It’s a complex world and we need complex tools to make sense of it. In this module, your team will identify a topic or pose a question, investigate that question, and tell the story you discover using a confluence of modalities and digital tools.
A recent piece breaks down new digital journalism formats into 12 categories:
- vertical video; often with captions, pioneered by AJ+ and NowThis
- Horizontal *Stories; swipeable cards like Snapchat Stories and its clones
- Longform scrollytelling; evolved from the original NY Times Snowfall
- Structured news; like the original Circa or the reusable cards at Vox.com
- Live blogs; frequently used for big events
- Listicles; like Buzzfeed
- Newsletters and briefings; which seem to be on trend right now
- Timelines; which I expected to be more common
- Bots and chat; from the chat-styled Qz app to the many attempts to deliver news within chat apps
- Personalised; which typically is used to filter the choice of stories, rather than the story itself
- Data visualisation; from graphs to interactives
- VR and AR
Goals
- Learn about the historical relationship between journalism and media technologies (print, radio, TV)
- Learn how the Internet has made new modalities of communication possible
- Learn how digital tools make new kinds of research possible.
Resources
- OpenRefine
- Kumu
- Storify
- Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
- “Snow Fall” (Pulitzer prize-winning piece of interactive journalism.)
- HuffPost Data
Suggested Tasks
- Investigate some topic or question using a digital tool like OpenRefine, Kumu or even one of the APIs at the Huffington Post.
- Learn about the history of converging media and modalities within journalism, starting with different technologies for including images alongside print (lithography, color photography, etc.)
- Create your own multimedia, multi-modal journalistic piece telling the story of the question or topic you investigated
