Rethinking Journalism Part III: Don’t Reinvent the Wheel, Just Tell a Story
Rethinking Journalism Part III: Don’t Reinvent the Wheel, Just Tell a Story
Creative Doesn’t Always Mean Original
Creative Doesn’t Always Mean Original
Just recently, I was assigned to make a video profile of a DACA recipient. It was just supposed to be a video, but I thought we could tell the story in a more compelling way. So I pitched a multi-media experience that had video, animations and images that would supplement the article being written about this Daca activist. To me and the designer I hired, it made sense that it would be a quick in and out job.
“Can you make this by Feb 19th (Two Weeks?)?” Asked my editor.
Of course, or so we thought… that is called foreshadowing.
The first step was to produce and organize the content while we waited for the article to be written. Our job was to help the journalist we where paired with to enhance the story.
Sidebar: by the way, that is all UX designers are supposed to do, we open doors for people using design, we shouldn’t have the hubris that we are the sole individuals that solve all of the organizations problems, we just organize their brand touch points, and in this case, leave it up to to journalist to do good reporting or the developer to do some good developing to make our designs come to life.
This is slightly different from the usual design flow, before we can do layout, we need to have an article ready. So how do you work around this?
In Richard Koch’s thought provoking book, “The 80/20 Manager” he talks about the power of the subconscious mind to solve problems for you in the background. In his “Lazy Manager” chapter, he explains how some managers put problems on the back burner and let the idea simmer while they work on other projects. What happens when you do that is a full development of an idea and action steps to go with it. It is programming that “aha!” moment into a sure thing.
Imagine the problem and clearly define it. Once you do that, let it simmer and work on something else.
So we couldn’t work on layout or wireframes just yet, but we did have a clear design challenge: we knew that the content needed to correlate with and enhance the article.
So we put that on the back burner and started to make content.
Shooting the interview is a fine example of what influenced the style of the article. I didn’t want music or fancy B-roll. The main idea was to have multiple segments of the interview spread throughout the article to supplement key points of the interview.
As was reviewing the footage, there was one clip of the activist adjusting his mic. and it made me think, “wouldn’t it be cool if we made this into a video header?” The article would then start with Alan, the activist, prepping for his interview.
From there it set the look we wanted to go for. The B-roll would be images strategically laid out through the article and the video would be plain and simple. Alan gave me pictures of his childhood and we scanned them. We also had him supply pictures of his activism.
We then met for a mini design sprint and started to imagine the potential layout for the article. We wanted it to be dynamic and informative. The design principle we wanted to implement was Depth of Processing. Which is backed up by psychological principle of the levels-of-processing effect. This how wikipedia explains it:
The levels-of-processing effect, identified by Fergus I. M. Craik and Robert S. Lockhart in 1972, describes memory recall of stimuli as a function of the depth of mental processing. Deeper levels of analysis produce more elaborate, longer-lasting, and stronger memory traces than shallow levels of analysis. Depth of processing falls on a shallow to deep continuum. Shallow processing (e.g., processing based on phonemic and orthographic components) leads to a fragile memory trace that is susceptible to rapid decay. Conversely, deep processing (e.g., semantic processing) results in a more durable memory trace.
This couldn’t be an average article. Each point of the narrative needed to be backed up with media to increase the depth of processing. We wanted the reader to remember what the experienced and thus be apart of the conversation.
We wanted the reader to remember what the experienced and thus be apart of the conversation.
This got us thinking about maybe doing some animations to show statistics in the article. So I emailed Alan for key stats on Daca.
The real kicker to the project is that the journalist was behind on his article. So even though we had our assets, we had to wait.
The first deadline past with no completed article. The paper’s advisor told me that the convention we where going to needed a link.
So I did what any sane person would do, I gave him the link to a blank page and hoped it would be finished in time.
We where given one more week to finish, so we waited on the reporter to finish the final article. It took some heavy and consistent follow up, but we eventually got it.
We then had two days to throw everything together.
Long story short: we finished it and won a best in show award with the Associated Collegiate Press. But that isn’t the point.
The big take away from this project is my new belief in the short deadline.
I don’t think the immersive article would have been the way it was if we didn’t only have two days to layout the content.
Creativity happens when there are tight parameters.
The intentional use of tight deadline is something I want to consider in future projects. The feeling of flow and adrenaline when you have little time to work is pretty exciting.
Also, creativity doesn’t necessarily mean original. I didn’t make anything that hasn’t been done before. I used existing components and organized them into a final product that tells the story in an original manner.
Bonus Content: Results
Here are some screenshots of the feedback the article received on social. The page became one of our top 5 performing URLS with 400 plus readers the first couple weeks. (Hey, thats pretty good for a school paper)
Thank you for reading! Comment down below and share your thoughts!