These five stories showcase the creative use of technology and multimedia to provide our audience with the most accessible, concise and straightforward information necessary to be informed and civically engaged.
The Tribune’s district lookup page is a very reader-focused tool: we assume almost no one knows their state House, Senate or congressional district numbers, but everyone knows their address. It’s powered by an address-to-district conversion API that we previously used for election results pages. The lookup also has all of the demographic data that we analyzed earlier — in simple HTML charts, because not all geographic data needs to be mapped. The entire redistricting project required very careful planning and coordination across teams. Data reports, politics editors and reporters planned every part of this project, from the original analysis questions to the final presentation. Our audience team was invaluable for sharing the resource, and our engineering team helped debug the more technical aspects of the lookup page.
Our video on the first anniversary of the winter vortex that brought down the state’s electric grid with harsh temperatures, ice and wind, was fueled by a call-out form. Senior video editor Todd Wiseman and multimedia fellow Jacob Ohara and Ashley Miznazi stitched together a collective narrative of the event through the use of audio and photo. Through these mediums, our multimedia team was able to paint a picture of the damage the storm had dealt, physically and emotionally.
Texas Tribune designer and developer Mandi Cai produced an in-depth, data-driven look at abortion policies and procedures in Texas after a leaked draft ruling indicated that the U.S. Supreme Court intends to overturn Roe v. Wade. Cai made this information accessible and easy to read so that our audience could understand what was at stake. Included in this impressive display of online technology was a call-out form for our audience to share their experience. We use these social tools to fuel our reporting of everyday Texans and remain in touch with our audience and the issues Texans face.
As the Tribune often does during elections, Astudillo also recently published a page dedicated to delivering audience results to Texans in the wake of several run-off elections for both state and local officials. It is interactive so that our readers can share their address and receive personalized results by showing them all the races from the state down that would affect them. Readers can also click on interactive maps and receive results specific to any county in Texas.
The Uvalde school shooting timeline is a minute-by-minute breakdown of everything currently known about the day of the shooting and the events that led up to it. This is an incredible tool for Texans to use in the wake of mass confusion and ambiguous details from local and state officials. Ripe with maps, video, and photo, the timeline provides a concise and detailed chain of events to our readers. Reese Oxner reported, and senior data visuals developer Carla Astudillo provided graphics.
