Matt Conlen - Explorables and the Conver...

Highlights from the conversation

Industry insights

In the last decade the news industry had to stop operating in a silo, suddenly it was competing on the same platforms against every other industry : all forms of entertainment, advertising and triple AAA video games. The bar for people’s attention became tremendously higher and the news industry has had to learn from the competition.

Novelty is a vitality factor. As novelty wears off articles are less shared and less popular. The expectation is for higher quality in order to continue building content that stands out.

This creates a rift for independent creators or local media who cannot compete with large media organisations and dedicated teams of visual journalism. The pain in having to know a set of skills that are far removed from the work of journalism shouldn't exist in order for journalism to continue thriving. These are common hardships with building interactive stories, publishing and optimising so that it can be read by thousands on low-powered phones. Journalists can’t worry about these things. Idyll is about solving all of those problems.

Buried Signals has emerged from the same motto : we want to provide resources, learnings and inspiration for independent visual journalism. Helping bridge the divide with larger institutions to empower citizen journalism.

Best Practices

• Personnalise the stories. How does it affect me in my city, my community and friends. Stories can be written in different perspectives, people can see stories from the perspectives that are relevant to them.

• Use interaction meaningfully and not decoratively. Oftentimes people use interactivity decoratively, we should think about how people are engaging with the story.

• Use pen and paper sketching for ideation, there are no tooling constraints so our minds are completely unleashed.

• Filter ideas with a constraint satisfaction rule. Eliminate any ideas that don’t meet hard requirements, adjust the remaining remaining for soft requirements by pulling from other concepts.

• Articles are long because the world is nuanced. We want to tell short and simple stories, but its rarely the case. We assume readers are interested and smart, you want to be sure that you’re being clear and that the information won’t be misinterpreted.

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