Climate change as you've never seen it before
An impressive multimedia reportage by the Washington Post that narrates climate change through maps, diagrams, drones, and interviews. The reportage, divided into six parts, tells the stories of people living in the areas most affected by Climate Change, to make global warming and its devastating effects on our planet and daily life more tangible.
It is hard to beat this reportage. Published in 2019, it displays an impressive visual impact and narrative power, together with a precious web-design that makes it user-friendly and enjoyable notwithstanding the amount of contents and the reading effort required.
The Washington Post has been working on these multimedia reportages, such as this one published in 2016, for a long time.
The New York Times always resorts to the most sophisticated methods of data-perception that the web offers.
For instance, they used data-sonification to recount the Mass-Shootings in the USA.
In other cases, they posed questions to their readers to have them interact with the news, as in this article on the perception of the Obama government compared to the preceding Bush administration regarding matters of national interest.
To make the quantity of Co2 in the air perceivable, they used virtual reality.
The New York Times has managed to make the deep and complex theme of climate change extremely tangible, forcing users to interact with the news. The final information becomes remarkably real, in order to sensitize users to climate change, including those readers who do not live in areas where climate change is as palpable as in other regions.
Reuters’ illustrated article investigates a theme already discussed in a multimedia longform by the South China Morning Post.
The Arctic is warming more than double the rest of the world and some scientists believe that the thawing of permafrost – the layer of soil frozen since the last ice age – is going to release huge amounts of emissions of climate warming.
Content appears very complicated for a non-specialist reader. This is probably the reason why Reuters has chosen to focus on a series of simple illustrations that contribute to light reading. Even maps are highly readable, thanks to scrollytelling.