Yuliya Parshina-Kottas

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 Notebook

D3

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