For instance, on Thursday, Tribune graphic artists Amy Lewis and Rhonda Hailes Maylett produced a graphic that illustrated "bumps and bounces" in mines and defined terms such as "overburden," "bump" and "heave."

A graphic like that one serves several functions - including the provision of quick definitions for readers making their way through the mine collapse stories of the day and the provision of a graphic element that offers information not in the various stories.

Graphics Editor Todd Adams explains, "There are some stories - like the Crandall Canyon mine collapse - that beg for some visual reference in people's minds. But a lot of readers don't have any visual reference; they've never been in a mine. So it's incumbent upon visual journalists, such as our graphic artists, to give readers a visual reference with which to 'see' the story."

The pressure to produce good work fell not only on reporters, editors and photographers:

"These images were especially critical during the early days of the mine collapse because there were no video images or photographs, obviously, from inside the mine. Sometimes graphics provide the only visual reference available. Other times, the graphic complements offer a more complete picture of a story," Adams says.

And a big story like the mine story seeds more cooperation among newsroom departments, Adams notes:

"Creating graphics of mine disasters requires a well-coordinated newsroom effort; after all, not many graphic artists have been inside a mine, either," he says. "But the artists obtain a frame of reference, if you will, by talking to and obtaining information from reporters in the field, researching the topic by scouring news and Internet sources, and then building a visual representation of the critical story elements. In the case of the mine collapse, both geographic and geologic reference material was needed. Plus, there were elements specific to the mining industry: miners' equipment, coal-mining methods, drilling and sound-detection technology.

"Now, imagine doing all this information gathering and visual referencing, and then producing a meaningful graphic - on a tight deadline! It's a challenge, but one that we relish," he adds.

Managing Editor for News and Business Terry Orme sees graphics from the perspective of a person who has to weave all parts of the story together:

"Sometimes, elements of stories can't be conveyed with words, at least not very effectively," Orme says. "When you are describing the process of boring holes through a mountain to reach trapped miners, it works much better to relate that information visually. When you are telling readers about mountain bumps, and how pressure from 1,800 feet of rock causes a mine's walls - not the ceiling - to collapse, well, that's a picture, not a paragraph.

"In telling the story of the Crandall Canyon mine collapse, graphics are a key element. They allow you to quickly profile the six men trapped below. They allow you to give readers a scannable, digestible history of the events of the last two weeks. Most important, they communicate the complicated forces at work underground and the unimaginably difficult task of finding these men alive."

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* THE READER ADVOCATE'S phone number is 801-257-8782. Write to the Reader Advocate, The Salt Lake Tribune, 90 S. 400 West, Suite 700, Salt Lake City, Utah 84101. E-mail: reader.advocate@sltrib.com.