Welcome to the 11th issue of Nuanced Narratives!
We're pleased to be welcoming Gurman Bhatia, Michael Brenner, Attila Battorfy and Emilia Ruzicka as the newest Jury members.
The next Jury meetup is likely to be held in July to learn about ChatGPT's Code Interpreter and its ramifications for visual journalism. We’ll also be sharing a few key takeaways from the first event about photogrammetry and NeRFs next month.
As of next week the Buried Signals website will include effectiveness and virality tracking for the projects we feature.
Visual Spotlight
This month's visual spotlight is awarded to The climate disaster is here by the Guardian. The scope of the project is wild, the final article uses scrollytelling with interaction to visualize trends for climate related events and temperatures across the planet.
Special mentions go to:
- The Kontinentalist for the release of Terraforming Singapore, a multi-chapter project with unique storytelling approaches and incredible attention to detail.
- The BBC's interactive articles, such as the Choose your own escape project on Syrian refugee routes.
Insights
In May I interviewed Simon Scarr and Adolfo Arranz from the Reuters Graphics department - whose work we've been featuring almost every month - expect those articles to be published soon!
In June I am very excited to be talking with Nic Newman (from the Reuters Institute) about audience and narrative trends, Nic is responsible for the comprehensive Digital News report.
A short note on something I've been up to…
Given the pressures of time and the lack of precise tooling, we often overlook analysis of whether the interactive and visual elements in our articles truly engage readers and effectively deliver the intended message. This gap presents an opportunity to take our storytelling to the next level and is the driving force behind Buried Signals.
The objective of these interviews and research is to unravel the most impactful narrative structures and layers for a given story. The aim is to empower authors to make publishing decisions backed by effectiveness.
I'm in the process of consolidating all of this information into a Playbook, to be released in Q4 this year!
Handpicked obsessions
- Flourish released their scrollytelling feature. The Flourish integration with Canva as a part of the acquisition is going to accelerate a transition into visual presentations. Canva also released a visual economy report.
- Kontinentalist are building a data storytelling tool
- Someone built the universe in Minecraft
- Last but not least a note on ChatGPT's upcoming release of code interpreter, which is likely going to cause a dramatic change in our field.