Interactive Journalism: An Art and Craft
In sixth grade “computer class”, our teacher taught us the basics of Adobe Dreamweaver and how to create our own Xanga blogs. Making my blog look cooler than everyone else’s was my top priority, so I dabbled in what I then didn’t realize was HTML. Adjusting text styles, embedding music players and gifs, and changing my blog descriptions seasonally all led up to who I am today: a curious journalist.
To call myself a multimedia journalist just because I can do a little backend HTML styling for blogs is like calling myself a pro carpenter for mastering basic Ikea instructions. Now that I’ve outgrown outdated Powerpuff Girls Pillow Fight flash games, I’m more amused by the way music, politics, urban planning, migrant crises and other topics of interest have been covered in the last decade. The opportunity to take valuable information and turn it into a relatable, comprehensive, fun, or captivating visualizations thanks to a better understanding of codes and details is truly exciting.
After clicking through the link our professor emailed to us, small squares with people’s faces popped up one after the other onto my laptop screen. We all stared silently, stirring in our seats, until multimedia journalist Alex Newman greeted us from a small office in Reno, Nevada.
Our first session of “Fundamentals of Interactive Journalism” was held over Google Hangout — how appropriate! Unable to physically meet for the day, Alex (our professor) circled us together for a quick run-through on early- to present-day examples of interactive journalism; from GIFs to graphs, data scraping to data visualizations, and other cool tools us journalists can/should make great use of!
We browsed through numerous examples of interactive journalism and discussed which ones did or didn’t work. We took a look at USA TODAY’s 9/11 “Clearing the Skies”, a creative and comprehensive demonstration of where and when planes in the U.S. landed in the hours following the World Trade Center attack. Practically out of courtesy, we discussed the ever popular New York Times’ “Snow Fall” article, replete with slideshows, animated graphs, and a wonderful, lengthy feature article. Less than 14 years later, a four-month-long project like “Clearing the Skies” would take mere weeks, days or hours.
Journalists, by nature, are good storytellers. Yet our stories are only valuable if we have the information to prove our theses. This is how I see it from the outside:
Whether the phrases “data journalism” and “interactive journalism” are interchangeable is still something I hope to learn in class. What do you think?
One of the coolest aspects of interactive journalism is the seemingly endless opportunities for creativity. NPR pushed the boundary by accompanying their traditional podcast audio with visual analogies on the history of Earth’s human population. The New York Times created a map which allows us to scroll across a portion of the Middle East to contextualize the growth of ISIS in the past couple of years. Faculty and students from CUNY J-School tested our crisis preparedness with a survival quiz as an insert in their Borough Buzz survivalist article. DNAinfo recently published “Can You Guess These NYC Neighborhoods Using Emoji?” — enough said.
Join me on this educational journey of approaching journalism in new ways. It’s difficult to maintain readers’ attention spans these days (congrats if you’ve made it this far into this post!), so it’s our turn to get creative, crunch some numbers, and push for more information.
