Interactive storytelling can be a tricky thing to plan for. This video, made for students on the MA in Data Journalism at Birmingham City University, explores different genres of interactivity — from quizzes and image maps to ‘choose your own adventure’ interactives and newsgames — and the different considerations when planning a story within each of those genres. You can find a related video on concepts of interactivity here.
The video refers to a number of examples — you can find links to those below.
When people talk about interactivity they don’t necessarily mean one thing. This video, made for students on the MA in Data Journalism and the MA in Multiplatform and Mobile Journalism at Birmingham City University, explores some of the different elements of interactivity identified by research, and how a knowledge of these can help you think more critically and creatively about incorporating interactivity into your journalism. (A future video looks at genres of interactivity).
The video refers to a number of examples — you can find links to those below.
Twitter’s new Spaces feature allows journalists to build a close connection with their audiences while expanding stories coverage. In a guest post for OJB, Catalunya Ràdio’s Carla Pedret shares her tips for using the platform.
Newsrooms face the dilemma of adapting to new platforms so often that it has its own name — the Shiny Object Syndrome. One of the latest in that long, long list of shiny new things for journalists to get to grips with is Twitter Spaces (TWS). Launched in December 2020, it’s a live audio chat streamed through the Twitter app — but should you be using it?
The first questions that anyone should ask before trying the platform are the same as with any new tool:
What kind of users has the platform? Are they an audience we want to connect with?
How is the feature going to help us get closer to our goals?
Have other media outlets used the tool? How? What were the results?
Does the tool need to be updated frequently? How does it fit into the newsroom’s workflow?
Asking those simple questions before deciding the next move is going to be a game-changer in your digital strategy.
Data journalists don’t necessarily need to know how to create webpages — but a basic understanding of HTML and CSS can be useful when communicating with designers and developers, when generating HTML output in R notebooks, when creating advanced visualisation, or when getting into scraping.
In this video — first made for students on the MA in Data Journalism at Birmingham City University and shared as part of a series of video posts — I provide an introduction to the aspects of HTML and CSS that are helpful for those starting out with data journalism. It is best watched alongside the previous video on responsive web design.
As news audiences have moved from desktop-based to primarily mobile consumption, the news industry has moved to mobile-first production — but it’s very easy to forget mobile when working on a data journalism project.
In this video — first made for students on the MA in Data Journalism at Birmingham City University and shared as part of a series of video posts — I explain what considerations a data journalist should have when approaching a story with a mobile-first mindset, and some useful tools to help you see what a story looks like on different devices.
Online and social video is different to broadcast journalism. This video, made for students on the MA in Multiplatform and Mobile Journalism at Birmingham City University, explains the 5 different types that have been identified — as well as how live video combines a number of those. It identifies mistakes to avoid, and tips on preparing and executing online and social video. (Note: this was made before Periscope was closed)
The video refers to a number of examples — you can find links to those below.
Being able to tell stories visually is a key skill for multiplatform journalists. This video, made for students on the MA journalism courses at Birmingham City University, explains a range of visual techniques that factual storytellers are using, from image composition to gifs and memes, as well as some tools that can help you make your own visuals.
That includes ‘functions’ and ‘methods’ that allow you to request certain types of data; ‘arguments’ that allow you to specify what you want data about, or what format; and API ‘keys’ that act as passwords to access the data.
Online Journalism Blog 