Trying to explain Trump’s tweets, the budget and metadata to your parents?
Simon Elvery can help.
This is a Walkley Magazine series introducing you to the many wonderful journalists coming to Storyology, the Walkley Foundation’s Aug. 24–31 festival of media and storytelling in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne.
In any election campaign, there are two essential ABC sources for #Auspol tragics: Antony Green’s blog, and Interactives, its data-driven election maps and charts.
For the latter you can thank Simon Elvery, along with his teammates at the Brisbane-based ABC News Interactive Digital Storytelling Unit. Elvery is appearing on an Aug. 25 Storyology panel we’re calling “The New Newsroom”, about the how journalists work today.
Elvery’s one of a small number of journalist-programmers in Australian media. His small team is made up of designers, developers, data analysts and writer-editors. They analyse reams of data and present them as charts, graphs and visualisations. A recent example is the interactive Federal Budget 2017: Winners and Losers, a grid with boxes labelled, “Taxpayers”, “University students”, “Welfare recipients” or “Big Banks”, among others. Click on the box of your choice and you get a short, clear summary of how that group will be affected — and whether they’ll win or lose. This tool makes the federal budget — huge, complex, hard to understand — simple, personal and interesting.
“My job is to bring technology into reporting and have an idea of how you can use technology better for both input and output,” says Elvery. In other words, using technology both as reporting tool and a way to shape publication.
In addition to political data visualisations, the group’s work includes quizzes, a collaboration with academics to make research accessible and a project, in collaboration with Four Corners, that weaves the video stories of foster-care kids into an investigative narrative. The group’s projects go out to a huge audience on all ABC Online’s social media feeds — all told they reach about 38 per cent of Australians online, and 23 per cent via ABC news, according to Nielsen.
Elvery recently gave a talk to university students in which he explained some of the philosophy behind the unit’s work. He described “a blend of exploratory and narrative models of data storytelling” as the “holy grail” of using data to tell stories.
Getting that balance right relies on a few factors. First, if the story has a strong narrative, it doesn’t need much more. Elvery gave the example of “The 332 People, Places and Things Donald Trump Has Insulted on Twitter: A Complete List”, a New York Times data visualization that is basically the text from Donald Trump’s tweets organised into categories.
But when there is “a gap between your understanding of the data and that of your audience,” he explained, “you should lean toward a narrative-driven approach. The bigger the gap, the more narrative-driven your approach should be.”
A notable narrative-driven ABC interactive from 2015 tackled the Australian government’s complex changes to metadata and data retention laws. After ABC reporter Will Ockenden was able to get access to his own mobile phone metadata, the Interactive Digital Storytelling Unit turned the seemingly abstract dump of information into a creepily specific profile of where Ockenden had been.
The migration of eyeballs to mobiles has changed the way the unit works.
“This has forced us to think carefully about how to use visualization,” Elvery said at his talk to students. “And I think it’s forced us to add more narrative — often resulting in better stories, where once we would have left it to the audience to explore and draw their own conclusions.”
The team’s next big challenge is unpacking the enormous amounts of 2016 Census data that will be released next month — and helping Australians understand how our society has changed over the past four years.
Catch more of Simon Elvery and other digital wonders at The New Newsroom, a Storyology event in Brisbane on Aug. 25. Get tickets and see what else is on for Storyology at the Brisbane Powerhouse, or explore the full program across Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.
