Blog
Editors get tips on interactive storytelling
- By: ASNE staff
- On: 09/19/2014 12:10:35
- In: Convention
By Aric Chokey
Ball State University ASNE-APME Convention Coverage Team
Although the National Public Radio visualization team is less than a year old, Supervising Editor Kainaz Amaria had much to say about interactive storytelling and utilizing platforms.
Amaria helped create the "Planet Money Makes a T-shirt" project and followed the manufacturing process of a single t-shirt around the world.
Although the National Public Radio visualization team is less than a year old, Supervising Editor Kainaz Amaria had much to say about interactive storytelling and utilizing platforms.
Amaria helped create the "Planet Money Makes a T-shirt" project and followed the manufacturing process of a single t-shirt around the world.
“Part of doing large projects like this is to not force your content to be something it isn't,” she said. “Let your assets do the talking and let them lead you where you need to go.”
To tell the story, the team used video, photography, graphics and text in a multimedia piece that received half its pageviews through mobile phone devices, another signal of the growing proliferation of mobile traffic.
To keep the vision of the project cohesive, the team established standards for a style guide of the different types of content they collected.
For every project, Amaria said the team asks three key questions before and after they gather information:
- Who is our audience?
- What are their needs?
- What are we going to make?
After revisiting their goals for the audience and how the story is to be delivered, Amaria said they took the project to a focus group to test how it functioned.
“I felt we had an original story that no one else is telling and we can tell it in an original way,” she said. “Responsive is part of our ethos.”
While information about usability drove the way the content was arranged, the lasting impression ultimately dictated the structure.
“What we usually decide is that we want to give you enough information to make you feel something," she said. "We constantly ask what the takeaway is, what am I going to feel?