Using design not as a layout but as a way of thinking can help reporters map complex issues
Reporting for a magazine or a newspaper used to be mostly about interviews, research and writing, but today's mobile journalists have to make more decisions, such as choosing the platform they want to publish their story on according to their target audience, and the format they think their followers would be most interested in.
In this article on the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN) website, Catherine D’Ignazio, assistant professor of civic media and data visualisation in the journalism department at Emerson College, explains how reporters could benefit from thinking like designers, and what methods they could borrow from this field.
For example thinking of individual news stories as systems means looking beyond the words to how the story travels across the internet, how people perceive it and what type of actions it generates, while experimentation and prototyping "permits learning, failure and dialogue with your audience along the way".
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