The discussion was about charts, graphs, visualizations and how they come together with journalism to create content that can be read in different ways. There was mostly positive feedback; people agreed that charts, graphs, etc are easy to create and can help readers understand complex issues or stories more easily. If these visuals are done well, readers can understand a story by simply looking at a chart; it may grab their attention where as an article without a visual would have been looked over.
The Gamification of news was said to come along with a risk of trivializing news; however, overall the gamification of news will engage and bring in an audience that might not have looked at your news story, or clicked on your site without having undergone that.
The next discussion topic was about social media curation tools such as Storify or Tweetizen. The general consensus seemed to be that social media curation was more useful for journalists than it is for readers. Readers don't necessarily want to read a bunch of tweets. Reading a story that may contain some tweets as references is good; but that would be up to the journalist to decide how many and where to insert tweets. Another thing to be careful of is the accountability of the tweets that you are sharing, retweeting, or publishing.
As always, the last discussion point for the chat was to...share a link! Free Visualization were immediately shared and I began to play around with them to find out how they could be used in journalism.
The first visualization tool I used was Bubbl.us. Bubbl.us was really easy to use and did not take a lot of time at all. I used the program to design a plan of action for a club I recently started at my school.
I think that this tool would be useful in making a web of connections in a complex story with multiple people are involved and interconnected. I also think that this tool could be used in a political piece where a leader is going to make a decision. A chart like this could lay out the possibilities and the directions that that leader may take. It only took me about 5 minutes to create this chart; it was easy and it is very clear to read.
The next thing I tried was a governmental kid's site that allows you to make graphs. This again was simple to use and did not take a lot of time at all. Yet, the visual is easy to read and can be key to helping a reader understand an article or situation.
Tools such as this could be useful when dealing with a story about budgets or money (for example: how much money was "double-dipped" by Timothy Matthews). It could also be used when measuring the amount of people that are involved in or being affected by something (maybe injuries from a fire for example).
Cacoo is a site that allows you to make all different kinds of charts, graphs, maps, etc. This is a preview of how it works:
Cacoo - Real-time Collaborative Diagramming & Design from Nulab Inc. on Vimeo.
In the process of trying out new tools, we got some good news at the Daily Freeman! Dipity is allowing the Daily Freeman to use its services for the website. Therefore, I updated the timeline that is following the scandal surrounding Timothy Matthews.
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