Troika For Better News
Our reliance on social media & aggregators as major news sources is increasing by the day. This makes the consumption of news devoid of focus and depth while the quantity of news houses sees rapid growth. Ironically, while varied opinions exist, personalized recommendations have encouraged echo chambers which makes discourse and debate confrontational and divisive. People neglect opinions that are away from their own and News venues control the existence of polar opposite narratives, making it difficult to convergence on common ground.
Personalization of news, driven by digital capabilities, is creating echo chambers that filter out multiple perspectives. It is crucial to show people multiple voices that exist across the political spectrum; not to change their beliefs but to promote tolerance to an opinion outside of one’s own. Ironically, it is also becoming easier to be lost in an array of sources, be misdirected and develop a bias without seeing all sides of the story.
How might we utilize the power of communication design to help people become better-informed citizens, by offering an opportunity to read and acknowledge multiple perspectives?
Objective
How news has been conveyed and conceived nowadays has been highly concerning. The excessive amount of news being produced every single day obscures the real significant news to be paid attention to. The reliance on social media & aggregators with an agenda as major news sources makes it hard to distinguish facts from opinions through skewed information and regenerated content. The readers who read only side-leaning news form echo chambers and neglect perspectives to judge comprehensively.
The Visual Structure Of News
We analyzed three conservative-leaning news resources through their visual quality, messaging of content and how news stories are structured and prioritized. Based on our analysis (Fox News, The Drudge Report, and The Blaze), we observed that even though they are in the politically conservative, each caters to a different audience and therefore takes different styles of reporting and operating. The visual structure, form, and their style of framing content determines how readers perceive each site. We observe that the visual structure of news and the way it used to be distributed before the digital web, influences the weight of text, image, video and the overall style of a news website. [Fox came from cable, Drudge was an e-mail dispatch, and Blaze was born in the digital age.]
Fox News
Fox News headlines have bold text. They are short and use emotionally charged language. The red and blue colors symbolize a patriotic voice. Coming from Traditional cable TV, the visual format on the internet is video-focused. There is a lot of emphasis on image, while the text plays a supportive role. As you scroll through a story article, it streams live TV and comments from readers.
In spite of a Column grid, the volume of news, and varying size of text and image make Fox News a chaotic website. Fox News articles rely on tweets from related figures, and live video footage that creates an augmentation to the text, creating a sense of distraction for the reader. Fox News has high user engagement enabled by live comments.
Drudge Report
The Drudge report is an influential aggregator. If drudge report was a person, he would be an undercover agent, speaking little, silently opinionated, but knowledgeable with a clever influence on the people who listen. The Drudge Report has looked exactly the same over the years. It’s like menu cards of news stories. It highlights just one top headline and uses the reader’s short attention span to its advantage. All other stories are links to several top news venues that you choose from yourself.
The plain text, black and white look, may seem unassuming. But it’s an influential and trusted news source for many readers.
Blaze Media
The Blaze provides niche curated stories. Bold Text and image emphasize key stories through stark black, white and red. Blaze does not report breaking news but rather positions itself as a platform that gives a voice to the conservative faction of our society. So while it's competitors’ webpages dynamically change, The Blaze is still like a magazine. More white space, bigger gaps, and curated content, giving it a social and approachable look. and it reports anecdotal feature articles.
The typography is bold and provides only the necessary information. The use of logo increases brand recall which positions it well in terms of reach with the public.
News on the digital platform
Size difference through last year’s revenue
Fox News is a part of a big corporation. Their funding largely constitutes cable subscriber fees, followed by cable subsidies from the government and advertisements. Fox boasts a revenue of $400M. The Drudge earns mainly from Advertisements. Its revenue is between $1–9 M and growing fastest, with the leanest setup. The Blaze’s funding comes from paid subscribers of the app and website. Its Revenue reported last year was $90M. Advertising is an indispensable source of modern news, but at the same time, it distracts a reader and leads to link the contents of the AD to the news.
Comparison between the size of operation and impact on readership
There is no significant correlation between the size of an operation and viewers. There might be a 3rd factor that affects the relationship between the two groups. Small, unregulated news venues are growing rapidly by being lean and digital-first. Digital Media offers dynamic visual tools to create an impact on the readers' mind and opinion.
How does the visual, structure and contents of these three news venues affect the realization of the well-informed citizen as we defined earlier?
Shown below is the attention span of the audience may be influenced by the visual layout, structure and volume of information of news websites. The Drudge Report is able tp engage users for a longer time than the industry average. [data source to be added] Graph Created by Team Troika.
Are current news outlets making readers informed citizens?
Since we believe a competent news outlet should shoulder the responsibility to help their readers achieve the criteria, we analyzed the 3 news outlets, and found that most of the venues are doing some good (and some bad) to help readers be aware of crucial news stories and distinguishing fact from opinions, but most of them barely can be powerful in helping readers acknowledge multiple perspectives, or even the opposite — only want to communicate their own perspectives.
As the founders of all three of these news sources are white males, the majority of the audience demographic is white. Fox News leads prime-time cable news, followed by MSNBC and CNN. According to an article, The median age of the Fox News viewer is 65. The Drudge Report though much smaller in discoverability that the Fox News. However, these statistics tweeted by Judd Legum, a journalist, show that the Drudge report audience extremely homogenous not just in terms of race but also in terms of gender. Homogeneous audiences are liable for creating echo chambers.
Who is an informed citizen?
All members of the audience are not equally politically aware. The Pew Research report shows that highly politically aware individuals are more aware of the rise of fake news, rather than people who are politically unaware.The eventual goal of our news intervention is to facilitate a way of reading news and encourage multiple perspectives while consuming any news story from varied sources. Research by the Pew Center also suggests that the ability to classify statements as factual or opinion varies widely based on political awareness, digital savviness and trust in the news media. In order to contextualize our design intervention to a specific category of audience, we framed our analysis to bring out the different levels of political awareness we believe our news audience falls into. Our design intervention aims at facilitating the audience's journey from being aware of political issues to being a tolerant individual who is able to acknowledge multiple perspectives and being responsible for being an informative rather rather misleading source of news.
Make it stand out.
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
This Project was featured by the Medium.com curatorial team.
Make it stand out.
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.
Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.
How might we utilize the power of communication design to help people become better-informed citizens, by offering an opportunity to read and acknowledge multiple perspectives?
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.