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Explain Yourself: The Guardian’s Duncan Clark

by on April 11, 2011 in Interviews

Duncan ClarkAs part of our explainer research, the Studio 20 team at NYU has been examining the FAQ format — its capabilities and limitations as well as opportunities for innovation in explaining complicated subject matter. In our research, we found the Ultimate Climate Change FAQ on The Guardian’s web site which is notable for its innovative approach: crowd-sourcing the FAQ. Instead of The Guardian choosing which questions needed to be answered, the team behind the Ultimate Climate Change FAQ asked their own users exactly what questions they wanted answered.

We caught up with Duncan Clark, one of the supervisors of the project, to get his thoughts on the Climate Change FAQ, what makes a good FAQ in general, and the future of the genre. Continue Reading →

Explain yourself: Georgia Tech’s Bobby Schweizer on newsgames

by on March 30, 2011 in Features, Interviews

Bobby Schweizer is a researcher for Georgia Tech’s Newsgames Project, which is currently developing a newsgame authoring tool for local newsrooms, codenamed The Cartoonist, in conjunction with the University of California, Santa Cruz and the Knight Foundation. Schweizer is also the co-author of  Newsgames: Journalism at Play with Dr. Ian Bogost and Simon Ferrari. He chatted to Explainer.Net’s Niel Bekker about the challenge of making newsgames an accessible medium for regular journalists. Continue Reading →

Explain Yourself: 5 Questions with Nick Baumann

by on February 8, 2011 in Interviews

Nick Baumann‘s Egypt explainer for Mother Jones was one of the first effective explainers on the topic as news was breaking, and has become an indispensable resource both for finding the basic, entry-level information as well as following the daily developments in the ongoing strife. Prior to the Egypt conflict, he was responsible for a similar, but much shorter explainer on the Tunisian revolution. Over the weekend, we caught up with the extremely busy journalist via email to pick his brain on his excellent work and also his thoughts on explanation in journalism. Continue Reading →

Explain yourself: George Lakoff, cognitive linguist

by on January 31, 2011 in Interviews

As part of our research on explanatory journalism, we’re interviewing experts in fields outside journalism about their approaches to explaining complex systems to non-specialtists.

Our first expert is cognitive linguist George Lakoff, who did groundbreaking research on the embodiment of thought and language and the way people think using metaphors. For Lakoff, language is not a neutral system of communication, because it is always based on frames, conceptual metaphors, narratives, and emotions. Political thought and language is inherently moral and emotional. The basic phrases journalists use every day—words like “liberty” “freedom” “immigrant” “taxes”— are essentially contested concepts that have radically different meanings for different Americans. Continue Reading →

Explain yourself: Master Science Blogger Bora Zivkovic

by on January 21, 2011 in Interviews

In a field full of complex, technical issues, a whole bunch of jargon and an endless amount of context, scientists have a lot of explaining to do. More and more scientists and science writers are taking these explanations to the blogosphere. The number of science bloggers has grown so quickly in the past five years that a collection of blogging networks and aggregators have emerged to keep track of them all. An influential leader of the science blogging community – and certainly one of its most prolific – is a man called Bora Zivkovic.

“Blogfather Bora”, as some call him, is a scientist by training but a blog and Twitter enthusiast by nature. He is the editor of Scientific American’s blog network, as well as series editor of The Open Laboratory, an annual collection of the best writing from science blogs. For the past five years he has organized the ScienceOnline “unconference,” an intense three-day meet up where scientists, students, and writers share ideas about the changing world of science and the web.

Bora, still reeling from the excitement of the most recent ScienceOnline meeting held over the weekend, agreed to answer a few questions about science blogging and the art of explanation. Continue Reading →

Explain yourself: This American Life’s Alex Blumberg

by on January 13, 2011 in Interviews

Alex Blumberg

Photo taken from Transom.org

When we set out on the initial stages of the Building a Better Explainer project, we discussed how good explanatory journalism can energize readers and make them passionate about a subject. Our gold standard for explainers was “The Giant Pool of Money“, a podcast for This American Life that aired in 2008, as America was in the full grasp of the subprime mortgage crisis. The resulting mess was written about by so many journalists in ephemeral, ungrounded ways that didn’t allow most news consumers to grasp what and happened and why.  The episode features Alex Blumberg, a This American Life producer, and Adam Davidson, a business correspondent for NPR, and many voices of people involved in every aspect of the meltdown. The episode went on to gain massive praise, and garnered a Peabody Award.

Alex took time to answer our questions about explainers, and the best techniques for radio explanatory journalism. Here’s what we talked about. Continue Reading →

Discussion: Scott Lewis of Voice of San Diego

by on December 9, 2010 in Interviews

Voice of San Diego is a non-profit, investigative journalism-focused online publication aimed at informing citizens of the Californian city. They heavily rely on explanatory journalism to help users grasp the bigger concepts they cover; they’ve even teamed up with the city’s NBC affiliate to for a weekly explainer series.

CEO Scott Lewis dropped by the Studio 20 classroom this week to talk with us about what makes a good explainer, and share what his organization has learned from making the San Diego Explained video series.

Continue Reading →

Explain yourself: RSA Animate’s Abi Stephenson

by on December 4, 2010 in Interviews

If you haven’t encountered the series of animated video lectures known as RSA Animate, you’d be forgiven for questioning the combination of cartoons and intellectual discourse in online video. By bringing these improbable elements together, however, the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) has hit upon an irresistible formula for modern infotainment.

The RSA, which hosts public lectures by eminent thinkers as part of its broader mission to “develop and promote new ways of thinking about human fulfillment and social progress”, has been sharing these talks as podcasts and videos for some time. In late 2009, a collaboration with artist Andrew Park led to the first illustrated version of the lectures being produced as a video. The RSA Animate series, which was born from that first video, has gone on to attract millions of views on YouTube and generated considerable discussion in the short time since.

Abi Stephenson, Events Development Officer for the RSA, produces the series and agreed to speak to Explainer.Net about what she’s learned from the project. Continue Reading →

Explain Yourself: Tristan Harris, CEO and co-founder of Apture

by on November 30, 2010 in Interviews

There are few people more committed to explanatory content than Tristan Harris. In July 2007, he helped create Apture, an application that allows users to highlight any piece of text on a website to view contextual videos, search results, and Wikipedia entries, all without leaving the page. In March 2010, Harris joined Jay Rosen, Staci Kramer, and Matt Thompson to lead the South by Southwest panel, “The Future of Context,” that explored the importance of providing background to ongoing news stories.

We recently caught up with Tristan to discuss some of the best (and worst) explanatory practices. Continue Reading →