Kevin and I are working on a project called FOLD, which borrows the accordion metaphor for understanding the news that Ethan described last class, and tries to anticipate the reader’s contextual needs.
FOLD allows you to expand and contract elements of a story (to get more or less detail), and associates a context bar to each section of the story. A context bar can include many elements, including historical background, maps, photographs, citizen media, videos, or technical descriptions.
From observing many people consume news, we recognize that readers spend significant time acquiring contextual information in additional browser tabs, taking their attention away from the story at hand. FOLD offers journalists a way to provide readers with a curated “tangent.”
We decided to use the FOLD prototype to create an explainer of the current situation in Ukraine and Crimea. We chose this story because historical context is very important for understanding the political, economic, and social dynamics at play in the region.
The FOLD prototype is live at fold.meteor.com (works best in Chrome for now).
This is so cool! Circa + (optional) context. I’ve been thinking a lot about how the principles of transmedia storytelling can be applied to journalism, in particular the axes of spreadability/drillability. News apps are one way to do this — you show the overall or outlying/interesting takeaways by default as the “spreadable” piece, but you also provide an option for the reader to drill deep and explore content relevant to them (e.g. geographically). At ProPublica, this was called the “far” and the “near.”
FOLD is another approach in including both spreadable/drillable elements in reporting, but for a different kind of story (i.e. where a large data set to provide the near view may not be present). You have the general story broken down and distilled to its most basic parts (the spreadable part — even better if you could implement some way of sharing/embedding that primary column easily), then you have the tangential context that readers can (optionally) drill deep into if they so desire. Very cool piece, looking forward to the final product!
I really love this project, it’s definitely a great way to explain a story in one place instead of linking to other pages or overwhelming the reader with a lot of graphics. One thing this project reminded me of is what Tactical Tech did with Exposing the Invisible (https://exposingtheinvisible.org/stories/unseen-war/sadaf/). They have a subtle way of including relevant information to the story as the user is scrolling down the site.