#newsbound

Meet Stacker: a new digital medium for creating journalism that incorporates eye-catching visuals with mobile-friendly design.

Stories made with Stacker, or “stacks,” allow the reader to move at his or her own pace and drive more interaction and engagement. Stacker reports that 60 to 70 percent of readers actually complete stories between 600 and 800 words in length, because they weave animation, photos and interactive features into the narrative. You can embed your stacks anywhere, and update them at any time, all without needing a developer.

Several news outlets have already begun to use Stacker as a storytelling platform. Stacks have been embedded on sites like The New York Times, The Washington Post, Upworthy, The Atlantic and more. Want to see how it works? Here are just a few examples:

The Commonwealth Fund’s “Thinking Outside the Mailbox”

On the island of Jersey, in the English Channel, residents’ daily mail deliveries are unlike anywhere else in the world. The Commonwealth Fund’s stack covers The Jersey Post’s eldercare program, which delivers healthcare and the mail to frail, elderly residents. Postal workers check in on the elderly, deliver their medications and give them reminders of upcoming appointments. The stack appears in a brightly-colored comic book format, allowing readers to see just how the program works in action.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s “How Empowered Women Change the World”

“How Empowered Women Change the World” is a look at how advances in women’s reproductive rights over the course of the 20th century have led to societal advances on a broader scale. The stack gives an overview of how improved contraception access allows women to become more educated, pursuing careers and helping the economy grow. Using graphs and other visuals, the stack brings this concept to life.

Newsbound’s “Get to Know Your Aquifier”

Newsbound, the company that created the Stacker platform, created “Get to Know Your Aquifier” as an explainer on aquifiers, which are large deposits of groundwater found deep below the surface. As humans have increasingly tapped these aquifiers for drinking water and irrigation water, they’ve begun to dry up -- and climate change is only making the problem worse. By using simple language and easy-to-interpret visuals, Newsbound’s stack helped demystify aquifiers for general audiences.

It’s free to sign up for a Stacker account and start creating stacks, but you’ll need to pay a monthly fee if you intend to publish your stacks. Currently, Stacker is available to use by invite only. To request an invite, enter your email address at stacker.cc.

-Sam, IJNet social media and editorial intern

Our Director of Content Strategy Frank Marquardt recently helped organize a SF Bay Area Content Strategy Meetup panel on emerging approaches to covering the news.

Check out his write-up on the organizations that are re-imagining news delivery in the Internet Age.

--------------

While many have mourned the contraction that’s been going on within newspapers, others celebrate the innovation taking place. 

Shifting consumer behaviors are forcing news organizations to rethink how the news gets delivered. Emerging technologies offer new ways to tell stories. And the competition for people’s attention is forcing news organizations to devise new, creative and more compelling storytelling formats. 

At “Re-making the News,” a panel hosted by the San Francisco Bay Area Content Strategy Meetup, panelists from Mother Jones, Circa and Newsbound shared how their organizations are responding to emerging consumer behaviors and new technological tools for delivering news. 

Circa, a mobile app, atomizes a news story into essential points, such as quotes, facts and photographs, in order to make it easy to follow and track stories on mobile devices. 

Newsbound creates visual, presentation-like "explainers" that offer a deeper exploration of complex topics like filibusters and the Mars Curiosity rover. 

Mother Jones uses a variety of interactive tools to provide context for news stories. Its interactive map of the dark money universe and guide to mass shootings in America are experiences that can be acutely topical, because they detail problems that (unfortunately) aren't going away anytime soon.

They have also created code that other news organizations can use to build content, such as a “choose your own adventure” plugin for interactive storytelling. Mother Jones uses this code for the excellent news quiz “Think You Can Beat the Immigration Maze”? 

At the core of each of these organizations is an effort to understand effective, appropriate and meaningful news formats and delivery mechanisms for today’s news consumer. Using the multiple channels and technologies available, these innovative formats foreshadow continued investigation into communicating the news in richer, more engaging ways. 

I remember coming across Newsbound many months ago through a job posting. I can't remember what they were looking for but it sounded cool. I didn't apply. I seem to recall something like "Explainer and Chief."

Anyway, the whole thing was to take complex issues and boil it down to a level of understanding... but not skimping. The tag line on the site right now is "Slow down the news, stay up to speed." Pretty clever.

So they create these "explainers". And they do a good job explaining. I went through the one on the "fiscal cliff" last night. You get it. I like it. It's short snippets, you click an arrow, you get a new snippet or a new slide. The graphics are all right (better than I could do). And as far as information goes, I feel satisfied. They explained it.

What I wish, though, was a level of interactive-ness or another dimension to it. Maybe they planned it this way but, really, I feel like I'm watching a power point presentation that is just a little bit more "edgy" than your run of the mill power point presentation.

But maybe throwing that in would be a distraction? This way, maybe, it stays focused and slow. Maybe I like it this way. Wait, I think I do. No, I do. I do.

Text below the explainer (which you can see on the page itself) takes you a little deeper with supplement articles. Again, it's all very 2D and slow (which is NOT a bad thing when the info is good ... and it is).

A very cool visual "explainer" by Newsbound breaks down the structure, problems, and solutions to the archaic electoral college:

Most Americans know that the president is elected through the Electoral College rather than through a nationwide popular vote. But what is the College, exactly? What does it mean for our democracy? And are there any alternatives? Our latest explainer breaks it all down. This one is adapted from Victoria Bassetti’s new book Electoral Dysfunction: A Survival Manual for American Voters (The New Press, 2012)...