One Digital Step for Mankind (and Journalism)
“Apollo 11: As They Shot It” is an interactive, augmented reality project about the first men on the moon. Published in July 2019 by the New York Times to celebrate the 50-year anniversary of Apollo 11’s moon landing, it combines text, photos, and graphics to give viewers the feeling of approaching and seeing the moon as they did. At a time when the public’s relationship to journalism is changing, this project has implications broader than merely conveying the moon landing in a new format. This project promises a more interactive, transparent form of journalism that will lead to improved trust and interest in news media.
As a journalism student and author of a children’s book series that focuses on the planets, journalism about space combines two of my favorite things. Nationwide, newsrooms have been slashed as both trust and funding decline. Pew Research found a 25% reduction in newsrooms from 2008 to 2018, so my interest in journalism goes beyond just reading interesting stories. If journalism is going to survive (Plot twist: It will), young reporters and editors must understand how to improve.
“Apollo 11: As They Shot It” is split into three parts: “To the Moon,” “One Small Step,” and “Returning Home.” Unlike TV shows that air live or articles that can be consumed in short periods of time, all three parts were released July 18. This gave viewers the option to immerse themselves in an hour-long experience that becomes more compelling the longer you spend with it.
The “30 Minutes After Launch” section sets up the text format: a white, typewriter-style font on a black background. The inversion from a typical news article or book signals this project will be different; it also subconsciously makes viewers feel like they’re entering space. The white-on-black text would have been hard to read in a predetermined timing format, like a movie or video. The uniquely digital format of this project makes the text effective in that viewers read it on a screen and control the project’s timing, giving a first-person experience.
After 10 minutes of the first chapter, which shows the men’s awe at Earth unfurling below them, readers click on a link: “Next chapter: One Small Step.”
“One Small Step” jumps right into the action — the Eagle has landed. This is where the digital components of the project are shown best. “The area out the left-hand window is a relatively level plain cratered with a fairly large number of craters,” Armstrong says, and photos that show exactly what he’s talking about start to unfold. Viewers experience for the first time a sense of parallax scrolling: When Aldrin asks, “O.K., about ready to go down and get some moon rock?” viewers scroll through a graphic of the moon landing that shows several boxes in a circle:
As viewers keep scrolling, these boxes morph into photos. Hypermediacy and transparency combine as viewers experience a sense that this project was constructed from various components.
The New York Times wrote about this blend of photos and graphics in an explanatory piece about the project. If “transparency is a key factor in restoring trust,” as a study by the Knight Foundation found about distrust in journalism, then “Apollo 11: As They Shot It” is a glimpse into what the future of journalism could look like. The piece, including the explanatory article, makes a powerful statement about transparency in journalism in an age where both augmented reality and distrust in news are trending. A large part of this statement is communicated in the use of photos.
At first, images are presented individually. But as viewers keep scrolling, they see the images a second time, this time blended into a panorama. It gives viewers a chance to control the pace as if they’re seeing the landscape for themselves. The view morphs seamlessly from graphic to photos.
The photos and graphics combine for two important yet different purposes. First, showing individual images communicates to viewers that they are original photos. The transparency in this is key; it helps viewers understand these are primary documents, ideally increasing viewers’ trust in the project and journalism. The second aspect of the individual photos morphing into a panorama is that it creates the effect of looking at the moon in a first-person way, creating a new perspective for people who might not consume this type of journalism frequently.
In terms of news consumption, this type of journalism feels more inclusive and accessible. Its augmented reality could appeal to kids who like video games, or it could appeal to older generations with no prior experience with projects like this. The relevance of the moon landing to older generations’ collective memory could get them to engage with journalism in a new way.
The third chapter, “Returning Home,” uses photos layered on top of each other to create motion, essentially creating a digital flip book. Viewers watch Earth rise over the moon. The hypermediacy comes back into play, almost by coincidence: Houston mentions to the astronauts that “yesterday after you made your landing, New York Times came out with…the largest headlines they’ve ever used in the history of the newspaper.” Most readers are likely aware they’re on the New York Times website, so this brings them back to the digital source. This slight reminder could also contribute to an increase in trust, as the Times was transparent in including the original script.
The Times’ explanatory piece explained incredible technical effort, largely made possible with digital software that wasn’t available at the time of the actual moon landing: “For each photograph he calculated the height of the camera, its direction and tilt, and the field of view of the lens,” Graham Roberts and Jonathan Corum said, explaining how those photos were then put into a program to calculate the landscape.
To land on the moon is such a feat that it should not be experienced in photos, text, or audio alone. This project came as close as the digital age has come to recreating an immersive moon landing experience. If I ever land on the moon, I can only hope I’d be as humble as Armstrong was in the last quote of this journalism-improving, ambitious project:
