By
KK Rebecca Lai
There seems to be an uptick of production
in digital storytelling: More and more newsrooms are beginning to build
longform editorial pieces on the web, with designs that break out of their
day-to-day article templates.
Web developers in newsrooms sometimes
find themselves struggling to meet growing editorial demand for special
treatment on story projects, sometimes by copy-and-pasting previous code in
order to meet a deadline. These efforts to “make it work with longform” have
begged discussions on how to scale design processes and whether to consider
various tools that can help speed up the process of project creation.
In thinking about how to scale special
editorial projects as well as work efficiently and at scale at Vox Media, Lauren Rabaino and
Scott Kellum led
a discussion on this topic at Knight-Mozilla OpenNews’ inaugural #SRCCON conference.
Design is an integral part of
storytelling, but to design each and every story for its content creates a near
inconceivable amount of work, given the volume of content from the average
media outlet. Newsroom story cycles move quickly and produce mass volumes of
content, and developers are expensive. Therefore, it is important to consider a
sustainable approach when building and designing special stories.
How can newsroom developers meet
editorial demands and build epic longform pieces, but make it in a scalable
way?
In this discussion, previously
Editorially’s, now Vox’s Jason Santa Maria offered a metaphor to explain the issue
by comparing building longforms to building pinewood derbies. Every kid starts
with the same building blocks, but with a saw, some paint, and lots of
imagination, every kid’s pinewood derby turns out differently on race day. Same
as in building longforms, creating blocks that are reusable and sustainable can
make life a lot easier, and could be done in a way that does not stifle
innovation.
A number of newsrooms have created
methods in helping scale longform pieces. The Chicago Tribune newsroom development team
has their own
forked version of the Twitter Bootstrap responsive framework, styled and
customized to fit their own needs. When starting a project, developers won’t have
to re-style parts of the projects that are consistent like the navigation and
branding. This along with their pre-baked flask template allows their team to start
projects with minimal effort.
At Vox Media, the Chorus CMS includes code snippets which allows editors to
create blocs in longform pieces for example inserting pull quotes, photo blocks
or graphics, with minimum involvement of developers. For example, the recent Amazon Fire Phone Review from the Verge was done without
any involvement from the product team.
Allen Tan at the New York Times shared their ranking system
that is inspired by college sports. When a tool or feature is first introduced,
it is considered junior varsity. When it is reused over and over again, it
moves up to varsity level and is given more care and attention. He referenced
Snowfall which The New York Times spent months working on with a dedicated
team, but something similar can now be accomplished in a week.
For more day-to-day graphics, Emma
Carew from Foreign Policy shared a spreadsheet in which they quantify time, process, tools for
different types of graphics. This streamlines the process of editors working
with web producers to create graphics, and both editorial and graphics would
have similar expectations of the process and outcome.
The discussion wrapped up on the topic
of users, both in terms of communication with editorial staff about internal
processes or involving users in the editorial cycle.
While these tools and
add-ons can automate the process of project creation, it is important to
consider user engagement, and the purpose of certain projects, art direction
and design should be used wisely to help users become more engaged with the
content.
Notes from
the session are available and the discussion will hopefully continue so
that newsrooms can share with each other what works and what doesn’t. What is
your newsroom doing to scale longform projects?
Northwestern University Knight Lab
advances news media innovation and education. Developing ideas from
experimentation through adoption, the Lab makes technology that aims to help
make information meaningful and promotes quality storytelling on the Internet.
KK Rebecca Lai is
from Hong Kong, currently experiencing American culture through college. A
visual journalist, she is interested in design and how stories are told through
different mediums.
Image by Ramla Mahmaood via Knight Lab.
This post originally appeared on Northwestern
University's Knight Lab and is republished on IJNet with permission.
Source: Ijnet.org
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