In the final part of the digital journalism trainee scheme we were given the opportunity to spend four weeks working on a ‘digital storytelling’ project.
All of us trainees are very different and our projects were incredibly varied – ranging from long-form, multimedia pieces about the trans pride movement to video interactives about women in politics and special reports on the intricacies of the legal aid cuts.
My project started with looking at ways to better explain the news and ended up focusing on interactive timelines. My theory is that organisations like the Guardian presume too much prior knowledge from their readers. Most established media organisations spend a lot of time agonising over how they can attract younger audiences, yet they like to presume that all of their readers know the ins and out of the first Gulf war, for example, when the majority of ‘young people’ weren’t even born when it happened.
Explainer journalism
Broadcasting represents a job of entertaining, informing and educating the nation.”
The three words ‘entertain, inform and educate’ – most famously adopted by the BBC’s Lord Reith, but actually first used by the American broadcaster David Sarnoff in 1922 – still do a good job of describing the purpose of a news organisation.
The Guardian informs and entertains, but does it make a big enough effort to educate? It should, as far as possible, aim to give the audience everything they need to understand an article.
Explainer journalism is a fashionable concept at the moment, what with the launch of projects like Vox, the Upshot and FiveThirtyEight. Even if a journalistic project can’t sustain itself on explainers alone, the trend has obviously come from a widespread sense that major digital news organisations aren’t explaining things to their readers successfully.
The project
The idea for the project came from the Guardian’s Hack Day in July, where a small group of us worked an idea for an interactive timeline. The original idea involved small timelines that could be embedded in news stories, and which themselves linked through to more detailed, multimedia timelines that sit on their own page. These longer timelines would act as a story’s ‘home’ and be updated as the story developed.
This is the rough prototype developed by Andrew Mason and Daan Louter.
Although I still love the idea of maintaining detailed timelines on major news stories – which would act as educational resources for readers – various people expressed scepticism that something like this would ever actually be used by a busy news desk. Because of this, we decided to focus the project on smaller timelines instead.
The model Daan and Andrew came up with is based on pre-existing Guardian interactive design. We wanted each point on the timeline to link back to the original Guardian article or video relating to that event, treating Guardian content as ‘evidence’ and using the Guardian’s back catalogue as a historical archive.
The timelines can be used for a huge range of things. As well as detailing a back story, they can also be used for biographies, explaining scientific/legal processes etc.
Using the timelines
Over the past few months we have been embedding our timelines in news articles and live blogs and monitoring their success.
Here are a few examples of what our timelines looked like:
What next?
The project received good feedback, and the timelines continue to be used on a range of stories including Hong Kong’s protests and Ebola. It is generally acknowledged that the Guardian should be making regular use of interactive maps, interactive timelines, fact boxes and short profiles of key figures etc to explain the news. But the news desk shouldn’t have to go through the overworked interactives team for such fundamental tools. Templates for these should be incorporated into the next generation cms, so that journalists can build them quickly and easily.
We showed our project to the people in charge of developing the Guardian’s content management system. Watch this space!
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