{"id":2258,"date":"2016-09-17T11:34:53","date_gmt":"2016-09-17T17:34:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/journalists-org-develop.go-vip.co\/newsroom\/newsroom16\/?p=765"},"modified":"2021-06-22T18:35:49","modified_gmt":"2021-06-22T22:35:49","slug":"getting-personal-with-interactive-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journalists-org-develop.go-vip.co\/newsroom\/2016\/09\/17\/getting-personal-with-interactive-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting personal with interactive news"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cHow would\u00a0this affect you?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat would you do if you were in this person’s shoes?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

These are the type of questions journalists who create news interactives want audiences to answer. They design sequences of questions or prompts that ask\u00a0audiences\u00a0to make virtual choices they may never have to in real life.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we\u2019re trying to do is trying to make it personal,\u201d Jere Hester<\/a>, Director of News and Products and Projects at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, said. \u201cThis issue and all these numbers\u2026where do I fit into them?\u201d<\/p>\n

Hester and CUNY J-School Director of Interactive Journalism Sandeep Junnarkar<\/a> worked with a team of students and New York Times investigative reporter Andrew W. Lehren to look at how money for Syrian refugees was being used. After a semester writing three pieces on the topic, Hester said they asked themselves how to actually get people to experience what the Syrian refugees are going through.<\/p>\n

The result is a Q&A interactive titled \u201cLiving Like a Refugee.\u201d<\/a> Readers are guided through prompts such as\u00a0\u201cHow many members in your family, including yourself?\u201d, \u201cDo you have family already in the States?\u201d and \u201cDo you speak English?\u201d \u00a0Junnarkar explained that \u201cLiving Like a Refugee\u201d was not based on any one person\u2019s story, but from several interviews, facts and figures that the team found\u00a0so that the\u00a0final product represented the refugee\u00a0experience.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were very careful in terms of\u2026keeping these to decisions that people had told us that they needed to make,\u201d Junnarkar said, \u201cas well as getting some in there that were fairly logical things that we know in terms of housing and transportation and things you would expect.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kristen Lee<\/a>, director of digital editorial operations\u00a0at the New York Daily News, had a different approach to interactive news. Lee contributed to an interactive map titled \u201cHow Safe is Your Child\u2019s Day Care,\u201d<\/a> which allows users to look up specific day care centers to see if they violated any safety regulations. She explained that because day care centers could either be registered with the city or the state, there was no clear-cut path for parents to find the center\u2019s safety records.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor the first time, the parents have a kind of one-stop shop to be able to go in and easily find safety information about their child\u2019s daycare,\u201d Lee said.<\/p>\n

News interactives like these have had an impact. Lee said the primary goal of “How Safe is Your Child’s Day Care” was to nudge city and state agencies to provide this kind of service themselves. She believes progress has been made, but said there\u2019s much left to do.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think that we at least made the government see that there is a need for it and that it should happen,\u201d Lee said. \u201cSo we are going to update it\u2026because we want to keep prodding them.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for \u201cLiving Like a Refugee,\u201d Hester said they received feedback from a number of people including journalists, friends and the people they wrote about who said that the interactive truly summed up what they were going through. They received good feedback from the federal government as well, he added.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe gist of the investigative part of the story was maybe they weren\u2019t making the greatest decision in terms of the nonprofits they\u2019re picking,\u201d Hester said. \u201cBut I was very happy and surprised they played ball with us on this one.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cHow would\u00a0this affect you?\u201d \u201cWhat would you do if you were in this person’s shoes?\u201d These are the type of questions journalists who create news interactives want audiences to answer.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10525,"featured_media":2415,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[480],"tags":[1267],"powerkit_post_featured":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2258","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-conference","8":"tag-ona16"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/journalists-org-develop.go-vip.co\/newsroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2016\/09\/Screen-Shot-2016-09-16-at-9.47.34-PM-2.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pd5Q1c-Aq","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journalists-org-develop.go-vip.co\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journalists-org-develop.go-vip.co\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journalists-org-develop.go-vip.co\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journalists-org-develop.go-vip.co\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10525"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journalists-org-develop.go-vip.co\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2258"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journalists-org-develop.go-vip.co\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2258\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4316,"href":"https:\/\/journalists-org-develop.go-vip.co\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2258\/revisions\/4316"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journalists-org-develop.go-vip.co\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2415"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journalists-org-develop.go-vip.co\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journalists-org-develop.go-vip.co\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journalists-org-develop.go-vip.co\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2258"},{"taxonomy":"powerkit_post_featured","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journalists-org-develop.go-vip.co\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/powerkit_post_featured?post=2258"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journalists-org-develop.go-vip.co\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=2258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}