(5% of grade)
Due Sep. 12.
Read and analyze a longform digital storytelling project or interactive documentary – drawn from The New York Times’ 2015 and 2016 best-of lists, the 2016 Online Journalism Awards, the GEN Data Journalism Award 2017 nominees, or the IDFA’s “Interactive Canon,” or elsewhere – and be prepared to present the story or project briefly to the class. You may be asked to discuss what the project is, what the user is expected to do or learn, how you think it was reported and built, what it left out, and how successful it was. Be prepared to deconstruct the project for five minutes.
*Extra points for dissecting the strategy used to drive traffic to the story through social media.
(10% of grade)
Pitch due Sep. 14. Final due Sep. 28.
Produce a 700-word Q&A with the writer/producer/coder/creator of a recent piece of nonfiction digital storytelling, inside or outside of journalism. The idea with this assignment – which will be published on Storybench – is to browse various newspapers, magazines, websites and blogs in order to deepen your knowledge of the field, and familiarize yourself with the current state of the art and craft of digital storytelling. Identify a project you’d like to peek “under the hood” of, and contact the creator(s). Write up ten questions and then set up a 30-minute phone call, Skype call or Google Hangout. If you’re calling international, beware cell phone charges! At last resort and only after consulting with Aleszu, send seven to ten thoughtful questions over email.
As a model, use the Storybench Q&A’s found here, here, here and here. Questions tend to concentrate on: How the story was pitched, what tools or techniques were employed to create it, what advice the creator has for journalism students, etc. The Storybench Q&A will be graded on spelling, AP style, presence of embedded links, screenshots or other visuals, a thoughtful headline, a brief introduction that concisely explains and links to the piece you’re dissecting, the name of the creator (properly spelled) and their current title, and at least six questions and answers that start general, then go deep and finally pull back and provide general tips for people and students hoping to create similar projects.
Social media campaign
(30% of grade)
Due Oct. 26, Nov. 16 and Nov. 30.
After reviewing the empirical research into social media publishing and once we’ve dissected case studies of successful social media campaigns and compelling engagement strategies, groups will propose a multi-week project that 1) audits a 2-month slice of a news organization’s social media strategies, extracts and organizes associated analytics and engagement data, and culminates with a report on what social media strategies have been successful – and which have performed poorly – presented in class and to the client. The audit of, for instance, two months worth of ProPublica’scontent analytics alongside theirinnovative engagement strategies, will in turn inform 2) the development of a 3-page design proposal for a social media campaign using your own reporting that 3) your desk will launch mid-semester.
The audit
The audit report – due Oct. 26 – will be graded on comprehensiveness in how you collect, analyze and derive insights from the social media and content analytics you gather. We will choose one publisher – ProPublica, Science Friday, The Fader, Esquire or The New Haven Independent – and analyze a 2-month slice of their content analytics, generated through a service like Parse.ly or Google Analytics. In groups, you will decide how to organize and analyze the data and cross-reference it to social media posts to derive insights on the publication’s social media strategies. In terms of story themes, what is popular? What is unpopular? What stories within those themes tend to perform well? In terms of social media strategy, what works and what doesn’t work? What are the ingredients that go into a successful social media post or campaign? Do headline length, sentiment, punctuation, etc. seem to matter? Do hard or soft news stories perform better? Given metrics like pageviews, how many ways can you define “popular” to your client? Each group will prepare an audit report – with curated graphics produced in Google Sheets or another data visualization tool – that will be presented before the class and sent to the publication. Your audit report should roughly follow this template.
*Need more data? Think outside of the box. Search an article URL through Twitter’s search engine. Use services like SharedCount to inspect URL shares. Use services like IFTTT and Zapier to collect social media posts. If you have someone handy with code in your group, perhaps run a query on the Twitter and Facebook APIs.
The design proposal
The design proposal – due Nov. 16 – should explain what you plan to do as a group for your own social media campaign and why you expect your strategies will be successful. What assumptions are you testing? Your proposal should point to prior art and cite direct examples of projects that inspired your decisions. These examples can come from the audit report. What is the story (or stories) you’re disseminating with this campaign? The proposal should also explain what reporting, what data, what visuals and what other assets you’ll need to track down, organize, edit and prepare before launching the campaign. The proposal should also lay out exactly what content will be deployed when and how often. If you’re relying on crowdsourcing, polling, surveys, forms or any other engagement before – or while – your campaign runs, design those assets and explain when they will be deployed. Your desk’s campaign will tackle a story or series of stories put together by your desk along your beat. Make sure to delegate who is working on what and when that work is due. Groups are encouraged to point their campaigns back to their newsletters.
The campaign
The social media campaign – due Nov. 30 – must be tailored for at least two different social networks and be launched Dec 1. Make sure you’ve optimized all your visuals and assets for their corresponding social media platforms. Test them out with tools like Twitter’s card validator or Facebook’s sharing debugger. Link stories back to past – or new stories – from your Tinyletter newsletter archive.