This digital review was submitted for a class called "Digital Britain," which focuses on how technology is used in Britain's news organizations, museums, and cultural institutions.
On November 1, 2013, The Guardian published “NSA Files: Decoded,” an interactive multimedia experience explaining the secret United States surveillance programs revealed by Edward Snowden. It uses videos, diagrams, interactive infographics, GIFs, raw documents, and traditional journalistic text to tell its story. To date, readers have shared the site over 56,000 times on Facebook.
According to the tech website Fast Company, the project took three full-time employees (along with input from about twelve specialists) two months to complete. It makes sense for The Guardian to devote so many resources to this story, as it was the first news organisation to break the story of the NSA’s surveillance programs in early June 2013. With the advent of The New York Times’ multimedia piece “Snow Fall” in the winter of 2012, interactive longform journalism has been an area of exploration for all news companies who want to stay on the cutting edge of storytelling.
The polish and detail that The Guardian put into this story is impressive. Throughout the experience, I noticed tiny details that helped immerse me into the content. Scrolling over a composite image of key players in the surveillance debate reveals more about each individual’s position. In this image, people’s shoulders are covered up by the people next to them.
When hovering over an individual, not only is more information revealed about that specific person, but the other people are greyed out and the person’s whole body (including the parts previously obscured by other people) comes forward. This is a very minor detail, but as the first interactive element of the story, it demonstrated to me the care that went into producing this piece. As someone with knowledge of HTML, CSS, and Javascript, I recognised the technological accomplishment that went into this small visual detail.
There were other instances in which I found myself admiring the user interface. For example, one section of the story features a globe illustrating lines of digital communication across countries. Upon clicking and dragging, I was able to spin the globe around to inspect certain parts of it. The mark of excellent user interface is when the product works exactly as the user expects. There was no prompt saying that I could manipulate the view of the globe, but the fact that I was able to move it around when I wanted to is a testament to the user-centric design of this story.
While this technical wizardry is flashy and visually appealing, there are parts of it that contribute to the journalistic intent of the story. In a section about personal information, there is an interactive graphic illustrating what types of data are transmitted over various applications. Initially the graphic only showed information transmitted over Facebook, Google search, and web browsing. I wondered why the other options (Email, Twitter, etc.) were not shown by default, and then I realised that I was currently logged into Facebook and Google on my computer over WiFi. The realisation that this story from The Guardian could detect my current web application usage was a very real reminder that my personal activity and information can be very easily monitored. There is no way that print or broadcast journalism would be able to demonstrate this point as effectively.
The piece also features embedded video interviews with key players (such as Stewart Baker, former NSA general counsel, and Jameel Jaffer, ACLU deputy legal director) in the NSA surveillance debate. Hearing interviewees’ tones and seeing their body language made these video inserts much more effective than a textual quote. Digital surveillance is a hotly debated topic, and seeing and hearing from leaders on both sides helped to emphasise the gravity of this discourse. The videos effectively integrate into the flow of the story. Most interviews are around thirty seconds in length, which is just enough time for a meaningful soundbite, but not so long that it is jarring to switch between reading the text and watching the interview. Aesthetically, the white background of the video fits with the white background of the webpage, making the clips feel very organic and connected to the text. The makers of “NSA Files: Decoded” spent about a month working on just the first few video interviews. They mention that “the hope is that the interviewee is engaging and well-spoken,” and this is largely true in the finished product. One of the reasons these videos integrate so well into the story is that the subjects speak clearly and with a strong command of the subject they are discussing. This confidence allowed the producers to cut these interviews to their most powerful points for use in the story.
While this piece proves that multimedia storytelling can be an effective form of journalism, it still requires hard journalistic skills. Without the accompanying text, there would be no narrative. The text is used just enough to carry the reader from each digital feature to the next, but in a way that makes these features feel essential to the story as opposed to gimmicky. The text nor the videos, pictures, or infographics would make sense on their own. This is the strongest accomplishment of this piece: it uses the multimedia format in a holistic way, with each feature meant to propel the story in some way. With new technological developments, there is an ever-present risk of being too gimmicky, but The Guardian has not fallen into this pitfall with this story.
Industry response to the piece is varied. Fast Company was impressed with the technical aspects of the site, while others argue that some of the multimedia effects are “superfluous bells and whistles.” Threespot could not handle the amount of content contained in the story, asking its followers, “Did you really read it?” To me, the multimedia aspect of the story is what kept it engaging. Ultimately, I walked away knowing much more about the NSA and its surveillance programs, and this is ultimately the goal of journalism. I look forward to seeing The Guardian’s next big multimedia story.