VOCER Innovation Day 2015: Let's Make Stuff Together
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VOCER Innovation Day 2015: Let's Make Stuff Together
- 5. Momentum magazine, February 2009 issue
- 6. –Johnny Appleseed “Type a quote here.”
- 12. Andy Warner
- 21. Andy Warner, Jackie Roche, Lucy Bellwood
Editor's Notes
- Hi everyone.
- My name is Joyce, and I’m a cartoonist. If you’d asked me five years ago if I’d be working in journalism innovation right now,
- I probably would have laughed at you and maybe shown you a copy of Bird Wizards! (my diary comic at the time). I didn’t think there was a place for me in journalism.
- Despite some stellar examples, I’d thought of the field as synonymous with fiction even as I personally was making largely non-fiction, autobiographical work. So I spent a lot of time in my silo with other artists + cartoonists
- But I also had hobbies; I was involved with a volunteer bicycle organization in Chicago and I met lots of people there I never would have met otherwise; Bike mechanics, small business owners, software developers, and journalists and we were all working together on something really great, which was collecting donated bikes to send to developing countries even though we didn’t have much in common professionally
- I didn’t know how to fix a bike, but I could make posters and that got people to our events which helped us with our mission this was my first taste of true—
- collaborative cross pollination we all came from very different places, and when our powers combined we did great stuff
- It was there that I met Erin Polgreen, a long-time media strategist and fellow comics-lover. In early 2012, we cofounded Symbolia, an interactive comics journalism magazine
- This was a weird and hard thing at the time. There weren’t a lot of publishing platforms for tablets at the time, and none of them prioritized comics, which are inherently image-heavy. We worked really hard to build an app, create a magazine, hire people to create stories for that magazine, and launch it, in about like 6 months while working day jobs. but we did it!
- Symbolia merged comics, in-depth journalism, and interactivity. Each issue had a theme (this was heroines) erin edited the stories, ran the publishing side of things, and developed our partnerships while I guided contributors on interactive elements and visual storytelling, designed the publication, and built & maintained it we were also committed to gender parity in our hiring which is a big problem still in comics and journalism separately. and we made an incredible team
- Running for over two years, we produced hundreds of pages of comics journalism on a wide range of topics, and worked with dozens of contributors from all over the world. We also worked with partners like American Public Media, Tumblr, and Popular Science.
- All of our stories utilized a combination of prose and illustration as well as incorporating interactive elements such as audio, video, animation, or moveable layers to create immersive, engaging pieces of journalism. The combination of these different elements allowed us to really shape a unique reader experience.
- And since we started in 2012, comics journalism has exploded in popular media, non-fiction comics are everywhere i personally never imagined i’d see the new york times publishing illustrated journalism, so that’s really incredible to me
- But why? pause here why is this medium so popular?
- Well, Comics scholar Scott McCloud has a theory on this, which is that “When we look at simplified images, we place ourselves into those images. Comics are subjective, in that we place ourselves in the story.” So comics make it possible for the reader to step into a subject’s shoes and experience the world in a new way. and that’s really powerful in journalism any time you can generate deep empathy and understanding you’re doing something right
- Additionally utilizing interactivity creates even more opportunity for engagement and empathy.
- Moving parts give the reader agency.
- Ambient animation contributes to a mood, and Audio/video can bring you to a place The internet is full of instant gratification, a lot of readers are looking for meaningful experiences, not just meaningful prose, and digital comics have that on offer.
- I want to share with you a few of Symbolia’s most impactful stories: Declassified, a collaboration between Lucy Bellwood and Sarah Mirk the stories of two female military veterans who served at Guantanamo Bay and their different experiences Declassified has been republished several times, and has been translated twice gives an eye into the experience of being a woman working in the american military and specifically guantanmo bay, which of course has its own history
- Shape matters, written and illustrated by Andy Warner a story about the museum of copulatory organs in Sydney, australia the world of insect copulatory organs is strange and kind of beautiful, and being able to see it lavishly illustrated brings new light to the science republished with tumblr and popular science
- and our Climate change series was also very impactful collaboration between Symbolia and The Years of Living Dangerously, a showtime documentary on climate change worked with a range of contributors on a bunch of different climate issues from the thawing permafrost in the northern part of the world, lake erie which has become overrun with alge and it’s totally changing the ecosystem and how climate change is affecting islam
- These stories, this work, is that same collaborative cross pollination I mentioned earlier we’re getting driven, creative people together to work on a problem. when Content makers are excited and taking risks, that generates work that readers are excited about match-making journalists and cartoonists became one of my favorite parts of the job at symbolia
- And this is not just true with comics and journalism. Right now now I’m a fellow at American University in washington DC we’re working on how we can work game design principles into the newsroom to drive journalism forward jolt team Among my cohort are a video editor, a psychologist, a biologist, a political scientist, everything in between. Being around them all brings new perspectives to the work I do. this has given me the opportunity to leave the comics journalism silo and see what new stuff I can bring back it
- Teams have been exploring nonfiction games since about 2003: The Migrant Trail was a game produced last year as a companion piece to a documentary The player attempts to get ten people across the Sonoran desert from Mexico into the US without getting caught by border patrol or dying of exposure. This game is really hard. When I played I couldn’t get any of my people across the desert players acquire a greater understanding of what a difficult undertaking it is to attempt to immigrate across the desert.
- And other kinds of media makers are experimenting with other graphic, interactive techniques as well Parable of the Polygons is a data-driven piece by Vi Hart and Nicky Case They call it a “Playable Post” and it’s an interactive feature about segregation Which is a big problem in Chicago, where I’m from (fact?) again, interacting with the data makes it easier to understand seg is a problem, this brings understanding and when I understand something, I’m more inclined to seek out more information about it
- So we know these kinds of approaches can be highly effective, but this stuff can be pretty intimidating. I doubt there are a lot of cartoonists in the audience, and there may or may not be that many typographers, information designers, or game developers.
- But I’m not a journalist. it took me falling into journalism to realize: I love working with journalists. I love that marriage of skill sets— A designer or an illustrator or a developer has a complementary set of skills, equally important, to make that information shine in a new way for a reader.
- In his book “Show your work” Austin Kleon talks about the value of creating a good “scene” over celebrating individual genius he says: We should all be building diverse scenes, and working with driven people who come from totally different backgrounds to make incredible news things. That is how we’re going to breathe life into journalism in the 21st century.
- Case in point: Symbolia became what it was because Erin approached me and invited me to collaborate, someone she’d met while volunteering at the bicycle organization, And together we made something to international acclaim that took perfect advantage of our complementary skills. And that’s magic!
- Thank you so much having me.