https://undark.org/article/air-pollution-lagos/
I looked at a multimedia piece on UNDARK (a new site to me), partnered with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. This story is under their Special Projects: Breathtaking, a series focusing on air pollution issues all over the world, including China, India, Nigeria and Bangladesh. This story has, to a degree, the “Snow Fall” treatment. The visual media guides you through the story and provides much needed slap you in the face photos to get the point across.
The opening photo fills the page, it’s grainy and dark, and powerful. A man tends to a burning pile of trash, surrounded by piles of trash as far as the frame can see, with black billowing smoke almost choking out the sky. This photo very quickly and effectively gets the point of the headline across. Obviously, we want to know more information, but it could be argued that this photo and headline tell a heck of a story. Many of the photos used as you scroll through the page are medium or wide shots. I think this really plays into the vastness of these burn areas, and the neighborhoods the toxic air is reaching. But when they do decide to use a detail shot it is done in a way to bring focus to an individual dealing with the harsh situation.
The written section starts by explaining just what is in this trash, in vivid
detail. They mix in scientific facts about the air quality with an anecdote about a young boy watching a goat being slaughtered and tossed onto the flaming pile. And that none of the workers wore protective gear. So even though they do not have visual media to match the anecdote, they tell it in a way that you can picture what happened. Next to these opening sentences is a world map infographic pinpointing the location of this part of the story in the series.
As you scroll down the page, through the story, there are clickable links that bring you to pages explaining some of the scientific things that a layman might not understand. These pages have tons of infographics and visuals to help get the point across. They also link to other news articles, I think this is because they are covering such a huge topic, it’s bound to have been written about before. So, they can link to this wealth of information which will save them having to add in unnecessarily detailed details. They link to other news organizations, but also to their own overall project, so that we can make those connections to the widespread issue.
Just one example of this is a link to the World Health Organization page, to help explain the correlation between air quality and health. This seems like a great way to be able to quickly explain something in the article, but also give people the choice to look more deeply into an idea/issue for deeper understanding if they so choose.
They are pretty good about taking a break from the block of text to show photos and short videos. This feels like a great way to zoom in and out of the story. They talk about the overall issues, and then zoom into the faces of actual people working and living in these areas. They also mixed in a beautiful short video, of drone shots, that show the area they are talking about. The camera’s point of view in these shots is very much motivated movement. It literally takes you over the burning landscape and through the clouds of smoke. It pans over a pretty large landscape and is cut together really smoothly. It almost feels a bit like a story without words. Then the video cuts in to the workers in these areas. And pans over the mounds and mounds of trash, through the black smoke. While drone footage can sometimes be overused, and feel disconnected, it works here because it puts you right in their shoes, no way out of it. This was a successful way to show a huge overview and to be able to move in and out of that space in a way that felt smooth and natural.
The visual storytellers seemed to have pretty intimate access to the people involved. This access is made even more clear when they also introduce a 360 video. It brought you smack dab in the middle of the villages that surround the burn areas, and into the heart of the burn areas themselves. As you look around in the 360 space different facts and information appear on the screen. It was an interesting feeling to have some control over moving around in that space. Lastly, they include a really great interactive chart. Tracked pollution data on any given day, that can also be broken into weeks and months to get a good overview. Everything in clickable and transformable, each dot has its own viewable data.
Having interactive media really keeps your attention and opens up the way you can tell a story, and the insane amount of information you can now provide to the viewer.