Mix-media Immersive Scrollytelling

Flashback: More than a decade ago, The New York Times started publishing visual, mix-media, interactive stories to explain complex issues. Since then, this style of visual storytelling has been a north star for publications and data journalists alike.

However, the ROI from these stories isn’t proven.

• These stories are extremely expensive to produce. Only a few stories can be produced per week or month. Each story requires high-skilled labour who not only knows data analysis and storytelling but also designing and coding.
• We’ve not seen these stories generate an outsized quantity of page views. In fact, adding to the challenges in discovery is the fact that there is no meaningful way to inject interactive stories in most page-based CMS.
• Hence, they are at best a branding exercise.

Workaround: Another method is to use templated solutions, like KnightLabs’ Timeline.js, Storyline.js, and Juxtapose.js and Google’s Web Stories.