By Courtney Holder, Georgia Trier and Kate Mullaly
Advantages
Coming into this course, I had very basic knowledge of what comprised of a multimedia story. Pictures, a video or maybe an audio piece to accompany the tale being told were about as intricate as a story could be. For the most part, I believed this to be true, only changing photos with graphs when dealing with a data story, but now, my perspective has changed thanks to the introduction of scrollytelling.
Bringing in the ability for reader interaction, scrollytelling allows the writer to make a story more dynamic and engaging, helping the reader to fully immerse themselves within the information as they move through the article. Bringing the piece to life, scrollytelling allows for more artistic flair, giving writers a bigger opportunity to get creative with their work and really think about their audience and how they want their work to be perceived.
For me, reading articles like “How Artists Get Paid from Streaming” by Elio Quinton and “Inside the Super Kamiokande” by Jake Sturmer were what really drew me in to the concept of scrollytelling. Both reporters were able to tell a long form story that contained quite intricate and sometimes scientific information, without it being wordy, and tiresome to read.
Their utilisation of different types of media is what really pushed these stories from being very basic journalism to being easily digestible and captivating. “Inside the Super Kamiokande” in particular used multiple elements including animation, videos, pictures and moving diagrams to teach readers about the science behind the super Kamiokande and each element did their own part to build the story. I especially liked the use of the photograph of the ‘dome’ that really showed the reader the size of the ‘dome’ as you scrolled down, making you feel like you were at the bottom of it.
As a journalistic technique, I would say that scrollytelling is my favourite so far, purely due to how engaging and digestible it is, and would highly recommend it when creating a multimedia article. While it may look complicated, scrollytelling doesn’t need to be that extravagant. One of the first scrollytelling stories “Snowfall” is quite basic but it still referenced as a great example, and has allowed others to grow from it’s idea.
Limitations
Although the format of Scrollytelling has many creative benefits, there are also limitations that come along with this.
This unique format is not always the right option for all stories. In fact, the choice to use this format could end up being the downfall of a perfectly good article. When used unnecessarily, the scrollytelling format becomes clunky and hard to navigate. These previously named ‘creative elements’ then become gimmicky inconveniences.
Although the progressive format of these stories can help to break down information, it can also make the article harder to skim over. Often when people are reading articles, they like to quickly scroll through to get the most important information. The format also isn’t ideal for those of us who like to use ‘Control F’ to search for information within an article. The scrollytelling format slows down this process and makes it harder to easily navigate to and from different sections. It can also lead to important information getting lost in the mix.
Scrollytelling is very creative and with that creativity comes a lot of invested time. With constant looming deadlines for journalists, we cannot be expected to create a visual masterpiece while also keeping up quality journalism in other aspects.
Although as journalists, we learn a lot about technology and design, we are still not digital designers, and should not be expected to be. The best scrollytelling stories have amazing graphics that not only depict the story, but further it. These graphics are highly unlikely to be created by a journalist, therefore to really seep the benefits of the scrollytelling format, a graphic designer must be consulted. This is not always practical as it takes up valuable time and money, thus should only be done when the story is worth it.
The many technological aspects that come with scrollytelling can also overload your website and lead to different problems. These can include glitches with the website or the website as a whole becoming slow and buffering due to the amount of technological elements co-existing.
Another problem that can come along with the scrollytelling format is the way it differs from platform to platform. If the article is designed on a laptop, there will be significant visual changes when viewed on a phone or tablet, and vice versa.
So although this technique is highly creative and can be a great way to enhance a story, it does come with its list of limitations and journalists should be cautioned to think carefully about whether or not this format is the right choice for their article.
Case Study
Scrollytelling is a type of long form journalism that incorporates audio, visual, animation and text that appear and disappear as you scroll online, in fact scrollytelling is a combination of the words storytelling and scrolling. It is a fairly new form of journalism, born from the age of technology and as shown above has both benefits and limitations to its use.
To truly reflect on the pluses and minuses of scrollytelling I have analysed some case studies, these are truly classic examples of scrollytelling and give us real insight into the usefulness of this technology as journalists.
Using the case studies of the scrollytelling stories How Artists Get Paid From Streaming and Why Infectious Bacteria Are Winning we can see both sides of scrollytelling.
First let’s look at the scrollytelling story, ‘How Artists Get Paid From Streaming’, a great example of what a journalist can do with the scrollytelling format. The story begins with a brief introduction, telling the reader that how artists get paid by streaming services is at times more complicated than we know and then going into a breakdown of how the payments all work. Scrolling through you are led from point to point as the story unfolds, with easy-to-read explanations coupled with explanatory animations aiding the reader’s understanding.
The complexity of the longform story is complemented by the scrollytelling style which takes a heavy topic and breaks it down in an engaging and easy to digest manner. It also does a good job of representing data visually and in a way that adds to the story and isn’t distracting.
In contrast to this, we have the case study of the scrollytelling story ‘Why Infectious Bacteria Are Winning’. The multimedia article attempts to break down the reasons why bacteria are beating antibiotics to the general reader by including similar short points as the streaming story with data infographics, however unlike with the streaming story the delivery of the scrollytelling is lacking and at times simply confusing.
The biggest drawback of the piece is the fact that the short paragraphs of text slide across the graphics as you scroll and makes it hard to see both text and the data being shown. This can be a limitation of scrollytelling, the media elements clash or distract from the story and instead of aiding make the story difficult to read.
So although there are limitations to scrollytelling, in my experience, a well-executed scrollytelling story can engage the reader and add depth or simplify a story, making it a useful format for the modern journalist.
(Featured image: Sincerely Media)
