Hearst Newspapers in the United States is building products to make sure all its newsrooms have easy access to diverse and effective storytelling formats. 

The company’s DevHub team is creating top-to-bottom digital experiences and content strategies for their newsrooms across the country to utilise whenever they need them.

Danielle Rindler, director of visual storytelling and UX for the DevHub team at Hearst, explained during the recent INMA Newsroom Transformation Town Hall the team’s “click to publish” programme.

The programme includes a suite of more than 20 templates reporters editors and producers can use to independently create interactive and visually driven stories without the help of an engineer.

Hearst has its team of engineers build out the templates initially, but a newsroom’s daily publishing is not reliant on having something built by an engineer. They can use the templates on their own.

Not only is it practical, but Rindler believes this strategy is helping to get newsroom staff to think in these alternative formats by reducing the barrier to entry.

“When I say alternative formats, those are things like quizzes, maps, searchable, and fillable tables,” Rindler said.

And while some of the uses are more text-based, they’re still breaking the format of a traditional story.

Hearst also builds visual storytelling templates that are custom built tools, trackers, interactive databases, and graphics stories. They implement these for stories on things like air quality, fire perimeters, tracking overdose deaths in a particular area, weather and climate trends.

Rindler also shared what Hearst calls its spectrum of visual storytelling:

• Step 1: Thinking about how to explain a very numbers-heavy paragraph in a story by using graphic support that’s very reader friendly. 
• Step 2: Turn the format on its head and start with the visuals and alternative assets and write text around it.
• Step 3: Where the visual, interactive, or new format is the story. It can’t exist without that element, and there’s audio or text to support and add context only.

“I think it can also be a blueprint for how to start that transition into thinking in these alternative formats either for your newsroom or for an individual reporter or editor,” Rindler said. “Stories aren’t going to neatly fall into any of these buckets so that’s why it’s a spectrum.” 

Alternative formats for storytelling like this are an investment. One that Rindler and the team at Hearst believes is well worth it. 

“It takes an entirely different set of skills, a different way of thinking,” Rindler said. “It often takes just more people to pull it off so there’s more coordination.”

The payoff is that more of the audience is expecting to consume information differently. They want bite-sized and visual formats. A lot of that is due to social media, but audiences — especially younger ones — are more digitally savvy today.

“These younger people, who we really need to capture to stay relevant, can detect low production value pretty easily and our journalism is not low quality. It’s high quality that should have high-quality production,” Rindler said.

Meeting people where they are is the goal with this, and it’s an exciting time for this kind of work since there’s such potential for AI to repurpose the work into multiple formats. 

“Another reason to believe is these alternative formats are proving to be successful,” Rindler said. At Hearst, data shows that compared to standard formats, alternative formats are outperforming them in retention and converting subscribers. 

“At scale they see more than 300% more visits, nearly 500% more subscriber visits, and they are influencing people to subscribe at a much much higher rate,” Rindler said.

These formats are also designed to compliment existing stories and not replace a company’s entire strategy, she said: “It’s more about diversifying your toolkit rather than grabbing a completely new one.”

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