Slides for Jan 13 2016 webinar - CWA Canada Associate Members and CMG Freelance. credit: Alisa Mamak and Mike Leschart.

1. WHO ARE WE?
Visual and interactive storytelling
Working with graphics, multimedia, data and online tools to share information
Mike Alisa
@amamak
http://leschartmedia.com/portfolio/
WHAT DO WE DO?
…
http://www.alisamamak.com
@lescharm
High Five Icon by Keith
Mulvin, The Noun Project

3. Some examples from our work:

4. interactives
We tell stories online by creating

5. Why is visual storytelling important?

6. Tactile/Kinesthetic
Learn through moving, doing and touching...
Or any combination of the above.
If you want people to be engaged, engage their senses!
Aural
Learn through listening…
Visual
Learn through seeing…
People have different learning styles:

7. SOURCE: This great interactive that explains
why your brain craves infographics
(http://neomam.com/interactive/13reasons/)

8. multimedia / long form stories
So we tell stories through visual and sensory elements like

9. data visualizations
and

10. 1. Conceptualize project
– Kick-off meeting with project sponsor
– Brainstorm
– Select point of contact/project manager
2. Design/proof of concept/mockups
– Wireframes, storyboarding, and/or prototypes
– Tools: Pen+Paper, image editing software (Photoshop, Illustrator), code
3. Development
– Tools: HTML5, JavaScript, jQuery, CSS, Javascript libraries and APIs,
– Gulp, NPM, Sass, PHP, cloud data storage
4. Test
– Quality Assurance (QA)
– Accessibility, device and browser compatibility
1. Project launches
2. Post-mortem discussion and feedback
3. Revisions, updates and new features (iterations)
PROCESS:
Long-term or large-scale interactive and multimedia projects

11. I need it now!!!”
“But there’s breaking news and..
YOU can make it!!!

12. 1. Story identification. Reporters in the field may alert editors, or assigning
editors will call the reporter. Photographers and visual journalists are alerted
at the same time. Story location determines what happens next. The
infographic/interactive artist might go to the scene to do their own reporting,
or work from the office.
1. Once there is enough reporting to determine “what happened,” the
infographic/interactive artist determines how to explain the events visually.
Text, whether written by the artist or by a reporter, and visuals are created
concurrently.
1. Content is fact-checked and edited, then sent to several platforms for
publishing. The sizes and content of the material are different for use in
video, mobile, desktop and other media. The artist would export several
different versions, updating web and mobile versions of the graphics as the
story develops.
PROCESS:
Breaking news – “quick hits” and fast infographics/interactives

13. Templates and third-party tools
Some great DIY options exist! Or if you have the resources your newsroom may have templates for you.
Start here! Google has a great suite of tools and tutorials for journalists!
https://newslab.withgoogle.com/tools

14. Visual and interactive storytelling: a toolbox
Could text enhance your story?
1) Big quotes
Highlight key quotes or reader comments
2) Lists
Could visuals enhance your story?
3) Infographics or single images
Easy to implement and share
4) Image/photo galleries
Often the most popular items on news sites.
Tools: Flickr, In house galleries
Could sound enhance your story?
5) Audio (Podcasts, MP3 files)
Tools: itunes, SoundCloud, Audioboo,
Broadcastr
6) Video (and audio slideshows)
Tools: Youtube video editor, Vimeo, Vines,
Soundslides
Could dates enhance your story?
7) Timelines
Tools: timeline.js
Could location enhance your story?
8) Maps
Tools: Google Maps, Google Fusion Tables, ArcGIS Online
Could data enhance your story?
9) Data-driven graphics (charts, visualizations, etc.)
Tools: Google Fusion Tables, Tableau, Google Trends
Could a combination enhance your story?
10) Complex Interactives
Any custom combination of multimedia tools/elements
Could reader participation enhance your story?
11) Polls, quizzes, games
Tools: Google forms, Poll Daddy, SurveyGizmo, Social
Media Polls
12) Social media tools – more this coming up in
3…2…1…

15. Visual and interactive storytelling: a toolbox (cont’d)
Using reader participation to enhance your story:
Some tools you may want to try:
• Storify: Aggregates content from different social media sources and presents them as a coherent story
• Buffer: Schedule posts to the main social media networks at set times or intervals.
• twXplorer: Explore and identify Twitter chatter by topic, and then see the most common links, images
and hashtags used in those tweets.
• Tagboard: Search a hash tag to quickly see an entire conversation across social media networks.
• SocialMention: A free real-time search for user-generated content on blogs, comments. videos, etc.
Sign up for email alerts (like Google alerts) or download the results as a .csv.
•
VerificationJunkie.com: A directory of tools to help you fact check, verify and assess the validity of
user-generated content

16. Data visualization and data journalism

17. "The ability to take data—to be able to
understand it, to process it, to extract value
from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—
that’s going to be a hugely important skill in
the next decades, … because now we really
do have essentially free and ubiquitous data.
So the complimentary scarce factor is the
ability to understand that data and extract
value from it."
- Hal Varian, Google's Chief Economist, opined in The McKinsey Quarterly, Jan 2009

18. Smarter people than us have spent a lot
of time on this:
http://datajournalismhandbook.org/

19. 1) Gather data
Does your data exist? If not, how can you get it?
SOURCE: http://onlinejournalismblog.wordpress.com/2011/09/06/gathering-data-a-flow-chart-for-data-journalists-2/

20. 2) Assess and interview your data
What’s the quality of the data like (sample size, timely, from neutral source)? Is there a story?
3) Refine your data
Is data messy or does it need to be in a different format?
Google Refine: Helps you format, improve or remove messy elements from spreadsheets
Tabula: Pulls data from PDF files and convert it into a spread sheet.
Google maps or Google Fusion Tables: Best for map-based visualizations. Takes a
spreadsheet of location-based information and shows it on a map. Can also generate
charts and other types of visualizations but the “insert chart” option within Google
spreadsheets is actually better and easier.
Tableau: Has a bit of a learning curve, but can generate many types of rich data
visualizations with no coding skills required.
D3.js: Has LOTS of code, but you can come up with some really neat things if you’re keen.
4) Present your data
What kind of visualization do you need? How will you prioritize visual elements? Should it be
interactive?

21. Never underestimate the power of existing data. Statistics
Canada has data for almost any topic you can imagine.
http://www.statcan.gc.ca/start-debut-eng.html
Most major cities in Canada (and around the world have
also started open data initiatives and they are willing to add
datasets upon request.
http://www.toronto.ca/open/
http://data.vancouver.ca/
Also try: partnering with organizations, purchasing data
from 3rd party vendors, collecting it yourself via
crowdsourcing or hiring a pollster or data scientist, learning
some code to scrape data (or pay someone to do it for you)

22. Challenges with data journalism
You don’t need to be a statistician, but you do
need to know basic statistics principles like
“normalizing” data on maps and understanding
the difference between corelation and causation.
SOURCE: http://xkcd.com/1138/
SOURCE:
http://xkcd
.com/1138
/

23. Learn more
(on a limited budget)

24. Join the MOOC movement
MOOC = Massive Open Online Course. They’re usually free and generally run by
professors at internationally-recognized universities and colleges. Some higher
learning institutions also offer online course modules free of charge (i.e. MIT).
Coursera - https://www.coursera.org/courses
Take advantage of free online learning
The Toronto Public Library offers the Lynda.com library of online courses FREE
for all people with a library card. Libraries in other regions may offer similar.
Over 3,500 video tutorial courses led by experts on web
design, software development, photography, business skills,
home and small office, project management, 3D + Animation,
graphic design audio, music, video editing and more.
http://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/detail.jsp?Entt=RDMEDB01
87&R=EDB0187
Udacity - https://www.udacity.com/

25. Get involved in person
Join groups or find organizations that run free or inexpensive workshops
ONA Toronto
The Online News Association meetup group.
http://www.meetup.com/ONA-Toronto/
NEWS AND DATA MEETUP GROUPS IN TORONTO (FREE!):
Look for groups that interest you at http://www.meetup.com/
INEXPENSIVE LEARN-TO-CODE WORKSHOPS ACROSS CANADA:
FITC (Future. Innovation. Technology. Creativity.)
Offer workshops and conferences (can be pricey but you
can often win passes!) http://fitc.ca/events/
Ladies learning code
(For men too! Encouraged that you accompany a lady)
http://www.ladieslearningcode.com

26. On twitter?
Get some inspiration!
@TwitterForNews
@CNNmultimedia
@CBCinteractives
@nytgraphics
@BBCNewsGraphics
GRAPHICS AND MULTIMEDIA:
@PostGraphics
TOOLS FOR JOURNALISTS:
DATA AND VISUALIZATION:
@AP_Interactive
@quartzthings
@Visually
@nytdesign
@nprdesign
@GuardianData
@mututemple
(Digital Journalism)
@HuffPostData