7 / Insights from the Guardian's Visuals and our new mission statement.

Understanding the mechanics of powerful storytelling on the web.

Jan 31, 2023

Welcome to the 7th issue of our newsletter!

We have important updates and insights to share today. After a series of enlightening interviews the Buried Signals mission statement has been refined to focus on a few common challenges in visual storytelling.

First we aim to limit assumptions by looking at patterns and understanding the mechanics of powerful storytelling on the web. Time spent will be a metric that we communicate publicly whenever it is made available to us.

The insights we collect from interviews and the testing of resources will be consolidated into guides that focus on simple but impactful visualization, reducing the technical obstacles to publishing. Our goal is to help independent journalists and creators build impactful visual narratives with local relevance.

Finally, Buried Signals will also be storing a permanent archive of all the articles and experiences we curate on the publication - our hope is to create a library of innovation in visual storytelling.

Today I have another exceptional update to share with you.

Nuanced Studio

Today we opened Nuanced, a film and design studio specializing in information visualization.

The learnings amassed with Buried Signals will be leveraged to improve our own productions, with a portion of our profits reinvested into publishing stories that we strongly believe deserve to be communicated.

In 2023 we’ll be producing two visual investigations :

an exploratory documentary on malnutrition and natural hygiene

an explanatory experience on psychedelics research, history and treatments

If you have an idea or a need, reach out to us!

Visual Spotlight

This week we're rewarding the incredible work done by Pablo Robles on his visual journey into the causes of “text neck". A beautiful read which exemplifies his immersion into the stories he produces.

Pablo was kind enough to share more details about his process and approach to visual storytelling in our latest interview, which will be published on Buried Signals next week.

Insights

Last week I interviewed Theresa Malone, the Guardian's Head of Visuals to discuss best practices for visual storytelling, from creative and operational standpoints.

We distilled success patterns from some of her team's most successful stories, such as the visual investigation into the Champions League final.

The story was relatable and popular, it presented new evidence and all of the conditions existed for us to use design and interaction meaningfully.

A common thread across these stories was the relatability of the data itself, and the team's ability to use visuals and interaction to humanise a story in order to increase its relatability.

We've had success with personalization, but it really depends on the relatability of the data set and of the project itself.

You can read the full interview here to learn more from the Guardian's visual team's insights over the last decade!

This month the Reuters Institute released its annual trend predictions for journalism report, excerpt from the research below:

Extraordinary advances in artificial intelligence (AI) in 2022 have laid bare more immediate opportunities – and challenges – for journalism. AI offers the chance for publishers (finally) to deliver more personal information and formats, to help deal with channel fragmentation and information overload. But these new technologies will also bring existential and ethical questions – along with more deep fakes, deep porn, and other synthetic media. Buckle up for the ride.
Media companies are quietly integrating AI into their products as a way of delivering more personalised experiences. Almost three in ten (28%) say this is now a regular part of their activities, with a further 39% saying they have been conducting experiments in this area.