CBS, by contrast, has been a model of consistency. For 60 years, the network has been identified by the distinctive “eye” logo that first hit the air on October 20, 1951.

It’s been derided on occasion as big-brother-ish and even creepy. But it’s certainly familiar to generations of TV viewers, few of whom may have any idea of its history. Where did the “eye” come from anyway?

The back story, narrated by CBS’s Charles Osgood, is fascinating, or at least it was to me. Who knew the logo’s history had anything to do with a hex sign? Here’s looking at you, CBS.

Used well, a graphic makes data more visually appealing and easier to understand.  Newspapers often do this well in print but when they post those static graphics online they fall short by failing to take advantage of the medium. What online gives you is the ability to make graphics interactive, letting users explore data not just look at it. You can use more information in an interactive graphic than you ever could in print or on the air, letting users dig deeper. And there’s one more bonus: users exploring interactive data will stay on your site longer.

The trouble, of course, is that many newsrooms don’t have enough staff to do all that needs to be done on the Web side on a daily basis, much less create interactive graphics to go with any given story. But guess what? They don’t have to. You can do it yourself, for free.

We’ve already shared tips on creating a simple interactive Google Map. Now, check out how to use the online tool Many Eyes to build additional types of interactive graphics:

On the hunt for some new examples, I searched a Twitter chat last week and found a boatload, along with some very helpful tweets from expert users. What to do with it all?

Enter Storify, a beta site that describes itself as a tool for telling stories using social media. I’d signed up for the service a few months ago but hadn’t tested it so I thought I’d give it a whirl. Read the Storify story through to the end for a few lessons learned.

Now about those lessons learned. Don’t try to use Storify to go back and find the tweets you want to include. Mark them as favorites and they’ll show up in the Storify interface. Much simpler!

Consider whether the story you’re going to tell really makes the best use of what Storify can do. This one probably doesn’t, consisting mostly of tweets and links.  It’s not as visually appealing as I would have liked.

That said, Storify makes it incredibly easy to share stories on Twitter and Facebook and to embed them on a website or blog. I’ll be keeping my eye out for other ways to use it. If you’ve tried it, let us know where to find your Storify stories.

For one thing, what used to be drudgery is now a snap. I can’t remember the formula for percentage change, for example, but I can calculate it in seconds with this online tool. It’s also much easier to get your hands on data than it used to be. Carry a thumb drive everywhere and you’ll find people willing to hand over data sets that might have taken months to get otherwise. And as Simon Rogers of the Guardian’s Datablog points out, some of the biggest stories lately have been based on data.

There’s nothing that makes journalists sit up and take notice like other people getting stories. I’m noticing lots of young reporters really taking an interest in this area now. Can you imagine a reporter not using the internet now? That’s what it’ll be like for reporters who can’t be bothered to learn to use a spreadsheet.

In an Q&A with the new Datajournalism blog, Rogers says you don’t need programming skills to work with data because there are so many free and simple tools available, like Many Eyes and Googledocs gadgets. But you do need computer skills and the ability to work with statistics. Rogers’ top five tips for working with data.

• Make it manageable. Break the data down into chunks you can use.
• Keep it simple. Ask simple questions of the data and try not to get too complicated.
• Mash it up. Some of the best data journalism is about joining datasets together you wouldn’t have thought of.
• Don’t be scared of the number – or trust it too willingly. Journalists are often terrified of numbers to the extent that they don’t question them properly.
• Try not to go native. Remember you’re a journalist and your mission is to explain the data and interrogate it properly.

I’d add one more: Get inspired. Search for great examples of data journalism, like those Rogers recommends at his paper, the New York Times and the Texas Tribune. Then see what you can do on your own using free tools like the ones I’ve written about at the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media.  Here’s a quick introduction to one of the simplest tools: Google Maps.

I’ll put more how-to videos up on my YouTube channel in the near future, so stay tuned. And in the meantime, dig in and make some data visual.

What’s different this time around? The new edition includes substantial revisions but retains the essentials: how to report, write and produce for multiple platforms. We have chapters on delivery, ethics and job seeking as well. There’s a ton of real-world examples and advice from professional journalists. New screen shots, images and examples are included throughout.

There’s also a new focus on the use of social media and mobile devices in gathering and disseminating news. Difficult to believe, but Twitter didn’t exist when we wrote the first edition. My how times have changed:

A majority of journalists today use social media to do their jobs—mainly to find stories, sources and information quickly and to monitor trends. Twitter, Facebook and other social media tools, once used primarily in breaking news situations, have become a central part of the daily newsgathering process. TV anchor Amy Wood says she gets “lots of tips on breaking news” via her social media sites. One of her Twitter followers told her a hostage crisis at a local bank had been resolved before the police announced it.

We’re hard at work on a new companion website that will be available for use with the book this fall. You’ll be able to buy access to the entire site or to individual modules. Each online module–linked to a chapter in the text–includes interactive exercises, tutorials, resources and examples of multimedia storytelling. The “Ongoing Story” module allows users to report a story from beginning to end, and write a TV package as well as a Web version.

No matter what edition of the text you have, updated chapter-by-chapter content will continue to be available on the Advancing the Story blog.

Sourced from: Advancing the Story

And that’s not the only problem with text-heavy graphics. On-screen fonts don’t convey the same credibility as an excerpt from a document itself. So consider these alternatives the next time you’re faced with a paper-heavy story.

Highlight the Paper

• Instead of calling graphics to make full-screens of excerpts, shoot the actual pages or computer screens, tight, to let the viewer see the specifics you are citing. Use highlights or lighting techniques to make the words stand out. One simple tactic is to shoot someone highlighting the words with a reference marker. Use a lipstick cam and shoot tight to make words pop off the page or screen.
• Capture and use natural sound as you move pages, flip through documents, or click through computer screens.
• Be sure the narration repeats the specific, highlighted words to reinforce their significance.
• Use the papers or computer screens as a narrative device–go back to them several times, if you are building a case that one person or organization keeps turning up in the documents.
• Have someone directly involved in the story read the documents aloud. This provides an opportunity for b-roll, and brings the documents to life, sometimes with emotion that would be inappropriate in a reporter track.
• If the volume of the documentation is part of the story, use it in a standup. For example, one reporter walked through the halls of the local jail unfurling a computer printout of DUI convicts who had never served their sentences. The sheer length of the list made the point that the city wasn’t holding violators accountable.
• Try an old-fashioned movie technique to illustrate timelines: shoot a calendar, or show dates on documents in close-up. Dissolve or flip through dates to show the passage of time.
• When you create full-screens, consider how font sizes and shapes can enhance the meaning of words. Experiment with different fonts to reflect the emphasis and tone of different voices, for example, in a court or hearing transcript.

Hide the Paper

• Find a way to “put a face” on what is in the documents. Medical records from a state mental hospital will pack more power if you quote them over video or still photos of the people who were sterlized against their will.
• Look for analogies or metaphors that can help viewers see more clearly what the documents imply. For example, you could explain the results of a scientific study about how the number of healthy brain cells shrinks as you age by showing the difference between a forest in summer and in winter.
• Translate jargon from documents into everyday language. You may not want to highlight the documents if the language is so complex that it’s hard to understand.

ABC News Reporter John Hendren used cartoon drawings to explain how “toxic assets” at banks are like rotten apples at a fruit stand. The analogy helped to clarify the problem and explain the government’s plan to deal with it.

The approach may seem simplistic but it works, and it doesn’t take an army of graphic artists to produce. Common Craft, a two-person production house in Seattle, makes simple videos to explain everything from banking to technology:

“Sometimes the news media start explaining things too far into the subject,” says Common Craft founder Lee LeFever. “We start at A.”  LeFever writes a script first and “the images come out of the words.” Once the paper cut-outs are made, he shoots the video in chronological order and completes the edit in four to six hours. He’s so committed to explainers that he even produced a video to show how he does what he does:

Dan Roame, author of The Back of the Napkin, believes that any problem can be solved with a picture. Here’s his take on health care:

It would be wrong to blame September 11 alone for the crawls and tickers that have swallowed our television screens. The truth is the revolution really started last summer when CNN debuted its revamped Headline News format. What had been the network’s primary visuals–anchors, reporters and video–were squeezed into the upper right hand corner of the screen to make room for layer upon layer of text and graphic information.

CNN’s motive was simple: to draw desirable younger viewers known to the network as “time warriors,” who are believed to want more information more quickly. To generate what it calls “real news, real fast,” the network appointed a “data wrangler” to whip out fact boxes and graphics around the clock. The executive in charge of launching the new Headline News image, Mary Lynn Ryan, said in April that the redesign was based mainly on gut feelings and staff suggestions. “Believe it or not,” she said at a Radio-Television News Directors Association panel discussion, “no real audience research was done.”

Actually, that’s not hard to believe at all. Researchers say the Headline News format looks as if it were designed to make it harder for viewers to understand the main content of the news programs. “Viewers are comfortable with crowding,” says Paul Traudt of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, “if the elements are all related to the same topic.” But Headline News has “multiple, incongruent elements” like weather conditions, a stock ticker, sports scores and headlines unrelated to the main topic. Says Traudt, “The result can be information overload.”

That’s not merely theory. A new study at Kansas State University has found that the visual elements of the Headline News format take an enormous amount of effort to process. “The results are clearer than anything I’ve ever done before,” says K-State journalism professor Tom Grimes. Further research will test the obvious implication: that viewers who watch a heavily cluttered news program aren’t likely to understand or remember much of what they see or hear.

But that may not matter to Headline News and its cable cousins. Their top priority, it seems, is not to educate and inform but to draw eyeballs. And what they’re doing may work. “Anything that moves is most powerful,” Traudt says. “It grabs attention and overpowers everything else.”

In fact, the whole point may be to keep viewers wondering what they just missed so they’ll stay tuned rather than clicking away. “We try to be edgy,” Ryan says, “so people will go, ‘Huh? What’s that?’”

Viewers who are distracted or confused by what they’re watching aren’t likely to recall the details of the message being presented. That truth has not been lost on the people who write the checks that keep the news channels in business. Surely you’ve noticed that the tickers go away when the commercials come on.

In their desperation to attract viewers, the all-news channels have become blind to the unique power of the television medium to convey information and emotion with pictures. Television news should be all about telling stories. Pictures make news stories more realistic, researchers say, helping viewers to form more complete and accurate impressions of people and events. But the cable newscasts make no effort to present compelling stories. Instead, they’re engaged in a high-speed data dump.

Ryan, now managing editor at CNN, believes the Headline News format is user friendly, but she concedes, “We’ve had to adjust viewers’ ways of looking at the screen.” The channel has made some adjustments too. On its first anniversary, it dropped the confusing weather maps, and put scores and stock updates in a highlighted box. But the Headline News screen still mimics a newspaper, with the important information placed “above the fold.” The trouble is, you can’t fold your television set.

So here’s a simple suggestion: duct tape. Roll it out, stick it on, and cover up the lower part of the screen. Works like a charm. The only downside is that it makes you realize just how unwatchable the rest of the product really is.

This article was originally published by American Journalism Review, September 2002.

Working with Knight Ridder Tribune’s News in Motion, a company that produces animated graphics for television news subscribers, NewsLab created three different versions of seven stories. The original versions, produced by local stations and provided by News in Motion, used an animated graphic to illustrate a segment of the story.
For example, in a report on how to build a “tornado resistant” house, the animation shows the effects of a tornado’s winds on a regular house and a specially-constructed house.

NewsLab then created a second version of each story by replacing animated graphic sections with full-screen text graphics matching the audio track. The full-screen graphics in this version are bullet lists of the different effects of a tornado on a conventional house as opposed to a tornado-resistant house.

We also created a third version, replacing the graphic section entirely with B-roll video. The all-video version covers the graphic section of the “tornado resistant house” story using shots of tornado damage, including aerials and ground-level video.

The Institute for Communication Research at Indiana tested the stories by showing them to college students and adults ranging in age from 28 to 80. All subjects saw two stories using B-roll, two using text graphics and two using animated graphics. The specific stories and the order in which they were shown varied.

The researchers found that viewers who saw a version with graphics, whether animated or full screen, had an easier time processing the information in the stories than viewers who saw a version illustrated only with B-roll. But there was a key difference between the two different types of graphics. Full screen graphics did not hold viewers’ attention. In fact, attention as indicated by heart rate dropped off steadily the longer the text graphic stayed on the screen, but stories using animated graphics held viewers’ attention just as well as the B-roll versions.

In addition, the research found a significant difference between the effect of graphics in stories that the subjects rated as easy to understand and those that were considered more difficult. Viewers who saw difficult stories using animated graphics understood and remembered those stories significantly better than those who saw the same stories with text graphics. Difficult stories using text graphics were remembered better than stories with B-roll. In easy stories, graphics had virtually no effect on what younger viewers remembered, but the animated graphics did help older viewers recall what they’d seen.

For news producers, this study suggests that animated graphics offer a way to keep viewers watching and to help them remember stories better. In other words, animated graphics can help build ratings and better inform viewers. But the study raises a caution flag about the use of text graphics. While they can help viewers remember important information in difficult stories, they’re no good at holding viewers’ attention, so the gain may not be worth the risk of losing the audience.

1.Julia Fox is assistant professor of telecommunications at Indiana University. Her research interests are in media processes and effects.

2. This report is adapted from a paper presented at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication annual conference in Miami, Florida, August 2002.

Watch television news these days, especially on cable, and you’re likely to see more words than pictures. The graphic look pioneered by CNN Headline News years ago is now widely imitated. Jerry Seinfeld, for one, doesn’t like it. “Don’t these idiots who run the news networks understand?” he asks in his stand-up comedy routine. “I don’t want to read. That’s why I’m watching TV.”

Graphic overload isn’t just irritating, it’s also counterproductive. According to a new study, viewers who get their news in a graphic-heavy format wind up less informed than viewers who see the same news without all the graphic boxes, news headlines, sports scores, and weather reports.

To study the effect of the graphic-heavy format, NewsLab created newscasts featuring different versions of four stories. Version one was the CNN Headline News format as it appears on the air. In this version, the anchor and the video stories appeared on the upper right side of the screen, with a graphic box on the left side displaying facts related to the story, and another graphic layer at the bottom displaying unrelated information that changed every few seconds. Version two was electronically manipulated to remove all of those graphic layers, creating a full-screen of the anchor box. The stories were in different orders to control for any order effect. The stories were: the kidnapping of a Virginia girl; a report on an Al Qaeda terrorist training camp; a critique of New York City’s emergency response to 9/11; and the murders of Louisiana State University students.

Researchers at Kansas State University had undergraduates screen the newscasts. Half of them watched a newscast in the original CNN format, and half watched the manipulated “no graphics” version. Afterwards, the students answered 40 written questions to see how well they understood the basic facts and themes of each story.

The researchers ran the experiment twice, giving the two groups of participants different instructions. Both groups were told to expect a written comprehension test after the screening. But the first group was told to concentrate on the anchor portion of the newscast. The second group was just instructed to watch the program.

The results showed that participants who watched the original format remembered significantly fewer facts about the stories than participants who watched the manipulated version that eliminated the layers of graphics. This held true even when the participants were specifically told what to focus on.

Although the results were statistically significant, the researchers note that all participants in the experiment got more than half the questions right. Clogging the screen with graphics does not make it impossible for viewers to understand most of what they’re watching. But the study clearly shows that a newscast in which stories are surrounded by unrelated, changing graphics is harder to understand.

These results should be of great interest in television newsrooms because they indicate that newscast format affects how viewers understand the news. While this research tested only one specific format used by CNN Headline News, it has broad implications for television news in general. Other cable networks and many local stations have adopted similar practices, using headline tickers and text-filled graphics in their newscasts.

A cynic might suggest that newsrooms don’t much care whether viewers understand or remember what they see on the air, that what really matters is how many viewers tune in. Indeed, one could argue that the Headline News format—fast-paced and full of on-screen movement—is designed to draw “eyeballs” to the screen, because that’s what really counts. But journalists themselves say their primary purpose is to inform, and if viewers can’t understand the news they see on the air, then television journalists are failing to accomplish that purpose. This research sends a clear message: To make your newscasts easier to understand, go easy on the trappings.