• What structure do interactives teams take, and what role and purpose do they serve in the modern newsroom?
• How are news interactives ideas selected?
• What creative processes are involved in the selection and treatment of news interactives?
• What values inform the creation of news interactives?
• Where does the audience factor within this creative process?
• What distinguishes “good” from “bad” interactives?
This research is informed by three strands of scholarship: organisational studies of the newsroom, interactive online journalism studies, and a composite overview of best practice in interaction design and data visualisation (outlined in the Methodology section).
Definitions
The term “interactives” is used throughout this study to describe news outputs in the sense set out by Nichani and Rajamanickam (2003): the purpose (or function) of these digital products is to facilitate explanation through interaction. The term is appended with “news” simply to delineate the source of origination—“news interactives” are created within the news industry, in a context of news production. It is acknowledged, however, that this is definition is coming under increasing pressure: for example, the “Hacks and Hackers” social events, established in Massachusetts in 2009, and the Data Journalism Handbook (Gray, Chambers, and Bounegru 2012) have problematised what it means to create interactive news, and what it means to be a journalist in this field.
Organisational Studies of the Newsroom
Journalists, it has long been argued, develop “inferential frameworks” (Lang and
Lang 1955), predicated on prevailing socio-cultural norms and developed through the
course of experience in employment, which in turn informs the process of story selection, and the assembly and “angle” of news. But as Schudson (1997) points out, this conception of the journalist tends to leave the information of which news is com- posed “sociologically untouched”; as if it comes pre-prepared, rather than being subject to the process of negotiation.
Some scholars have observed that conflict has a normalising influence on the production of news by journalists (Bantz 1997). Conflict and the competitive effective- ness of a specialism can set the status of some professionals in the newsroom. Tunstall (1971) showed that TV news and current affairs producers have significant autonomy, and that autonomy is granted as a result of a valued specialism.
Many early sociological studies of news work converge around the importance of the deadline as an organisational norm, and a determining factor in how news is “manufactured”, a theme which dominated the field studies of the 1970s and 1980s; (Tunstall 1971; Epstein 1973; Golding and Elliott 1979; Schlesinger 1987). But where space is boundless, and where deadlines are not constrained within a fixed publica- tion schedule, such issues cannot continue to be considered to direct our under- standing of the inclusion and/or prioritisation of certain stories in news production (Franklin 1997).
Influenced by scholarship in the sociology of work, several studies by Lowrey (1999, 2002a, 2002b, 2003) explore how the news we receive is shaped by the con- flicting norms held by competing sub-groups within the fluid setting of the news room. Lowrey found that the demands of organisational need are not the only deter- mining factors at play in news production; professional norms and values are impor- tant too, particularly where professionals from a range of backgrounds come together to produce the news. Lowrey’s approach allows us to move beyond the management structures and ideological norms that shape behaviour, to see the autonomy exerted by individuals over the news we consume. But this approach is premised on a binary conflict between “word” and “picture” people from a pre- converged era. For the exemplar in the present study, we must consider the “data person”, and alternatively the statistician (or data journalist), the data visualisation expert (or graphic designer), and the computer programmer, all of whom may have their own pre-conceptions of what constitutes newsworthiness in data, and all of whom may exercise some degree of influence on the interactive graphics produced in today’s news online. For this reason, in addition to establishing the role and functioning of interactive teams in the contemporary newsroom, the author also seeks to identify the extent to which “interactive norms” exist within these profes- sions, such as whether there is:
• a common rationale to justify the creation of interactives;
• routinisation of work processes (that may speak to organisational norms in this field);
• consistency in approaches to best practice in data visualisation (such as a common position on the “chartjunk” debate in the literature); and
• consistency in approaches to best practice in human–computer interaction (such as a common position on the significance of user-centredness, and the factoring of emotion into interaction design).
The Rise of Interactive Online Journalism Studies
Interactive online journalism has its own field study literature, which in turn draws upon the organisational journalism studies literature of the past (Boczkowski 2004; Bruns 2005). However, interactive visual journalism has more often been researched from an “outputs” perspective, which tells us little about the decision-making that goes into this field of news production. Schroeder’s (2004) survey of interactive infographics shows that the UK media lagged behind their European counterparts in this field, over the last decade. Similarly, Quandt (2008) pulled together the dominant themes in late
1990s literature on the formal and structural properties of news content online, to show that online media had an over-reliance on “shovel ware” from print.
In the middle of the last decade, the rise of the network brought a new utopian- ism to journalism studies literature, bound up with the notion that “the profession would have to articulate an equilibrium between its operati