A bigger tent

How new techniques and technology can help journalists reach more people

In the last few years we've seen a rush of new storytelling technology and techniques — from virtual reality to scrollytelling to chat interfaces. For many of us, these advances have made the experience of consuming news richer, more convenient, and more illuminating. We can learn more quickly, see the world with fresher eyes, and immerse ourselves in stories in ways that go far beyond text on a page or moving images.

For those of us who create these stories, opportunities abound for us not only to do cool, new things, but also to bring our work to new people. With new storytelling and distribution techniques and technologies we can reach people who otherwise would have had a difficult time finding our work or accessing it because of government censorship, language barriers, limited technical resources, and more.

At Knight Lab, we recently began asking ourselves how we can reach new and wider audiences with digital (and sometimes analog) news. We haven’t asked, let alone answered, all the questions that one might consider. But we have identified a few topics that we find compelling, and over the next few weeks we’ll explore some of these topics, including:

We'll publish about one story each week. The story list above will become live links as stories are published. Check back here, or follow @KnightLab on Twitter to make sure you see the story's as soon as they're published.

About the author

Aditi Bhandari

Student Fellow

Latest Posts

  • A Big Change That Will Probably Affect Your Storymaps

    A big change is coming to StoryMapJS, and it will affect many, if not most existing storymaps. When making a storymap, one way to set a style and tone for your project is to set the "map type," also known as the "basemap." When we launched StoryMapJS, it included options for a few basemaps created by Stamen Design. These included the "watercolor" style, as well as the default style for new storymaps, "Toner Lite." Stamen...

    Continue Reading

  • Introducing AmyJo Brown, Knight Lab Professional Fellow

    AmyJo Brown, a veteran journalist passionate about supporting and reshaping local political journalism and who it engages, has joined the Knight Lab as a 2022-2023 professional fellow. Her focus is on building The Public Ledger, a data tool structured from local campaign finance data that is designed to track connections and make local political relationships – and their influence – more visible. “Campaign finance data has more stories to tell – if we follow the...

    Continue Reading

  • Interactive Entertainment: How UX Design Shapes Streaming Platforms

    As streaming develops into the latest age of entertainment, how are interfaces and layouts being designed to prioritize user experience and accessibility? The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated streaming services becoming the dominant form of entertainment. There are a handful of new platforms, each with thousands of hours of content, but not much change or differentiation in the user journeys. For the most part, everywhere from Netflix to illegal streaming platforms use similar video streaming UX standards, and...

    Continue Reading

  • Innovation with collaborationExperimenting with AI and investigative journalism in the Americas.

    Lee este artículo en español. How might we use AI technologies to innovate newsgathering and investigative reporting techniques? This was the question we posed to a group of seven newsrooms in Latin America and the US as part of the Americas Cohort during the 2021 JournalismAI Collab Challenges. The Collab is an initiative that brings together media organizations to experiment with AI technologies and journalism. This year,  JournalismAI, a project of Polis, the journalism think-tank at...

    Continue Reading

  • Innovación con colaboraciónCuando el periodismo de investigación experimenta con inteligencia artificial.

    Read this article in English. ¿Cómo podemos usar la inteligencia artificial para innovar las técnicas de reporteo y de periodismo de investigación? Esta es la pregunta que convocó a un grupo de siete organizaciones periodísticas en América Latina y Estados Unidos, el grupo de las Américas del 2021 JournalismAI Collab Challenges. Esta iniciativa de colaboración reúne a medios para experimentar con inteligencia artificial y periodismo. Este año, JournalismAI, un proyecto de Polis, la think-tank de periodismo...

    Continue Reading

  • AI, Automation, and Newsrooms: Finding Fitting Tools for Your Organization

    If you’d like to use technology to make your newsroom more efficient, you’ve come to the right place. Tools exist that can help you find news, manage your work in progress, and distribute your content more effectively than ever before, and we’re here to help you find the ones that are right for you. As part of the Knight Foundation’s AI for Local News program, we worked with the Associated Press to interview dozens of......

    Continue Reading

Storytelling Tools

We build easy-to-use tools that can help you tell better stories.

View More