Structuring a local immersive feature aimed at the world
Al Jazeera longform and shortform approaches to explain Chhaupadi in Nepal
International journalism usually is explained through the long read, as it needs more context to approach its audience to stories and events that are usually far from their perspectives of the world.
Banished: How menstruation can mean exile is an Al Jazeera web documentary directed by Dirk Gilson in which we are flown to Nepal to discover and debate around Chhaupadi. The longform, immersive feature illustrates this ancient tradition that “refers to the condition of being untouchable during menstruation”.
But we aren’t given this probably unknown term at the first moment, as the feature is narrated — wisely — with a kabob structure. The first thing you see when you enter this feature is a powerful full screen image of a woman inside a mud house (which we don’t yet know is called a hut). Above it, the headline and subheading of the story use key words, understandable for the audience.
“Believed to be impure, some menstruating women in Nepal are forced from their homes — with sometimes deadly consequences”
This simple sentence, with clear words — “menstruating women”, “Nepal”, “deadly consequences” — invites us to keep reading.
The best structure for features
The kabob structure is widely used in feature writing, as it works with stories that give more importance to human experiences and situations than to facts and figures, and are also not tied to breaking news. As Brian Klems says, “to write a strong feature it’s not enough to just give the facts. Your piece must have the most essential element in any story: It must be a story”.
It is true that this immersive piece gives the audience some space for interactivity (it has a lateral menu which takes you directly to each of its parts) but as it is mainly designed in a linear path, I will analyse it with its linear structure.
As we will see, it’s build with a series of different kabob structured parts, included in a bigger kabob or circle. The different chapters recognised are: “Banished”, “Why”, “Religious background”, “Death in the hut”, “What is menstruation” and “Purification”.
The first and last chapter are illustrated with the same character, Sabrita Bogati, in her first and last day of menstruation routines, what gives us some kind of circular ending. Each of the chapters itself has a similar structure as the one described below.
How the Kabob structure is developed
The feature starts with an anecdote, a human example. In this case, we see Sabrita going to his hut, where she will sleep during the menstruation. We also have a short video of her explaining her routine in this situation.
Then we are lead to the “nut graf”. This provides us of context and, as the former Pulitzer Prize-winning NYTimes reporter Rick Bragg calls it, the “BBI” — Boring But Important information. This would be the terminology of the “Chauppadi” and a reminder that the Supreme Court of Nepal declared this tradition illegal.
Following that, we are given a description — either with text on a full screen image or with a short video of the woman — of the place where she must sleep and the conditions.
The other chapters mix the nut-graph parts with video and audio witness from other woman and man, statements from an expert and even the experience of the crew who when to do the filming. These last pieces of information, included inside the various parts of the feature, don’t break its structure. Additionally, they give the approach to the society portrayed needed in international journalism.
The Kabob structure is also known as the ‘Wall Street Journal’ formula, because it is said to had first been used in their newsroom. As this article by Chin Scanlan says, “The Wall Street Journal’s reporters were following a new rule: Write a story that keeps readers reading rather than provides a built-in excuse to stop, a complaint made by the inverted pyramid’s critics.” And every piece of “Banished” makes you want to know more about the tradition of Chauppadi and its possible future.
Joining elements to consolidate the structure
The characters in this history, according to Blaine in The Digital Reporter’s Notebook (2014), are:
- Stakeholders: Women in the area facing Chauppadi. Either interviewed in video, audio or just part of a bigger picture.
- Experts: Pema Lhaki, from NFCC international, in short video interviews talks about the context, her opinion, her experience as an activist in the area and interacts with the characters.
- Witnesses: described as people who “tend to have a direct stake in the events of the story, but they may be close enough to the action to provide a valuable perspective”, we could consider men in this category. They explain why do they make women follow this tradition and their vision and experience with the society rules.
To create a structured story, you need to join these characters with exposition. In this case: the map of the region where the tradition is followed, the picture of this villages, the religious background… “Exposition connect characters and anecdotes with the idea that you’re trying to express”, says Blaine (2014).
But we also should consider that this backstory is supposed to be “show, don’t tell”. In this immersive piece, the journalist has tried sometimes to involve his experience reporting from the area in the content, which makes parts of the feature too much “tell”.
Also, analysing the piece in regard to the words of Giles Wilson, features editor for BBC News Online, the “character or situation that is in flux” aren’t really all the stakeholders in the story; but them being faced to the questions of the journalists and to the expert’s statement. Is then, when we consider the “occidental” perspective of the story, that conflict appears in the surface.
Wilson also says that “every element of a story — text, audio, video, animation, parallax scrolling — must serve a purpose in elevating and enhancing the storytelling process at hand”. In “Banished” many different elements are put together. The choice of every piece of them has sometimes been done regarding on the possibilities they were given (for example, one girl is interviewed in audio because it was the only way possible) or following the journalist will.
This mixture of elements, added to the fact that there are many different chapters -each of them with nut grafs and personal stories — achieve to hook the audience. But at the same time, make the understanding a little bit chaotic. Maybe, moving some of the nut grafs closer to the beginning (for example, the map of the region) and keeping the personal stories together would make a simpler kabob structure.
Two shortform examples
This summer, the Chhaupadi tradition was on the agenda again as the Nepali parliament criminalised it. A new piece of news was released by Al Jazeera and spread in two similar tweets, but with an small difference that created distinctive structures. None of them repeated the news headline, that was “Ending menstruation banishment only a start”. The pictures in both cases weren’t the same but were of similar situations.
Al Jazeera News tweeted it first. The text had a classical headline structure, but included the contemporary event in it. “Criminalising” was what the fact that put this topic on the agenda again.
Al Jazeera English tweeted the day after introducing the word “why”. This emphasised the idea that the answer was in the link, and so it works better as a hook for the audience.
Even though we can’t compare both tweets as they were done by different accounts and in different time periods we could say that the second one works better in a platform like Twitter, where media want to bring the audience to their own site.
References
Blaine, M. (2014). The Digital Reporter’s Notebook. New York [US]: Routledge.
