This course will expose you to a suite of tools and methods employed in contemporary reporting, editing, design and delivery. It will also introduce you to the collaborative design process, with which we will ideate, prototype, test and iterate your projects. While this course will introduce you to the emerging applications, technology and ideas of digital storytelling and design thinking, its bedrock is journalism: accurate reporting and ethical storytelling in the public interest, which you will be expected to demonstrate in every assignment.
We will touch on many areas – community engagement, digital publishing analytics, new media business models – but devote the most time to exploring the tools and methods of data visualization, social media publishing and digital storytelling using the collaborative design process. We will put those concepts and tools into practice first through individual assignments and later through large projects completed in groups.
Tuesdays 11:45 - 1:25 pm in Holmes 163.
Thursdays 2:50 - 4:30 pm in Holmes 157.
We will learn to produce compelling stories across an array of digital platforms using cutting edge tools and by employing the collaborative design process. Upon completion of this course you will:
Have a critical perspective on visual, networked and data-driven journalism.
Be able to employ the collaborative design process to tackle publishing projects both critically and creatively.
Tell accurately reported stories through multiple digital avenues, and have the confidence to learn new techniques and skills as the digital news ecosystem continues to evolve.
Learn to gather and analyze data from industry partners before curating and disseminating insights in return through a client-consultant model.
Use social media tools to engage and develop audiences while understanding the dynamics of social networks for newsgathering, engagement and dissemination.
Like any newsroom, we will have a mosaic of different desks covering different beats: say, science and technology, criminal and social justice, media and politics, culture and entertainment. Your desk will hold weekly editorial meetings and adhere to strict deadlines – for your editor’s and classmates’ sake. Your desk’s beat will be voted on and decided early in the semester. You will publish your reporting inside newsletters and, later, on social media. There will be no class blog. If your desk needs to build a website to house additional content, you can do so using a free service like Wordpress.com but you’re encouraged to drive all traffic to your newsletter. Articles that make sense for Northeastern School of Journalism verticals Storybench and The Docket will be pitched and published on a case-by-case basis.
Some assignments will be submitted as group work, others will completed on your own. For group work, your team will select and tackle stories that make sense for your desk and the themes within your beat. As teams, you will also hold one another accountable. Pitch each other; edit one another; push your colleagues. At the end of the semester, students will submit assessments - of your teammates’ dedication and contributions to the group projects - on or before Dec. 5.
Most weeks, we will dedicate our Thursday class time to “lab” activities where we’ll introduce new tools and methods and tinker with them in teams, applying them to our beats and stories, and folding the most successful use cases into our group projects. Lab time will also be used to finalize and publish group assignments.
Our assignments will trace the case studies, discussions and tools we’ll explore in class, each assignment building upon the last. We’ll begin by 1) analyzing compelling examples of digital storytelling; 2) move to interviewing the makers behind those projects; 3) test out the tools and techniques used by industry leaders; and then 4) design, produce and deploy digital products – a series of newsletters and a social media project including an audit, a proposal and a campaign – using the tools and best practices we’ve learned.
Aleszu Bajak is a freelance science journalist who teaches journalism, design, data visualization and programming at Northeastern University. He is the editor of Storybench.org, an “under the hood” guide to digital storytelling from Northeastern’s School of Journalism, and LatinAmericanScience.org, a resource for science news and opinion out of Latin America. In 2016, he was a founding senior writer at Undark, a magazine exploring the intersection of science and society based at M.I.T.’s Knight Science Journalism Program. The year before, he launched and edited Esquire Classic, the digital archive of Esquire magazine. In 2013, Aleszu was awarded a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at M.I.T. where he explored the interface between journalists, designers and developers. Aleszu has been a freelance reporter in Latin America, a producer for the public radio show Science Friday, and once upon a time worked in the gene therapy department at Weill Cornell. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, the Boston Globe magazine, M.I.T. Technology Review, Esquire, Guernica, Science and Nature, among other outlets.
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.
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.
Sep. 7, Week 1
Sep. 12, 14, Week 2 Due Sep. 12: Show and Tell.
Sep. 26, 28, Week 4
Due Sep. 28: Storybench Q&A.
Oct. 3, 5, Week 5 Due Oct. 5: Newsletter #1.
Oct. 17, 19, Week 7 Due Oct. 19: Newsletter #2.
Oct. 24, 26, Week 8 Due Oct. 26: Social media audit.
Oct. 31, Nov. 2, Week 9
Nov. 7, 9, Week 10 Due Nov. 9: Newsletter #3.
Nov. 14, 16, Week 11 Due Nov. 16: Social media campaign design proposal.
Nov. 21, Week 12
Nov. 23, NO CLASS.
Nov. 28, 30, Week 13 Due Nov. 30: Social media campaign.
Dec. 5, Week 14, **Final presentations.
Themes: Introduction to the course. We’ll discuss assignments and expectations. We will unpack case studies of digital journalism and establish the language we’ll use over the course of the semester to analyze works of modern journalism.
Assignments for next week:
Due Sep. 12: Show and Tell.
Due Sep. 14: Pitch Aleszu the Storybench Q&A you’ll be doing: What project are you dissecting and whom are you interviewing?
Readings for next week:
Eric Newton,“A New Age of Communication,” Chapter One, Searchlights and Sunglasses, 2013.
John Wihbey,“Rethinking Viral: Why the Digital World Is Not as Democratic as We Think,” Pacific Standard, 2014.
Emily Bell, “Facebook is Eating the World,” Columbia Journalism Review, 2016.
Introduction to Design Thinking, Stanford D School
Due Sep. 12: Show and Tell presentations.
Due Sep. 14: Pitch Aleszu the Storybench Q&A in person.
Themes: We’ll take 5 minutes per presentation and then discuss journalism’s charge in 2017, including which tools and methods have evolved and which have held constant. We’ll look at case studies profiled on Storybench and explain the tools and techniques used. We’ll introduce a suite of tools we’ll be using next class and throughout the semester. We’ll meet break into groups and begin the design process for developing your desk’s beat, your audience and the product itself.
Lab: Digital Storytelling card game. In groups of two, you’ll shuffle, deal out, select and learn how to use at least two digital storytelling tools during class time. These include JuxtaposeJS, StoryMapJS, TimelineJS, IFTTT, Twine, SoundCiteJS, Polarr, Imgur, Google Cardboard Camera App, and PicGIFlite.
Assignments for next week:
Due Sep. 19: Find 2 sources each for your 3 story pitches. Pitch your group your first newsletter contribution. Send out emails to sources by end of the week.
Due Sep. 21: Before class: Draft of your Storybench Q&A. By end of class: A production plan and layout mockup for Newsletter #1.
Readings for next week:
Newsletters
Ann Friedman, “Email newsletter etiquette for journalists,” Columbia Journalism Review, 2013. Ann Friedman example newsletter. Archive here.
Liza Darwin and Casey Lewis, “The Problem With Email Newsletters,” Medium, 2016.
Tweetstorms
“How the Texas Tribune uses tweetstorms and other social media strategies to drive audience engagement,” Storybench, 2017.
Fighting hunger, Texas Tribune on Twitter, 2017.
David Uberti, “Recognizing American journalism’s finest tweetstorms,” Columbia Journalism Review, 2017.
Hot takes
John West, “How hot takes drowned out journalism and ruined our Facebook feeds,” Quartz, 2016.
Jacob Harper, “Brace Yourself for the Greatest Hot Take in the World,” McSweeney’s, 2016.
Blogging
Joseph Lichterman, “The Atlantic is returning to blogging,” Nieman Lab, 2016.
Due Sep. 26: Contact two more sources for your newsletter story if initial sources have not gotten back to you.
Due Sep. 28: Emailed to Aleszu before class: Storybench Q&A.
Themes: In groups we’ll brainstorm how reporting has changed over the last 30 years. We’ll discuss case studies in newsgathering using social media. We’ll discuss projects in data science, epidemiology, marketing and journalism that have mined data to gain insights and tell stories. We’ll discuss interesting analyses of social media published by journalists as well as issues with verification. We’ll introduce social media strategies at each point along the newsmaking continuum, from idea to pitch to publish, with an eye towards your social media campaign assignment. We’ll quickly touch on 360-degree photo and video, which groups are encouraged to use in their newsletter reporting.
Lab: We’ll use Twxplorer, Mentionmapp, Tweetdeck, and/or Hashtagify to explore social media platforms, find related hashtags and visualize influence networks. The goal is to find sources, influencers and readers with an interest in your beat. Groups will decide which client publication they will take on for their social media data audit assignment. Groups will start devising the first phase of the audit.
Assignments for next week:
Due Oct. 3: Email Aleszu a draft of your reporting for newsletter #1.
Due Oct. 5: Ship newsletter #1 by the end of lab.
Readings for next week:
“Interviewing Sources,” Nieman Reports, 2002.
Laura Helmuth, “Pitching Errors: How Not to Pitch,” The Open Notebook, 2012.
Miguel Paz, The Pitch, CUNY J-school, 2017.
Due Oct. 3: Email Aleszu a draft of your reported piece for newsletter #1.
Due Oct. 5: By the end of lab: Ship newsletter #1.
Themes: The art of the interview and considerations for digital storytelling, data gathering and dissemination. Email etiquette. The art of the pitch and examples of pitches across journalism. In-class exercise for finding sources and drafting up emails to potential sources for newsletter #2.
Lab: In groups, final tweaks to first newsletter and ship by end of class. Ideally, begin planning out coverage for newsletter #2.
Assignments for next week:
Due Oct. 10: Email sources and conduct interviews for newsletter #2.
Due Oct. 12: Pitch your groups your story for newsletter #2.
Readings for next week:
“Most shared articles on Facebook in 2011,” Facebook, 2011.
“What 120 Billion Facebook Impressions Can Tell Us,” Blitzlocal, 2012.
NPR, “An analysis of 3,000 Facebook posts,” 2015.
Trevor Eischen, “8 headline tips to draw readers on social media,” Poynter, 2017.
“How the Associated Press is experimenting with headlines and modular stories to win Facebook,” Storybench, 2017.
Due Oct. 17: Email Aleszu a draft of your reported piece for newsletter #2.
Due Oct. 19: Ship newsletter #2.
Themes: Come prepared to dig into data and find some stories. We’ll explore the basics of geospatial design and learn how to organize data for charts and graphs.
Lab: We’ll explore the content analytics data from our client publications to learn the finer points of Excel. We’ll finalize and ship newsletter #2.
Readings for next week:
“Our Favorite Pew Research Center Data Visualizations from 2014,” Pew Research Center, 2015.
“The 52 Best — And Weirdest — Charts We Made In 2016,” FiveThirtyEight, 2016.
Ross Crooks, “16 Captivating Data Visualization Examples,” HubSpot, 2015.
Mike Ananny and Kate Crawford, “Designer or journalist: Who shapes the news you read in your favorite apps?” Nieman Lab, 2014.
Jeremy Singer-Vine’s curated dataset collection: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wZhPLMCHKJvwOkP4juclhjFgqIY8fQFMemwKL2c64vk/htmlview?pli=1
Ana Swanson, “Six Maps that Will Make You Rethink the World,” Washington Post, 2016
Themes: Using Google maps, we’ll explore digital cartography and discuss best practices of information design. We’ll also be usingRaw for more ambitious, less mainstream visualizations. We’ll look at examples of maps, data GIFs, other visualizations in the wild. We’ll focus on* best practices, formats, platform, style, and tools.*
Assignments for next week:
Plan social media campaign. Delegate tasks.
Readings for next week:
Josh Stearns,“Journalism’s Theory of Change: From Community Engagement to Community Action,” Local News Lab, 2014.
Jennifer Brandel, “What We Mean When We Talk About ‘Engagement,’” Medium, 2016.
Nicole Froio, “New Community Tools: Hearken,” Coral Project, 2016.
ProPublica, “What’s Next For ProPublica’s Engagement Reporting Team,” 2017.
Bridget Peery and John Wihbey, “The story of ProPublica’s maternal mortality series and its structured call-out to the crowd,” Storybench, 2017.
Themes: We’ll discuss efforts in community engagement in journalism – like the 6,000 stories collected by ProPublica onAgent Orange – and audience development strategies. Guest speaker: Tory Starr, WGBH.
Assignments for next week:
Due Nov. 7: Draft of your piece for newsletter #3.
Due Nov. 9: Ship newsletter #3.
Due Nov. 7: Email Aleszu a draft of your reported piece for newsletter #3.
Due Nov. 9: Ship newsletter #3.
Assignments for next week:
Due. Nov. 16: Social media campaign design proposal.
Due Nov. 16: Social media campaign design proposal.
Due Nov. 30: Launch social media campaign on 30 and continue posting through the weekend.
Due Dec. 5: Final presentations.
The overall grades will be calculated as follows:
Show and Tell – 5%
Storybench Q&A – 10%
Newsletters – 30%
Social Media Project – 30%
Class participation, group participation, attendance – 25%
A (90-100) – Excellent work that met or exceeded the requirements. Writing reflects solid research, interviewing, accuracy, attribution, conforms to AP style; multimedia elements (video, photos, audio, interactive) are sharp, focused, clear, appropriately selected, properly captioned, tagged, credited and functional. Could run as is, or with very minor edits.
B (80-89) – Good work with a few errors. May contain minor problem with focus, spelling/grammar, style, balance, organization; several multimedia elements are sub-par (out of focus, poor sound quality, etc.) or exhibit one or two technical glitches. Could run with some editing.
C (65-79) – Average work. Failed to meet most of the requirements of the assignment. Shows lack of news judgment, accuracy, balance, etc., significant technical errors, sub-par multimedia elements, poor selection of interactive elements. Could only run with significant editing or a complete overhaul.
F – Work that shows no understanding of the requirements of the assignment.
Deadlines drive journalism. You need to meet them. If you need an extension, check in with me well ahead of time.
Be here each week, on time, ready to engage. Complete all reading and assignments on time with attention to detail. Exceed expectations. Assignments deserving of an “A” are those that could conceivably be published in an outlet like The Boston Globe with minimal editing.
Participate in class discussions. Stay up to date about issues and news related to online journalism and share that knowledge. Engage with your group and support your classmates.
Think ahead. Anticipate upcoming requirements such as the final project and structure your time so that you can do your best work. Get drafts to Aleszu early and often.
Always provide links to material cited – quotations, ideas, etc. – and attribute. Link back, be kind (and above all honest.)
Use photos, music and images from other sources only when they are clearly designated as public domain materials (appropriated from Creative Commons or public sites, such as .gov domains) and always clearly attribute. Get to know what the legal doctrine of “Fair Use” means for journalists.
Follow AP Style. Quick refresher:http://journalistsresource.org/skills/style/apstyle-basics
The School of Journalism requires that you attend at least 80 percent of all scheduled class meetings. If you miss 20 percent or more of scheduled classes, you may not be able to pass the course. Please make a commitment now to attend every class.
Northeastern University is committed to the principles of intellectual honesty and integrity. All members of the Northeastern community are expected to maintain complete honesty in all academic work, presenting only that which is their own work in tests and all other assignments. If you have any questions regarding proper attribution of the work of others, please contact me prior to submitting the work for evaluation. A personal note: The two capital offenses of journalism are fabrication and plagiarism. Commit either of these and you can expect to receive an “F” for the course, with possible referral to OSCCR.
If you have physical, psychiatric or learning disabilities that may require accommodations for this course, please meet with me after class or during conference hours to discuss what adaptations might be helpful to you. The Disability Resource Center, 20 Dodge Hall (x2675), can provide you with information and assistance. The university requires that you provide documentation of your disability to the DRC.
Social media campaign
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.
Extra credit
Interested in covering digital innovation in journalism? Pitch Aleszu additional stories for Storybench, Northeastern School of Journalism’s blog that covers the art and science of digital storytelling. Browse the tutorials and “behind the scenes” features for a sense of what we publish.