The New Age of Digital Storytelling
Jack O’Shea-Ayres
As a journalist working in the digital age, it’s important to keep up with the latest and greatest in immersive storytelling in order to keep readers engaged and entertained.
Scrollytelling is an interactive experience of journalistic storytelling, where text jumps into view, images materialise, and an abundance of media can be incorporated for readers’ leisure.
As the name suggests, and as J-Tech 2022 has taught me, scrollytelling attempts to create an immersive digital experience, best suited for long-form web editorials, interviews, online guides and travel stories.
The Pudding’s online scrollytelling article “Hola Y Bienvenido” is a perfect example of combining audio and visual content in a scrollytelling article that explores the lives of residents, as well as the sounds, and everyday happenings that make up Mexico City.
Source: https://pudding.cool/2022/09/cdmx/
The piece incorporates natural sounds taken straight from Mexico’s streets accompanied by soft and colourful illustrations, as well as a myriad of information on the daily lives of Mexico CIty’s residents.
It’s the attention-to-detail that makes The Pudding’s article so great; as the story progresses, the visuals and sounds progress, too. Readers can fully immerse themselves in the hearts and lives of Mexico City’s residents, and that’s exactly what the article sets out to do.
This NY Times article serves as another great example of vertical storytelling using scrollytelling.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/06/13/sports/worldcup/world-cup-balls.html
The story describes the history of soccer balls used in World cups over the years, using scrollytelling to initiate image loading as well as smooth, infographic style animations that show the construction of soccer balls and their changes over the years.
The article is a great piece for sports fans, and serves as a quick and interesting read for anyone scrolling through who wants to learn something new.
Not only does scrollytelling enhance digital storytelling across a range of topics, but it allows journalists to reach a broader audience and immerse them into a story in a way that may never have been experienced otherwise.
A story rich with graphics and interactive content that aims to please the viewer draws them in deeper, allowing them to fully immerse themselves in the exciting prospect of digital storytelling.
Scrollytelling is a glimpse into the future of journalism and digital storytelling, as well as what can be done with just a few simple resources at hand.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Scrollytelling
Pete Whelan
In the varied ecosystem of journalism, I would consider myself, primarily, to be a writer. It’s my safe place. Sure, I’ll pick up a camera if I need to, but before I started J-Tech, I was intimidated by the idea of assembling the kind of slick multimedia experience that the scrollytelling format demands.
In fact, the idea of doing any kind of graphic design just boggled my mind. My experiences with Photoshop and Illustrator could generously be called amateurish at best. But, as I have come to learn, in the gig-driven market that journalism has become in the digital age, one must become the proverbial jack-of-all-trades.
Fortunately, in creating this problem, the digital age solved it as well. Apps like Shorthand allow even a philistine like myself to craft professional looking scrollytelling pieces capable of deftly transforming a big chunk of Helvetica with a few hyperlinks into an immersive scrollytelling experience.
Beyond graphics, scrollytelling can allow a journalist to add soundscape, narration and video elements to a story, all by uploading data to a simple user interface and hitting publish.
There’s more going on than a bit of razzle-dazzle, though. Scrollytelling allows a single narrative thread to continue across different media elements without interruption. No clicking through to another page, no super-loud ads before a youtube video, no paywalls. No disconnect. As audience attention spans and content engagement times continue to dwindle, this is key.
Take a look at the article that started it all: John Branch’s Snowfall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek, published in the New York Times Magazine in December, 2012.
Source:https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/index.html#/?part=tunnel-creek
Branch’s piece, an extraordinary six-part feature about a devastating avalanche in Washington, won a Pulitzer and a Peabody for its transportative storytelling.
Branch’s writing was worthy of such high praise on its own merit, but nobody had ever seen a feature presented like this before. Blizzards raged in video backgrounds, infographics sprang to life, maps swirled and pulsed with data and statistics. Snowfall caused a stir in the design world and set a new bar for storytelling on the burgeoning digital landscape of 2012. Scrollytelling was born.
In the Atlantic Wire, Rebecca Greenfield wrote that Snowfall “integrates video, photos, and graphics in a way that makes multimedia feel natural and useful, not just tacked on.”
I experienced a ‘lightbulb’ moment when I read that quote, and the whole scrollytelling concept clicked into place for me. Its genius is allowing media elements to work in harmony to tell the same story, instead of competing for your attention.
Featured Image: JESSICA LEWIS CREATIVE
