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That’s right, now is one of the few times you can honestly help me improve my mojo. (Mo)zilla + (Jo)urnalism that is, you dirty-minded lot. Simply go here, read my awesome proposal and click ‘vote’ in the top right hand corner. Essentially, it’s what you’ve come to expect around here, discerning fan of comics journalism that you are – combining the visual storytelling devices of comics with the souped-up power of web 2.0 (or is that passe already?) to incorporate video, animation and audio within comics panels. Voting closes today, so make it count! Winners go through to the next round, earning themselves some top-notch coding training in the process. Believe me, after wrestling with my interactive Blackwater piece (now pushed back til Monday on Cartoonmovement, sorry folks), I could use it.
Here’s the blurb from the Mozilla:
Video is a central part of many people’s daily news experience. But most online video is still stuck in a boring embedded box, like “TV on a web page,” separated from the rest of the page content. This offers little in the way of context or opportunities for viewers to engage more deeply.
New open video tools make it possible to pull data from across the web right into the story. Information related to the video can literally “pop” into the page. And videos themselves can change, dynamically adapting as stories evolve. The challenge is to use these tools in ways that serve the story. How can we enrich news video through things like added context, deeper viewer engagement, and the real time web? What are the untapped possibilities inherent in many-to-many, web video?
Cartoon Movement, the internet’s #1 platform for high quality political cartoons and comics journalism (and sister site of VJ movement) , is publishing my latest piece on the Sept 2007 shootings that occurred in Nisoor Square, Baghdad – there’s a little taster about it on their blog here. The piece will go up next wednesday, June 15th. In the run up to next week I’ll post some previews of the panels and give more of a sense of how the piece works, and the importance (not to mention the untapped potential) of incorporating interactivity into comics journalism pieces.
For now, let me break down the above screenshot, which is the main viewing area for the piece (which, incidentally, loads in its own window due to sizing constraints). The viewing area is comprised of 3 main parts: the timeline (corresponding to the 15 minutes that the incident took place over), which can be advanced by clicking on the play button, or dragged to a specific point); the background, which is comprised of a satellite picture of Nisoor Square together with an additional layer of brightly coloured icons (corresponding to the various people and vehicles involved in the incident) that move along their respective paths as the incident unfolds; and, of course, the panels, which appear as the user hovers over the said icons, providing an eyewitness account of the event from that specific perspective (the majority of which are taken from direct testimonies).
Thanks to Hal and the Palo Alto Rotary Club for inviting me to talk on Friday – I’m glad that my energetic defence of comics journalism went down well. There’s been a flurry of activity lately on the comics journalism front, perhaps best summed up by the launch of Graphic Journos, a showcase/forum/sounding board for drawn journalistic pieces featuring a handful of up and coming journalists (including myself). Kudos to the ever productive Susie Cagle for getting it off the ground. One of the said journos is Wendy Macnaughton, whose innovative combination of audio and lush watercolours works really well in the video below – the bar has been raised.
Building on my previous post about explainers, I want to continue a conversation I had at last night’s Hacks and Hackers meetup at Stanford. For those of you who don’t know, H&H was set up by Knight Fellow Alum Burt Hurman (now one half of Storify, which just secured a hefty chunk of angel investor funding) to put journos in touch with the coders who can make their stories come alive on the digital page.
Burt and his partner Xavier had come to talk to the Knights earlier in the afternoon about Storify and the challenges of transitioning from journalism to entrepreneur-dom, and I asked about whether it was possible to find coders who were up for smaller project assists without necessarily being promised stock options in a startup before doing so. Well, turns out I might be eating digital humble pie after chatting to some hackers later on that evening – I’ll keep you posted on what comes of our follow-up talks. But I digress…
Talking to a fellow hack after the H&H evening talks were over, we agreed that in this age of shorter and shorter web-based mini-docs and social media-loaded website parsing feeds from You Tube, FB, Twitter et al, ironically enough it’s the storytelling that will continue to determine the quality and calibre of successful journalistic pieces. Admittedly, this is predominantly in the realm of feature-length, more in-depth pieces, and not real-time commentary. But there is a vaguely worrying trend in the idea that simply by tapping into the cloud and wringing out the plethora of quotidian musings from the flannel of the digital hive mind, suddenly journalists can gain access to a new stream of information that is more real and vital than traditional models. I can see the appeal in this model working for events – such as fellow Fellow Jigar Mehta’s popular #18daysinEgypt – but again it relies on a pre-existing knowledge of the circumstances: for locals who know their way around, as opposed to the newbie cyber-tourist dependent on a guidebook (who, more importantly, is subject to the limited timescale -albeit self-imposed- of their online attention span). Particularly at a time when so many are decrying the imminent death of journalism, or claiming that the good ship of traditional reporting has sprung a wikileak, I think it’s worth stepping back and saying that yes, information is now more readily accessible than ever – but that makes the job of curating it all the more important. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Julian Assange is more of a cyber-security guard for Bradley Manning’s whistleblower, and neither of them have taken any steps to interpret any of the hundreds of thousands of leaked memos – they left that to the Guardian, Der Spiegel, etc. In fact, when Wikileaks did try to editorialize their leaked material, they were excoriated by the online community for their removal of several minutes of footage from the now infamous video showing the trigger-happy crew of a US helicopter gunship firing on suspiciously unthreatening civilian targets in Iraq.
Earlier on, I wandered into a semantic minefield by arguing about the “success” of a good piece of journalism. This reminds me of another troubling article (I’m beginning to sound like a paranoid conservative fending off the barbarian e-horde at this point, but anyway) I read recently in the Atlantic about Nick Denton, driving force behind the Gawker empire, and his faith in page views above all else: analytics, as opposed to content, are king. Here’s a video summing up the new Gawker redesign and shift to a more TV-based online approach. To my mind, this can only precipitate a race to the bottom, a pepped-up mixture of instant gratification and restless attention-span pandering that will open still wider the floodgates of paparazzi photos, celeb gossip rumour mill grist and mindless memes. So what is a successful piece? A good story – something that admittedly needs to entertain/interest you enough to keep reading, but that can also -shock horror- force you to challenge your assumptions and learn something. Instead of page views, what about asking readers to check what they’ve gleaned from an article? Cognition experts are almost as ubiquitous as journalism decriers in exposing the slash-and-burn effect all this hyperstimulation and fragmented media in(di)gestion is having on our poor neurons.
From my clearly unbiased point of view, it’s up to us hacks to combine the raw materials of our storytelling expertise with the hackers who can model it in html5 clay into the right vehicle to maximum the potential return (we’re talking knowledge here, not bottom line – that’s a whole nother post) for the reader. Not to get caught up in making the biggest pottery shed so that the world and his wife can come and try their hand at clay-slinging. Like the folks at the Atavist say, a good story is all about getting lost. Without losing your train of thought along the way.
As part of the multimedia jamboree that has come to characterize my project, I’ve been researching the latest techniques that news organizations are using to convey their complex story subject matters to an increasingly time-starved, quick-fix-hungry readership. The key as I see it is to balance an accessible means of delivery (something that doesn’t fall at the first hurdle of being visually horrifying or clunkier than a second-hand skoda) with a message that will stay with the reader for longer than it takes them to drain their latte.
This means content providers being a little more accountable for how the information they’re relaying is being used – after all, a school’s not worth much if its pupils can’t retain the teaching long enough to pass their end of year exams. Yes, you could argue this is less relevant in the second-by-second news cycle, but as we’ve heard time and time again, the up-to-the-milisecond-coverage means little without a healthy working knowledge of the context that it fits into.
Discussing this recently with Josh Kalven, founder of Newsbound, we agreed that game theory could play a crucial part here, inconspicuously cajoling browsers into testing their post-article muscles to see just how many of the key points have stayed with them. Josh has joined the ranks of the visual explainers, creating a company that is “exploring how best to contain and explain complex news narratives“. See below for his first offering, on filibusters:
Of course, we’re not the only ones who have awoken to this new breed of explanatory journalism – indeed Fellow Knight and NPR Marketplace stalwart Paddy Hirsch has made it to the focus of his project, as an offshoot of his highly successful marketplace series of explainers: here’s one on the Double-dip recession from Marketplace:
As I’ve mentioned before, Paddy and I are also working on our own financial crisis explainer, which will be premiering early next month and will be akin to the mongrel offspring of New York Times’ Zach Wise’s after effects animations and Mark Fiore’s more cartoony satire.
Much praise was heaped on John Jarvis (and rightly so) for his uber-slick explainer, “The Crisis of Credit Visualized”, which was his thesis project at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. For a behind the scenes look at how the project came together, check out Jarvis’ post here. Jarvis is now part of a group known as The New Mediators who are using graphic design solutions and interactive, rich-media diagrams to bring clarity to complex processes. Next post, coming soon: riding the visual rollercoaster of slickness – and no, that’s not a veiled reference to this very slick interactive timeline of the Middle Eastern Protests from the Guardian. (Although it will feature).
Smarter than the average bear (or not): screen grab from my cartoon explaining the $ crisis
If last term was all about creating content, then next term will be about how to best display and navigate that content. In a way that builds on the visual storytelling framework of comics to create a long, interactive narrative, as opposed to a free-standing, autonomous infographic. Here’s the closest I’ve come to what I’m talking about – a hyperlinked version of the AIPAC comic that ran on Religion Dispatches last year.
Predominantly through Flash, despite it being the unwanted guest around Apple’s table(t). After teaching animation in flash for a few years, getting back into the rigmarole of key frames, movie clips and tweens wasn’t too hard (see pic to the left), but didn’t prepare me for the move to actionscript and incorporating interactive elements, like scrubbers (not those sorts of scrubbers, UK folks), buttons and inset animations. To give you an idea of the sort of things I’m looking for, here are just a few examples that have caught my eye:
USA today piece on mortgage comparisons between 2000 and 2007 (subtle nod to the importance of data viz in sexing up dry data)
Medecins sans frontieres piece on War in the DR Congo
In fact, I’ve just had a very productive chat with Katy about the future of interactive visual media, the challenges it faces on being accepted into the newsroom, as well as a guide for best practices in user interface design. Once again, the goal is to amalgamate the page composition of comics with a multi-layered, dynamic online experience. Katy mentioned the importance of learning HTML5 over Flash…but one thing at a time. Methinks I need to find a code-minded collaborator.
There’s nothing quite like the race to the end of term to catalyse a depth-charge of creativity. The past few weeks have been busier than normal as I’ve spent hours hunched over final cut and flash (as opposed to the drawing board and scanner), busily hashing out my first mini-interactive documentary site (produced with fellow Knight Madhu Acharya), on Bhutanese refugees and their integration into the Oakland community. The screenshot above gives you an idea of the homepage layout, which in the final published version allows you to choose different chapters of the story to explore. I’m currently tying up loading/streaming issues with the FLV files, but aside from that I think it’s good to go.
Now that I’ve got to grips with Final Cut and Flash, I can move to phase 2 of my project, namely combining video and audio within comics pages to give online readers an interactive multimedia comics experience as they explore news events. Looking back at the “to do” list I put up at the end of January, I’m pleased to say that I’ve hit all the goals:
I’ll next week with news of some future projects, as well as some previews of the above – including my first experiment with text animation in After Effects.
A daily comic from the Archcomix archives (circa 2006) featuring that day's new stories, a la Steve Bell
Last night was my backstory chez Jim Bettinger, our program director, a now time-honoured tradition amongst the Knights when we each take center-stage for an evening to explain how we got into journalism. My talk went well, and led to some good questions about collaboration, multimedia and legal issues around comics journalism. It was also surprisingly satisfying to wade through the murky depths of my early cartooning career to pull out single panel op-ed pieces and chart how I got from there to the longer form work I do today. See attached for some examples from back in the day.
As I tap I’m putting together the final edits on the Bhutanese Refugee story I mentioned last post, which I’m hoping to then import into a flash template ahead of tomorrow’s multimedia class. That’s the plan, anyway. Aside from learning a ton about editing and Final Cut file (mis)management, doing this project has also schooled me in the pain of subtitles, or rather, overdubs. Something that will no doubt become essential training for my future work, which often does feature english as the primary language of interviewees.
I have finally succumbed to the lure of After Effects, Final Cut and Flash for my visual storytelling needs of late. Not that I’ve turned my back on my drawing board (or the more accommodating sketchbook – additions to which are up on flickr). More like I’m finally able to start experimenting with different ways of presenting the visual stories that up until now have been pencilled, inked, scanned and printed (or published online). Turns out After Effects is more intuitive than I thought, though the avalanche of sub-field arrows reminds me of the first time I got plonked in front of Photoshop CS2 at Penguin many moons ago. So I’m finally on track to combining video, audio slideshows and interactive comics from one story into an online rich-media maelstrom. The question is, what is the best way to hack them altogether? Is it Flash, or will that be the online publishing equivalent of Quark in a few year’s time? By now, loyal reader, you’ll have no doubt closely watched the Pulse and Seda videos that I’ve posted (scroll down in the News section below if not), and will be anxiously awaiting the latest offering, which should be wrapped up by Weds. It centres on two Bhutanese refugees who have been resettled in Oakland, and their contrasting experiences at different ends of the age spectrum.
With the help of the indomitable Christopher Lin, I’ve also managed to put out a new version of my interactive comics reader prototype, now featuring a vertical as well as horizontal scroll, and pop-up windows from linked panels. It went down very well at our Knightly outing to Google last week, where I presented it to teams from Google News and Youtube. Fellow fellows Hugo Soskin and Di Pinheiro are putting together a video of the talks (also given by Cafe Babel founder-now OWNI partner Adriano Farano and Investigative Journalist Evelyn Larrubia), so I’ll post a link when it’s up. The excellent comics journalism resource Cartoon Movement have also expressed an interest in an interactive narrative visualization (like a data viz, but with visual stories as opposed to infographics, though I suppose the panels technically constitute information graphics) I’m putting together of the Nisour Square shooting of 2007, so expect that down the pipeline soon. To keep you sated until then, check out this video from a talk I gave to the MA journalism students at Stanford last month on comics journalism, my path into it, process, and all that good stuff.
Yes, I know what you’re thinking. It’s been too long. Well, plenty of reasons for that. First and foremost is the fact that I’ve been wading through the list of Knight Fellowship projects instead of blogging about them. Good news is I can share some of the progress – as ever, I’m always interested in what you, dear readers, think about it.
Multimedia has been the main focus this semester, fuelled by my focus on the excellent Multimedia Production class I’m taking at the Comms dept. Our small production team (comprised of 4 Knights) has now 3 films under its belt, the first of which was an interview with another Fellow, Seda Muradyan. Hugo has since posted his solo-produced piece on another fellow Fellow, Jenka Soderberg, but fear not! Our latest oeuvre isn’t fellow-related, it’s with the creators of the Pulse news app – 2 Stanford alums who created a best-selling RSS feed reader for mobile devices that even got a shout out from the grand poobah of all things tech, Steve Jobs. You can view all of our multimedia efforts at the Knight Garage blog here.
