Could you explain that?

One of the markers of clickbait is the question headline. With pure trashy clickbait, the question usually turns out to be a tease, and the story a disappointment.

Explanatory journalism, on the other hand, rewards the readers’ curiosity by offering them what they were looking for all along: understanding.

The realisation that people want to understand the world is not new. There’s been a Pulitzer for explanatory journalism since 1985. Wikipedia made itself one of the most visited sites on the planet because people turn to it in an effort to understand the world. Ezra Klein built a massively popular digital media organization, Vox, almost entirely on the insight that millennials want to understand stuff.

Part of the reason for the surge of interest in explanatory journalism over the past 2 or 3 years is that it offers respite from the blizzard of information, much of it crappy or irrelevant, that is being flung at us from our social news feeds. As noise levels rise, so does the demand for quiet, clear insight.

Another reason is that data became sexy. Charts and graphs started to move, to swirl, to respond to the swipe of a finger across a phone. Nate Silver, founder of FiveThirtyEight, demonstrated the awesome predictive power of data to a young US audience. Smart journalists reconnected with the social sciences, using academic datasets to create stories and interactives that helped audiences understand the world around them. Just take a look at what Lucify did with the vast dataset of the UN’s refugee agency.

That desire to understand the world is not going to change, and explanatory journalism , although it’s having a moment, is not a fad. Editors and journalists need to be constantly asking how they can help audiences make sense of today’s random news fragment, how they can tell the story behind it, and how they can use data to shed light rather than add to the din.

One of the more interesting experiments of 2016 is the Washington Post’s ‘Backdrop’, a kind of annotation feature that allows readers of any article about the US presidential race to take a look at the background — stats, context, profiles — to the main story.

For more on explanatory journalism, have a look at the special project launched this year by the Brookings Institute.

For the integration of explanatory journalism and data viz, the NTY’s ‘The Upshot’ is always worth a look.

For punchy text explainers, The Economist Explains is hard to beat.

The Ground Beneath Our Feet is a series of short posts / link-roundups about innovation in journalism. It is not for specialists and makes no attempt to be comprehensive. Instead, it is an attempt to help other working journalists stay abreast of this constantly shifting field.