Page 91 - Convergent Journalism an Introduction Writing and Producing Across Media

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Converged Graphics Across

All Media

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We live in an increasingly visual culture. Television, the Internet,
even newspapers and magazines are loaded with visual messages meant
to enhance or advance journalistic storytelling. This chapter explores
the ways media, such as print, broadcast, and online, use informa-
tion graphics as a primary storytelling method and also discusses how
convergent partnerships across media platforms can benefit from the
integration of information graphics into important news coverage.
For more than 20 years, newspapers and magazines have been work-
ing to perfect the art of information graphics reporting, a craft that
combines art with journalism, aesthetics, and information. Graph-
ics reporters began to emerge in print newsrooms in the early 1980s.
Newspapers took advantage of this revolution and increased the num-
ber of charts, diagrams, maps, and other visually driven story packages
to help time-starved readers absorb information more quickly. These
days, we have more options from which to obtain information than ever
before, and the field of information graphics reporting is expanding to
influence how information is presented in online and broadcast. So,
while the development of the graphics reporter is generally derived
from newspapers and other print publications, the skill set is begin-
ning to translate to other mechanisms for delivering information.