Lam Thuy Vo, Open Lab Fellow for BuzzFeed News
What are you most excited about in terms of interactive and immersive news stories?
For me personally, doing stories with social data and finding personal stories within it has been something I’ve been tinkering with a lot and being funded to do this for an entire year is giving me so much space to truly think of the types of stories that lay dormant in the vast amount of data we produce as everyday consumers.
On a grander scheme I’m becoming increasingly interested in attention management, finding, forging and merging audiences, and being able to communicate with them. On some level, that may happen through technology: I think that APIs like Twilio, for instance, that allow us to communicate with people’s phones are incredibly exciting and haven’t been fully leveraged by a number of news organizations yet. I also think journalists will need to be forced to think in more holistic ways about their audiences: about their audiences’ immediate geographic community, the means they use to receive stories and what makes up their information universe.
Which of your own projects are you really proud of?
With this story I really tried to marry two storytelling modes that I often see segregated: the intellectual understanding of a larger context that data and graphics deliver and the immersive power of the point of view that linear storytelling and the moving image convey.
How do you balance innovation with financial and audience realities?
Attention is so so hard to garner, foster and most importantly maintain. And, as is the case with so much social media, the loudest will often be the ones who get your attention, even if it’s for just a tweet or a Facebook post at a time.
In an industry that first learned to rely on the click before it looked to the subscriber to fund its journalism, it felt and sometimes still feels like a lot of editors want you to just scream louder with your headline, your hot take, or your promo images. But I do hope that through these labs, and the potential success of the longer-term projects, we can make the case that that extra little bit of time is worth it to our readers and will hook them enough to come back and stay longer.
Immerse is an initiative of Tribeca Film Institute, MIT Open DocLab and The Fledgling Fund. Learn more about our vision for the project here.