Interactivities are new. Interactions are old.
Sometimes the big questions seem so basic that they are the last to be asked. Consider this: what is interactive news?
You might have an idea, even a few examples, but if you were to articulate those, would they be:
- User actions? Something people can click, scroll, type, and expect something to happen?
- Aesthetics? In the forms of animation, pop-up, and intriguing graphs?
- Technical advancement? — If information is so dense that it needs to be deduced from a large dataset with code, the presentation might as well be interactive?
A case study
These categories are not mutually exclusive. In the new ProPublica project, Hell and High Water, satellite images, wind-speed animation, and much more are packed into a oblique view for the readers to explore the alternative scenarios of the Hurricane Ike in 2008. The hurricane devastated Galveston Island in reality but could have hit Houston and caused serious damages.
What’s remarkable about this article is that it has translated complex data that only a small group of researchers might use into a relatable model that the public can understand. It employs a range of user interactions. You click to move the story forward, drag to examine the landscape, and hover to select the time frame of the storm. It shows highly detailed images and animates them. And it unfolds the story layer after layer by introducing different scenarios.
This might be a model child for interactive news, but is it the only form? Do all interactive projects require month-long analysis and research of obscure data formats? And — let’s be honest — apart from all the impressive investigation of this project, how far into the story did you actually go?
Getting to the roots
Gregor Aisch from the New York Times gave an excellent talk on the future of interactive news during the 2016 NICAR conference. He addressed the future by going back to the past —and not just the past before VR, or the one before Facebook, it was the past before computers even existed. In his presentation, Gregor observes:
The heart of interactives is the “interaction”, which wikipedia defines as two or more objects that have a two-way effect upon each other. Human communication is the perfect example of quality interaction. That’s the bar we’re setting.
Indeed, human communications might be the highest bar one can set. (Think about the 100 billion neurons in your brain and how many permeations of communication can come out of them.) Within this two-way-effect framework, Gregor revisits some common formats of interactive news:
- Long forms that make you scroll forever (aka. Snow Fall): one-way communication. It’s the equivalent to someone talking to you non-stop and all you’re supposed to do is to listen and to send back signs of continuous interest.
- Interactive slideshows that you click numerous NEXT buttons: one way. It’s essentially the grown-up version of a picture book.
- Puzzles: two way! It forces readers out of their role as news consumer. The readers had to describe the answer in their own words!
Build a relationship through interaction
While getting bigger and more complex in scope might suit certain interactive projects, more often than not, the goal of an interactive piece is to engage the reader.
This taps into empathy. How do you empathize with the readers, and how would the readers empathize with the people/situation in the story? What, in the end, do you want them to get out of the story?
Only then does the question become a technical one: how do you do that? This requires rethinking the “trendy” forms of journalistic artifacts (think charts with hovering tooltips, or maps that animate). As Gregor points out:
Readers can do so much more than just scrolling or clicking on buttons! They can talk, write, draw, solve puzzles, play games, etc. So we need to trust the user to do that, and we need to write the code that actually listens to what the user wanted to say, so we can reply in a smart way. Like in a real two-way conversation.
The future of interactive news is not about inventing newer, crazier formats, but rather, it’s about understanding deeply about what people are drawn to. And people are drawn to very simple things. As Gregor concludes:
In the end, interaction is about building a relationship. We interact with people, and if the interaction is fun, they might become friends.
Check out his whole talk here.
