Moroccan journalists explore interactive storytelling
Writers and developers gather for the second Hacks/Hackers Casablanca meetup.
The digital era has created a progressive shift in media behavior, production, and distribution. This led us to think of what could be useful for the Moroccan journalists to help them offer an adapted content to the new reader’s consumption trends.
Interactive storytelling was perfectly aligned with what we had in mind for our second Hacks/Hackers event in Casablanca (#HHCAS). We were extremely happy to be able to create a friendly and safe space where Moroccan journalists could get new insights on how to offer their audiences the ability to access and engage with their stories through images, video, or sound embedded onto maps, blogs, or any other form of digital graphics. We also gave the participants a practical training on how to create an interactive story, use visuals and videos, using some of the following tools.
TimelineJS, KnightLab
TimelineJS is diffidently one of the most simple open source tools for storytelling in a timeline format. It can be used to display a linear progression through time of a story.
Other than being an extremely easy-to-use tool, It is completely free and great for pulling in media from different sources. Timeline.js relies on a simple spreadsheet template which can be populated with links from Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo, Google Maps or SoundCloud, which are automatically formated it to fit into an interactive story.
The developers of TimelineJS are developing the tool to support more media types in the future. Our participants were especially impressed on how easy it was to create their timelines in a few minutes .
Online language barriers
One issue that we encountered in demonstrating tools like TimelineJS, however, is the difficulty of finding multilingual documentation. Very few Moroccan journalists understand English, and very few free tools come with instructions written in French.
For TimelineJS, we have prepared a simple five step guide in French. We also added a live demo during which we created an attractive timeline showcasing the StoryLab Academy activities in Morocco in a simple and interactive chronology for free.
Embeding TimelineJS on Medium
Timeline JS is quickly and easily embedded on Medium blogs.
One area that we focus on at #HHCAS’ educational evenings is learning through experience. We challenged participants to a Timeline competition to boost their skills and motivational spirit.
At the end of the friendly competition , each participant created a simple timeline on the topic of their choice which was instantly visible online for free through TimelineJS.
Adobe Spark
Another special request from the participants was to show them an easy hack to create attractive visuals, videos and pages with a little or no graphic skills. They were particularly interested in how we create the Hacks/Hackers Casablanca posters (like the one in the heading picture of this post).
We showed the participants how to create a simple, attractive poster on Adobe Spark, along with a short demo on how they can create pages and videos for free.
At the closing we have set a date and a topic for the next Hacks/Hackers Casablanca. See you in January to talk about Mobile Journalism.
Are you Interested in joining us ?
Please follows us on Hacks Hacks Africa or contact us via email here to be informed about the our next meetup.
About the author
Fadwa KAMAL is the Hacks Hackers Casablanca chapter organizer and StoryLab Academy Lead in Morocco . You can connect with her via Facebook , email and instagram.
The worlds of hackers and journalists are coming together, as reporting goes digital and Internet companies become media empires.
Journalists call themselves “hacks”, someone who can churn out words in any situation. Hackers use the digital equivalent of duct tape to whip out code.
Hacker-journalists try and bridge the two worlds. Hacks/Hackers Africa aims to bring all these people together — those who are working to help people make sense of our world. It’s for hackers exploring technologies to filter and visualize information, and for journalists who use technology to find and tell stories. In the age of information overload and collapse of traditional business models for legacy media, their work has become even more crucial.
