We have news here at Explainer.net. We’re announcing a new, expanded collaboration today, and it’s international in scope. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation will be working in parallel with NYU and ProPublica as we all try to advance the art and science of the journalistic explainer. The ABC will be doing its own explainers and experimenting with new tools as we do the same on our side of the world. The hope is that can we all learn more that way. The ABC will then share what it comes up with here at Explainer.net.
To keep transaction costs low, the American partners and the Australians will work independently, but on the same puzzles during the same time period: January through May, 2011.
The idea for this approach began in August, 2010 after Jay Rosen gave a presentation to the ABC staff on “the future of context.” Abigail Thomas, Head of Strategic Development for ABC Innovation and Sam Doust, Creative Director, said that they had been thinking along similar lines. Here is Sam Doust’s note, with some additional details.
Like many media organisations the ABC is interested in refining the art and practice of communicating context and explanation in online journalism, now more than ever. We hope that through Explainer.net we can share what we learn with a broader community.
Explanatory journalism can take many forms, from bullet-point lists of text to diagrams and timelines, to complex data visualisations. We’re specifically interested in understanding better what approaches are appropriate to which stories.
We’re also producing tool sets and editors to help journalists create explainers on their own. As an example, we’re just finishing an editor that publishes time-based, sequential information in dual formats: a card timeline, as seen here, as well as a depth-based “road” view of events as seen here. In this tool the same editor and information are used across both output formats.
As well as building tools for journalists, we’re pursuing stories to showcase different formats of explainers and will post at Explainer.net. analysis of our process and success with these.
As an example: One of the major issues in the last Australian election–some even say a decisive one–was the proposal to build a national broadband system. Doust said the ABC will probably experiment with how to clearly explain that project, which would affect virtually everyone in the country.
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