Jeffrey Feddersen
This course is designed to provide an overview of visual storytelling in the newsroom. We will explore a variety of narrative formats and design principles, learn about reporting techniques for visual stories, touch on the best practices and ethics of journalism and get our hands dirty with collaborative weekly assignments.
COURSE OBJECTIVES
At the completion of this course, the students will:
Learn to become temporary experts on a subject and synthesize their knowledge into a visual story format
Learn to find an appropriate story and identify the best format for presenting it. Think critically about how the story format affects the narrative
Practice working in collaborative, interdisciplinary teams on breaking news deadlines
Become familiar with best practices and ethical considerations of visual journalism
Understand the power of information design as a tool of communication and persuasion
Week 1: Introduction
- What is visual journalism
- Working in a newsroom
- Ethics and best practices
- Becoming a temporary expert
- Approaches to research for a visual story
- Editorial versus opinion stories
Week 2: Explainers
- Tick-tock stories
- “:How something works”
- Design principles
- Time and motion
- Suggested skills
- Google Maps/Google Earth Studio
- Photoshop/Illustrator/AE
- 3D Editors
Week 3: Data
- 2D
- 3D
- Gathering data
- Data cleansing
- Ethics of data
- Data Wrapper
- Adobe
- Jupyter NotebookD3
- WebGL
Week 4: Geo-Spatial
- Maps
- Cities and landscapes
- Remote sensing (satellites, drones, etc.)
- My Maps (Google)
- Data Wrapper
- Google Earth Studio
- QGIS
- WebGL
Week 5: Photo, illustration, video and audio
- Lecture + examples, thinking beyond charts
- Creative use of video
- drones
- Photos in interactive storytelling
- Illustration and playful explainers
- Audio
Week 6: Emerging Technologies
- Immersive journalism
- Photogrammetry / Volumetric Video
- Drones
- Computer Vision
- Sketchfab
- Unity
- Spark AR
Week 7: Final project review