Behind the (Technical) Scenes: Unwatched

By Tyson Bird & Mara Corbett

The Story: How a lack of state oversight leaves children in day cares across Texas unwatched

1 Problem: Traditional, longform journalism packages aren’t designed for digital — They’re thousands of words, multiple stories and assume you (the reader) will enter through one main story and then progress through each subsequent story for several hours. They’re designed for the print reading experience: You start at the front page and flip each page from there.

The digital reality is that readers can enter anywhere in the package thanks to sharing across social media and search engines. And time is a precious commodity when you’re competing with the rest of the internet. So why are we still structuring digital packages like a printed product? We didn’t.

How we did it: I’d argue cookies are almost always a good thing — but in the context of the internet, they get a bad rep. Cookies allow websites to recognize you and track you across the internet, typically to target ads without your consent. But they also allow us to present a subtly personalized reading experience. We call it “cookies for good.”

An early phase of brainstorming around a dynamic longform storytelling solution.

When you come to a story on the Unwatched site for the first time — any story on the site — you see the series title and a few paragraphs explaining the scope of the project and the investigation findings, all written naturally into the story you want to read. Every story in the package has this unique series headline and findings built in — but you’ll only see it on the first story you read. That story is your personal entrance, thanks to the cookie. You don’t need to see the series title and summarized findings twice, so you won’t.

Cookie tracking also helps us personalize the “next story” cards at the bottom of each page. Content that you’ve already read looks different than the unread stories we want you to click. Our cookie tracking can even account for two Spanish translation stories. Before the page tracking cookie is processed, a variable defines whether or not Spanish is turned “on” or “off” for you. If you’ve read the overview in Spanish, you’ll be served the “Illegal Daycares” page in Spanish instead of directing you immediately to English content.

Now, this isn’t flashy tech — You aren’t even supposed to notice it working. But it is designed for the digital reading experience: You start where you want and go where you want.

A snapshot of planning the various forms of each piece, as a lead or secondary story.

What we learned: We built unprecedented routes throughout this package. But we didn’t focus on the routes coming in. So while you can start anywhere in the series, the overview story was still shared as the place to start across social media.

The analytics show users coming in predominantly through this one story, and while linking and navigation throughout every story allows you to go elsewhere, we’re didn’t see the variance in starting points that we expected. Ultimately, we need to develop a more flexible social strategy — one that takes advantage of the ability to build your own reading experience.

The cookie tracking worked to display the series headline and summary only once, but we should collect more data on how readers reacted to this experience. We could use A/B testing to display a “normal” package to some users and a dynamic package to others and determine which has a greater return on read time and overall page views.