Zoom in for context
When you’re reading about something as daunting and dynamic as climate change, a single story may hold layers and layers of context within. Those who aren’t ardent followers of this issue, for instance, may find themselves overwhelmed, lost, even skeptical, without all of the details.
At the GEN Summit in Vienna for the Editors Lab Final, the Global Editors Network’s worldwide series of hackathons for digital newsroom innovation, the team from National Geographic came up with a solution for reporting complex stories such as this — and won second place for it.
According to the team — Michael Greshko, Scott Burkhard and CY Park — many news outlets rely on tag-driven, chronological ‘hub pages’ to display content relating to a single story. This may not always balance breadth, depth and context, and readers don’t find them very useful.
Michael Greshko, journalist at National Geographic:
“Like many publishers, National Geographic relies on its website taxonomy to feed dynamic hub pages about given topics. But for complicated, multi-part stories such as climate change, these hub pages aren’t especially helpful, because they don’t give the reader context for how one story fits into the whole.”
The team built a dynamic explainer instead.
Called Zoom In, the tool contains a slider interface that customises the content depending on the user’s interest. The tool’s target audience is a subset of readers who wish to quickly understand the gist of a story, but also explore how the latest developments fit into the larger narrative, the big picture.
The feed is organised using a context-first taxonomy that’s built into the publisher’s content management system.
When the reader is fully ‘zoomed out’, he or she sees a single paragraph of text. Within this paragraph, each sentence relates to an important part of the story or topic. By scrolling down the slider to ‘zoom in’, these sentences break up into headers, each of which contain two or three sentence-summaries of detail. As you zoom in further, you’ll find summaries of stories related to each header. When fully zoomed in, the reader reaches a list of all the latest stories under each header, packed with key sentences and quotes.
The team has worked out that a new story will belong to a topic, such as climate change, and a sub-topic, such as rising temperatures. While they selected summary passages manually for the sake of the prototype, they hope to automate the process going forward, including the steps of creating and maintaining site-wide taxonomies for Zoom In. To make sure that their summaries are fresh with developments, the algorithms would focus more on the most recent pieces. Thus, since Zoom In would improve the overall engagement with stories, and invite increased click-through rates when placed within context, it could contribute to display ad-revenue.
Greshko: “We think it helps solve the problem of reporting complex stories, because it gives all readers — from the new reader to the power user — a quick and easy ability to go from the gist of a complex story to how the latest news fits into the puzzle.”
The team has presented its concept to National Geographic’s digital team, and is keen to see its implementation through.
About Editors Lab
Editors Lab is a worldwide series of hackathons hosted by the world’s leading newsrooms, supported by the Google News Lab and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Season five of Editors Lab has been the most exciting yet for the Global Editors Network. Talented journalists, designers and developers from every continent have collaborated on high-impact ideas to prototype the future of news. This year has seen more Editors Lab hackathons than ever, including three in India (in Mumbai, Bengaluru & Delhi) and the first-ever Editors Labs in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea & Philippines.
