Freelance journalist launches 'interactive stories' initiative

A freelance journalist has launched a service that will see him create photo-led "interactive stories" for news outlets.

Benji Lanyado, who created the Reddit Edit, a site which simplifies Reddit serving as a "feature generator" for journalists, has created a template that he can "build on top of" to make custom-made visual interactives.

His site shows samples of the interactives, which take between one and four days to create.

Lanyado, who has been developing his coding skills, said that he is "in awe" of Boston Globe's 'big picture' and thinks "the next level is to make images interactive".

He admires news outlets which create bespoke article templates, such as for this Verge article about cybernetics and this Pitchfork feature on a Bat for Lashes release.

"Around 99 per cent of news articles are the image with copy format," he said, adding that "articles can be playgrounds for design".

The visual interactives can be "hard-baked" into a news site "or embedded like a YouTube video", Lanyado said.

He added that this solution offers news outlets (and brands) a "simple and cheap way to do compelling and original content around images".

Benji Lanyado will be speaking about the Reddit Edit as part of the lightening round at news:rewired, Journalism.co.uk's digital journalism conference which takes place on 6 December. See this link for agenda and tickets.

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