Challenges as digital journalists take on climate change
April 9th, 2010 | Published in blog, featured, writing
I just had a new article published at the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media on how the best digital storytellers are covering climate change online. Here’s a taste.
A 3-D spinning globe on the new website TakePart tells a compelling story about the tremendous impacts of climate change.
The graphic is part of an online feature explaining climate science. The globe, the centerpiece of the feature, can be spun with a click of your mouse. Moving the slider below whirls you through the years 1950-2050, as glaciers vanish, ice caps dwindle and portions of the Amazon turn to dust.
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The most important feature of the globe, said Doug Fitzsimmons, who led the TakePart team that created it, is to show that all is not lost. A second slider allows you to control the amount of carbon dioxide emitted: Notch emissions toward the best-case scenario and the pace of global change slows.
“The real goal of it is to show through some of the sliders – turning it into an interactive piece – that if we start working on this problem, we can actually help make things better,” Fitzsimmons said. “But if we don’t do things differently, we’re in for a pretty rocky period.”
A More Compelling Experience … ‘You Lean Into It’
Graphics such as the TakePart globe demonstrate the power of what Joe Weiss calls “lean-into” online experiences. Weiss is a multi-media expert best known for developing Soundslides, a tool used to combine images and sound. He said that in contrast to passive experiences such as watching television, interactive online media encourage audiences to participate.
“You lean into it. You engage,” he said.
