Interactive Journalism

Hackers, Data, and Code

Nikki Usher

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780252098956
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Interactive journalism has transformed the newsroom. Emerging out of changes in technology, culture, and economics, this new specialty uses a visual presentation of storytelling that allows users to interact with the reporting of information. Today it stands at a nexus: part of the traditional newsroom, yet still novel enough to contribute innovative practices and thinking to the industry.

Nikki Usher brings together a comprehensive portrait of nothing less than a new journalistic identity. Usher provides a history of the impact of digital technology on reporting, photojournalism, graphics, and other disciplines that define interactive journalism. Her eyewitness study of the field's evolution and accomplishments ranges from the interactive creation of Al Jazeera English to the celebrated data desk at the Guardian to the New York Times ' Pulitzer-endowed efforts in the new field. What emerges is an illuminating, richly reported profile of the people coding a revolution that may reverse the decline and fall of traditional journalism.

1Interactive Journalism

A Budding Profession

I remember the first time I came across interactive journalism and realized there was an aspect of this kind of news content that was different than anything I had seen before. I had just started what would become this book, and I'd begun thinking about the intersection of “hacks” and “hackers,” or programmers and journalists, from a cultural perspective. I was one step away from digging into the interactive content itself, but it was an accidental discovery that showed me how important interactive journalism would be to the future of news.

A New York Times interactive made a deeply personal impact on me that influenced one of the biggest decisions I've ever made. We were searching for a home to buy in 2011 in the Washington, D.C., area, and we were feeling quite disheartened. After all, median home price in the district is close to $500,000—and when you're on a professor's salary after years of a pitiful grad school stipend, that seems kind of nuts. At the same time, rents were and still are also out of control—a two-bedroom in a neighborhood we deemed safe with good access to the Metro, shopping, and entertainment could cost close to $3,000 per month, if not more. So, we began trying to figure out whether it was a better idea to rent or buy, yet we didn't know what factors to consider. Then we found The Times’ Rent vs. Buy calculator (“Is it Better to Rent or Buy”).¹ By entering a few bits of personal data unique to us—our monthly rent vs. our potential down payment and the cost of the home, plus the property tax and mortgage rate—we learned that it made much more sense to buy than rent if we were planning to be in the D.C. area long term.

This interactive tool did not constitute breaking news; rather, it was a well-researched piece of journalism that required learning about the financial impact of home mortgages and renting, and then took into account personal data and offered an individualized result. The journalists had to research all the key factors relevant to buying a home, weigh how those factors related to each other, and then (using skills I was now seeing as critical to the newsroom) use programming not only to create the code behind the “rent or buy” calculation but also to present a visually enticing and easy-to-use display of this information. There were spaces to enter numbers and then a graph to show results. Over the years, the tool has only gotten better and easier to use, with more features that can be toggled, dragged, and displayed (even on your smart phone, should you need to think about a home purchase on the go).²

After we bought our home, I reflected a bit—this single piece of journalism was responsible for one of the biggest decisions of my life. It wasn't a Pulitzer Prize story that had changed my worldview about a social issue, but it had nevertheless literally changed where I lived. And anyone I knew anywhere could use this calculator—it would be personal and useful to them—and it would simply not have been possible before without a quick, responsive Web, an understanding of programming, and reporting about real estate. The kind of journalism The New York Times was offering was changing with content like this calculator, and it was time to think about how, why, and who was changing it.

Defining Interactive Journalism

Interactive journalism is defined here as a visual presentation of storytelling through code for multilayered, tactile user control for the purpose of news and information. Its practitioners, though they have varying backgrounds and skills, are classified as interactive journalists. Interactive journalism is a subspecialty—a new form of journalistic work—but it is certainly one among many; subspecialties include photography, graphics, videography, blogging, copyediting, layout and design, online-exclusive content, and others. Some of these subspecialties have been part of journalism for decades or even centuries—consider photography from its early days to present—while others have emerged in the online era. As a whole, interactive journalism is an all-encompassing term that refers to the people who work in this area, the practice of doing the work, and the work product that results.

Interactivity, though, is a confusing term at best. Interactivity has been called an essential if not defining property of the internet.³ Scholars in the late 1990s and early 2000s wrote articles trying to define interactivity in the context of human–computer interaction, each one with a familiar refrain: interactivity was a messy concept that the author would make clearer (which often failed to happen). People have proposed a number of ways to think about the concept, the first as primarily an interpersonal relationship whereby interactivity can be measured through how closely messages relate to each other.⁴ Others argue that interactivity means that users can modify and participate in controlling a mediated environment in real time, but what “modify” means is unclear.⁵ Jennifer Stromer-Galley suggests a way to think about both computer and person-to-person interaction: interactivity as product and interactivity as process.⁶ Interactivity as product is defined as the control users have over what they see through some sort of computer experience. Interactivity as process is person-to-person or human interaction. Others define this divide as user-to-system and user-to-user.⁷

In my view, then, and given the subject and form of news discussed here, interactivity has a much simpler definition, one that Stromer-Galley supports and Erik Bucy describes as the “control that users exercise over the selection and presentation of online content, whether story text, audiovisuals, or multimedia, and other aspects of the interface.”⁸ What is important here is that users have the perception that they are engaging in a two-way exchange, where factors such as time, speed, content, and pathways for discovery create the experience. Ultimately, the predetermined architecture of the interactive creates a structured experience of content.

In an earlier era of interactivity, as I have shown in Making News at The New York Times, journalists saw multimedia as interactivity. Multimedia was the most compelling way users could engage with multiple forms of journalistic content, the type Bucy suggests.⁹ This “multimodal” journalism, or journalism presented through visuals, stories, text, audio, videos, and photos, is one part of interactive journalism—journalism as a multisensory experience.¹⁰ In fact, interactivity may be said to be one of the defining principles of digital journalism.

Journalists recognized that more sophisticated multimedia, coupled with better Web integration, heralded a new capacity to do interactive work. Interactives are even more sophisticated than they once were, building this content as software with programmers working inside the editorial process. Small newsrooms even five years ago were unlikely to have an interactive journalist—but today, even those without them are taking risks and trying out new ways of bringing interactives into their work: for example, The Star-Telegram in Fort Worth, Texas, uses an off-the-shelf program to upload photos and graphics to help create interactive elements for their most important projects.

With this energy behind interactive journalism, let's look at this definition I've offered in order to get a clearer picture about what the phenomena at hand actually is:

Interactive journalism is defined here as a visual presentation of storytelling through code for multilayered, tactile user control for the purpose of news and information.

By visual, I mean that the product is not a text-based story. Some may think that this applies specifically to a data visualization or a video-laden interactive, but it does not: rather, this visual aspect ought to be considered on a scale. On the most basic side of this, one might consider a database that users can search through—this doesn't look like a story, and it isn't particularly visually pretty. And its product is text you can read. But the user-design is intended to lead you visually through to the elements of the story you ought to click on and explore. The point is that you are not getting a traditional textual element found on every single Web page for every single online journalism presentation—the traditional text, written story—but instead are being offered something that looks different. On the most extreme version of visual presentation, you might place fully immersive and responsive story pages replete with visual stories, maps, animated graphics, annotation via commenting, and beyond.

Storytelling, too, operates at a variety of levels. A sports interactive showing the trajectory of a pitch may depict how the ball moves, but it provides new information and insight in some way. A calculator may generate a number or a quiz may generate a silly answer. A collection of movable graphs may not have a direct narrative, but this may offer information that allows the user to put the story together. On the other hand, interactive journalism may tell a self-contained narrative—for instance, an interactive that brings together reported text, images, maps, and beyond to offer greater insight into, say, a conflict zone. Styles of this interaction can be the user telling the computer to do something; having a conversation as if there is a dialogue with the graphic; manipulation, where the structure of the story is changed via appearance; and exploration, where the user is put in charge.¹¹

Everything in online journalism requires code.¹² But interactive journalism goes above and beyond the code that enables sites to function. Certainly, content management systems are incredibly difficult and complicated, but interactive journalism means layering on top of this content management with particular, specialized coding language built as an expansion to a Web site with additional functionality. It is code created with the intention of a visible output. Not all journalists who work with interactive journalism know code, but they use tools that apply an extra layer of coding to journalism. Code in the service of interactive journalism means specialized knowledge, either of code or of tools that use code to make interactive journalism. On perhaps the most coding-heavy side of this scale, we may consider computational journalism, whereby journalists go about finding stories with or by using algorithms.¹³

And at the core of interactive journalism is the idea of tactile, user-directed, multilayered control: in other words, a user is directly interfacing with a computer to select and make choices about the pathways through content. A user has always been able, to some degree, to select his or her own content. The difference now is that there is a self-contained experience of manipulation, though nonetheless this experience is within a set, bounded universe devoted to a single, concrete topic for exploration. As Alberto Cairo, a major figure in interactive and news information graphics, points out, these can be linear and nonlinear, and while there is user control, the designer does impose some limits on what users can do.¹⁴ Yet the content has multifaceted areas to explore but no predetermined pathway. The user has the ability to tell himself or herself a story.

By multilayered, I mean that the navigation occurs through the experience of multiple elements at once. The user does not have to refresh a page or do anything on his or her own to make the new insight available. While interactive journalism may produce a new version of an image upon a request for new information, the user has not navigated on his or her own away from the original request for the specific experience contained within the interactive.

And tactile offers a key way to describe the user experience. Tactile suggests an element of play—that the user is able to do something. There is something almost physical to the experience; the entire experience requires touching via the experience of clicking. Interactive journalism has a plasticity and mobility built into its form. According to user interface and design expert Jenifer Tidwell, this tactile experience can include the ability to scroll and pan, zoom, sort and arrange, search and filter, and go close and far.¹⁵

The last part of the definition is the most challenging: for the purpose of news and information. Through interactive journalism, we know and learn something that orients us to the world—in the classic way that Robert Park talked about the function of news in society: “news as a form of knowledge.”¹⁶ As I contend, there is no one journalism, particularly as the definition transforms, changes, and adapts. But I do think there is an essential “newsthink,” what Silvio Waisbord defines as a “a way of apprehending the world that distills bottomless amounts of information into news.”¹⁷ For me, this offers a generous way to think about journalism—it can be fun, silly, or even entertainment, and it can also be hard-hitting, investigative, public service, and/or the kind of breaking news that makes an editor's heart sing.

Sometimes, the work product of interactive journalism is described as a news application or, in short, a news app—or often software. A major leader in this field, Scott Klein of the investigative journalism nonprofit ProPublica explained this as “doing journalism by making software instead of words and pictures.” Often, though, this definition is just limited to the artifacts that produce data-driven products and does not refer to immersive or less-data-specific work. Similarly, the focus on the news app itself does not help explain the people involved or the type of knowledge created. And calling it “data journalism” is too narrow: there are other kinds of interactive journalism, such as interactive storytelling that provides an immersive digital journalism experience, like “Snow Fall,” or interactive features that bring together elements of mapping, data, and multimedia storytelling; further, there are interactives that have nothing to do with data at all but still employ news apps. A BBC interactive called “The Secret Life of Cats,” for example, might not fall under this definition,¹⁸ nor would the interactive Oscar ballot put out by The New York Times, nor many sports interactives, and potentially not even immersive storytelling like “Snow Fall,” and certainly not quizzes that are not directly related to traditional journalism but are associated instead with news events (Slate is particularly good at these, such as mocking John Travolta's butchering of a star's name at the Oscars).¹⁹ Thus, interactive journalism is an all-encompassing term that refers to a category of journalism created as, or through, software, and its practitioners are interactive journalists.

Data journalism is an important source of inspiration, expertise, and content for interactive journalism. The term itself is quite slippery to some practitioners: Does it mean the act of actually just using computation to create data findings? Or does there have to be something visual or even interactive in presenting the findings? Journalist Alexander Howard, in his report for the Columbia School of Journalism, gave one of the clearest definitions of data journalism so far: “[The] gathering, cleaning, organizing, analyzing, visualizing, and publishing data to support the creation of acts of journalism.”²⁰ He adds that this means the application of data science to journalism, which he defines as the “study of the extraction of knowledge from data.”²¹ Data journalism is a combination of sources, the application of statistics, and visualizations to present it all. From my perspective, data journalism is a key part of interactive journalism, but not all data journalism is interactive. My focus here is how news and programming have come together to create new forms of journalism, and so the data journalism most relevant to this project is data journalism rendered in interactives, as it relies on new technical expertise to extend code into journalism in ways that inspire new modes of thinking about journalistic work.

Thus, to sum up, the type of work that is being done may be called interactive journalism: a visual presentation of storytelling through code for multilayered, tactile user control for the purpose of news and information. But interactive journalism is what we call the product and the process of creating this product. We need to remember that interactive journalism is more than a material object: it is also bound up in social and cultural contexts. C. W. Anderson talks about data journalism in the context of an assemblage—as having “interlocking material, culture, and practice-based underpinnings”—and while I do not use these terms here, the interactive itself, the assumptions built into its creation, and the larger sociotechnical culture inform its use, design and reception.²² This is why the people who make interactives and how they work are at the center of this study.

“The Secret Life of Cats,” BBC News

An important tie-in to interactive journalism is the larger academic association with computational journalism. The two ideas are related but not the same thing; interactives often use code and algorithms to help journalists improve the process and practices of...