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Political Podcasts That Will Keep You Sane

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They’ll keep you informed—and some will make you laugh, too.

Feb 20, 2020

Temi Oyelola

We’re officially in the thick of the 2020 presidential race, and it’s full-speed-ahead until November. While the field of prospective candidates has narrowed considerably in recent months, trying to parse out who to vote for still feels like a full-time job. A good political podcast can help you make sense of the week’s news, connect you to the candidate who’ll address the issues you care about, or clear up misinformation that runs unchecked on social media. That weekly—or daily—download can also be a soothing voice of reason amid one of the most anticipated and divisive elections in American history. It’s never been more important to do your civic duty by hitting the polls next go-round, and these entertaining, convenient, and sanity-preserving offerings will help you brush up on candidates like Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Pete Buttigieg. Here are 15 of the best political podcasts for 2020 to check out for yourself.

The New York Times

1 of 15

The Daily

You can learn a lot in 20 minutes, and the New York Times‘s podcast is short enough to listen to on your morning commute or treadmill session. Monday through Friday, host Michael Barbaro and his guests fill listeners in on stories such as “The President and the Census” and “The Plan to Elect Republican Women.”

The Daily offers on-the-ground looks at the current state of partisan difference in America; a 2018 episode titled “White Evangelical, and Worried About Trump” features an uncomfortable immigration conversation between a young woman and her father that many families will likely relate to.

Listen Now

Crooked Media

2 of 15

Pod Save America

Jon Favreau, Tommy Vietor, Jon Lovett, and Dan Pfeiffer are all former aides to President Barack Obama (Favreau was Obama’s Director of Speechwriting). They bring their White House experience to this extremely popular twice-weekly liberal podcast, which mainly focuses on the Trump administration and the 2020 election.

The vibe of hosts’ fast-paced dialogue could be characterized as both witty and “bro-y,” and their guests have included Megan Rapinoe and most of the Democratic presidential candidates.

LISTEN NOW

NPR

3 of 15

Throughline

The tagline for this weekly series from NPR is “we go back in time to understand the present.” Excellent sound editing interweaves archival news reports with the hosts’ storytelling, lending each episode the feel of a well-produced documentary.

History buffs will love Throughline‘s account of how previous events affect what’s happening today.

LISTEN NOW

FiveThirtyEight

4 of 15

FiveThirtyEight Politics

Statistician and author Nate Silver’s name most often appears in the news for his election projections: His site, FiveThirtyEight, predicted a higher chance of a Trump victory than most other prominent polls (they still favored Hillary Clinton).

Silver and his co-hosts are already paying close attention to the next presidential race, with episodes like “Is Biden Still the Front-Runner?” and “Who’s Going to Win Pennsylvania in 2020?” Their takes are, unsurprisingly, data-driven above all as they debate the candidates’ literal odds.

LISTEN NOW

MuellerSheWrote.com

5 of 15

Mueller, She Wrote

While the Mueller Report was filed in the spring of 2019, the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election still has a ripple effect as we barrel toward the 2020 election. This liberal-leaning weekly offering from A.G., a federal government executive and veteran, and comedian Jordan Coburn is dedicated to explaining the report’s continuing impact—all served with a side of lighthearted banter.

Ready to never hear the words “Mueller Report” again? Try their irreverent news podcast, The Daily Beans.

LISTEN NOW

Earwolf

6 of 15

Throwing Shade

Hosted by comedian-actor Bryan Safi and Feminasty author Erin Gibson, Throwing Shade—a title borrowed from Black queer culture—is as funny as it is informative. Every week, the comedy duo serves up profanity-laced takes on news stories you probably haven’t heard about (but should), with Safi focusing on LGBTQ issues and Gibson on women’s issues.

Throwing Shade is perfect for pop culture lovers who prefer to laugh as they get their news.

LISTEN NOW

KCRW

7 of 15

Left, Right & Center

KCRW’s weekly podcast calls itself a “civilized yet provocative confrontation over politics, policy and pop culture.” Host Josh Barro positions himself as the “center” in this equation, and talks to figures from both the right and the left in an attempt to break free of the echo chamber so many of us find ourselves in.

LISTEN NOW

CAFE

8 of 15

Stay Tuned with Preet

Preet Bharara was United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York from 2009 to 2017, until he was fired by Donald Trump along with 46 other attorneys appointed under Barack Obama.

The former prosecutor provides a clear-eyed look at the legal aspects of current events, welcoming guests from The Big Short director Adam McKay to conservative pundit George Will. Bharara often begins his episodes by answering questions from listeners, which can range from asking the lawyer to explain a confusing point in the Mueller report to requesting advice on how to pass the bar exam.

LISTEN NOW

Vox

9 of 15

Today, Explained

This daily podcast from Vox is, as the title suggests, an “explainer,” breaking down current and current-ish events in 25 minutes or less. Host Sean Rameswaram sits down with journalists from outlets including The Atlantic and The Intercept to unpack complicated issues and point out what you might’ve missed.

LISTEN NOW

The Intercept

10 of 15

Deconstructed With Mehdi Hasan

This weekly podcast, which is on hiatus until September 2019, has the feel of a snappy BBC radio show. Deconstructed may be more infotainment than hard news, but host Mehdi Hasan’s lively interviewing style ensures the listener won’t space out while listening.

LISTEN NOW

Crooked Media

11 of 15

Pod Save the People

Like its Crooked Media cousin Pod Save America, this conversational liberal podcast discusses national current events and local news stories across the country.

DeRay Mckesson, an organizer and activist with over one million followers on Twitter, interviews guests on politics, social justice, and pop culture, while writers and activists Brittany Packnett, Sam Sinyangwe and Clint Smith join to demystify the stories behind recent headlines—often placing them in a larger historical context.

LISTEN NOW

Slate

12 of 15

Political Gabfest

Slate’s popular, long-running weekly podcast draws crowds at their live events, and has earned the honor of being one of Stephen Colbert‘s favorites. Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz discuss the latest White House-related news and more trending stories.

LISTEN NOW

New York Times

13 of 15

The Argument

With our curated social media feeds and insular social circles, it’s easy to surround yourself with people who share your political opinions (and thus, never hear an alternate point of view). The Argument, a New York Times podcast hosted by opinion columnists David Leonhardt, Michelle Goldberg, and Ross Douthat attempt to expose listeners to what “the other half thinks” with their own lively debate.

LISTEN NOW

14 of 15

With Friends Like These

Ana Marie Cox, culture critic and founding editor of political blog Wonkette, attempts to foster non-argumentative dialogue with a podcast about “what divides us and what doesn’t.”

A gifted interviewer, Cox uses episodes like “Red-Pilling Grandma,” a discussion about older internet users falling prey to radical-right fake news on social media, as an opportunity to explore ways people can encourage a perspective shift in their loved ones—and how to remain patient (and listen!) when it doesn’t work. That’s a skill that would serve us all in the months ahead.

LISTEN NOW

WNYC

15 of 15

On the Media

In the age of easily-spread disinformation and sensationalist cable news coverage, it’s never been more important to consider the source. On the Media aims to do just that, billing itself as “your guide to examining how the media sausage is made.”

Hosts Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield, alongside a deep roster of talented journalists, also dig deep to answer questions that may be on your mind this election season, such as “what’s the deal with the caucus system?” and “why is primary season like this?” in their “Picture Perfect Democracy” episode.

LISTEN NOW

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Three things I learned while making Vox’s solar eclipse graphic

We recently published a graphic on Vox about the upcoming solar eclipse in August. While I enjoyed working on this graphic, building it certainly put my problem solving skills to the test. As I drew numerous circles on scratch paper and worked through calculations to determine where to place certain elements, a number of my colleagues expressed interest in what I was doing and wanted to know more about how the graphic works. Here are a few of my takeaways from building this piece.

1. The data you’re looking for is probably already out there

Did you know that The United States Naval Observatory (USNO) has an API that provides detailed eclipse data? Neither did I until I Googled “solar eclipse 2017 API.” Talk about a game changer. Learning that I could get all of the information that I needed to create the animation at the top from one source made my week. Well, really, it made this project.

In order to get the data for each zip code from the API, I needed to know the geographic coordinates for the zip code center. While I could have created this data myself, I didn’t need to. Thanks to erichurst, it already exists.

Turns out that there is also an existing data set for mapping zip codes to timezones from DoubleDor and Moment.js has library for formatting dates based on these timezones.

While we ended up compiling and manipulating these data sets to make them more manageable and reduce page weight, we didn’t have to create any of the data ourselves.

2. You don’t have to be a math expert

The animation at the top is essentially one circle moving over top of another circle along an invisible line that recurs every 15 seconds. Figuring out the math to draw this line was complicated, but for the most part doable. The USNO API gave me three important pieces of information that I needed to draw the path of the moon over the sun:

The starting vertex angle (the angle where the moon first touches the sun).

The maximum obscuration percentage.

The ending vertex angle (the angle where the moon last touches the sun).

One important (and interesting) thing to note: The vertex angle is measured counterclockwise from the point on the sun that has the highest local altitude, which differs from how circle angles are typically measured.

Diagram showing how vertex angles are measured as compared to how angles are typically measured on a circle.

Creating the animation

Since the USNO data provided the angles where the moon enters and exits the sun, it wasn’t too difficult to determine the starting and ending center points for the moon. These points would become the starting and ending points on the invisible line that the moon is animated along.

Diagram of calculating the starting and ending points for the line used to animate the moon.

Behind the scenes, the “sun” circle is actually a circle composed of 360 nodes (shoutout to Aaron Bycoffe’s Block, “Placing n elements around a circle with radius r”), which made it easy for me to pull out the coordinates for the entering and exiting angles and compute the line endpoints as shown above.

Now that I had the starting and ending points, I needed to determine where to place the line midpoint. Drawing a straight line between the two points would not account for the obscuration percentage or depict the true path of the moon across the sun. In order to place the midpoint, I needed to know how far away from the sun’s center it needed to be and at what angle.

Determining the angle of the midpoint was a combination of determining the bisecting angle of the start and end angles along with knowing whether the current zip code’s location relative to the path of totality. If the user would need to travel SW or SE to view the totality, the line midpoint would be placed somewhere below the sun’s center point and if the user would need to travel NW or NE to view the totality, the midpoint would be placed somewhere above the sun’s center point.

If you’re interested in seeing all of the fun math that went into figuring this out, here’s a look at some of my notes.

After figuring out the angle for the midpoint, I needed to figure out the distance between it and the sun’s center. Given that I knew the percentage that the circles overlapped (the maximum obscuration percentage), I was able to find a formula online that would help me compute the distance between the two points. And since I’m a little rusty on my trigonometry skills, I used Wolfram Alpha to help me compute the percentage overlap of the radii for all obscuration values between 1 percent and 100 percent. The percentage overlap multiplied by the size of the radius (in pixels) allowed me to find this last missing variable.

After placing this point and drawing the line, I ended up with an animation that looked like this.

3. Simple is okay

When I first created the mock for this graphic, I included a play/pause button on the timeline below the animation. We ended up nixing that idea fairly early on.

Everyone I showed the graphic to in the early stages found it straightforward and easy to understand. The animation loops every 15 seconds, so even if the user misses something the first time, they don’t have to wait long for it to come around again. Adding the play/pause ability for such a simple visualization seemed like a bit much (and would have added extra dev time).

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How to create a social video that doesn’t break the bank

6 top tips for creating a strategic social video on a budget

It only takes one train journey or a merry stroll through our towns to notice people of all demographics are glued to their phones. Much of the content they’re consuming is video and not just any video but mobile first video on social channels.

In the marketing world, whenever video is mentioned there is a misconception that it’s budget breaking and therefore it’s overlooked in favour of less engaging formats. However, there are a number of cost saving hacks, which can be applied at different stages of the marketing funnel. These range from the use of phone footage and user generated content (UGC) through to ad spend and obtaining efficiencies through effective targeting. With that in mind, let’s explore how to incorporate video into your social strategies, even on a small budget in order to meet your objectives.

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One thing to remember is that a good idea always wins. This doesn’t mean you have to be the new Cecil B. DeMille producing epic pieces of content for social channels. It’s important to deliver content that reaches the right audience, resonates with it and encourages a high-value action.

1. Use real people as your hero content

Hero content is usually an advert or branded content. It aims to increase brand awareness amongst the masses and will likely have the highest production budget. 

It’s a myth that animation is, as a rule, cheaper than filming, but animation must be very strong to be a hero piece of content. If you have lower budgets, then filming a real person may be your cheapest and most effective option. Real people can also warm up brands in industries such as finance or insurance.

However, whilst real people are cheaper than actors, don’t expect them to be actors! Real customers can speak in the first person about your brand and can share authentic experiences but remember that you won’t be able to dictate or 100% predict their answers. So, writing interview questions to trigger and steer their answers is key. Spend time at the preparation stage making sure you get the best out of your contributors. Pick locations and topics that they are comfortable with. You will still need to cast for appropriate customers. Just because someone has written a great feedback email, it doesn’t mean they will express themselves well on camera.

2. Shoot on your phone for hub content

Hub content usually comprises industry or thought leadership insights. It aims to engage audiences in the discovery phase with regularly scheduled video releases.

Are you vlogging at industry events? Are you asking thought leaders and experts for insights when you bump into them at those networking events? Are you doing market research, asking the public what they think of industries/ issues/ topics? You can do these on your phone, just watch some vlogs online and practise! Consider the balance between the value of your content quality and the financial value of your production spend. If the content is strong enough, then production spend can be lower. Understanding this equilibrium is essential for you to be able to make cost savings.

3. Consider user generated content (UGC) as hygiene content

Hygiene content is your ‘always on’ content. It sits further down the marketing funnel and retains your audience rather than attracts a new audience. It typically has the lowest production budget

You may have to incentivise your community offline to do this. But for the sake of offering vouchers or discounts, the value of authentic content often far outweighs this expense. If you have customers who are geographically widespread, UGC can offer an easy way to gather content from customers in more obscure areas where travel and accommodation expenses make it impractical to shoot. But do be aware that if you are asking for product reviews or similar and you are incentivising, you may have to declare this if you are using it for advertising. With UGC, it’s important to be prescriptive with your brief. Provide clear guidelines for submissions including whether you want your videos to be horizontal or vertical, with or without background music, whether you want your contributor holding the phone or propping it up in front of them etc.

4. Identify economies of scale

 There is an argument that production value reflects the quality of your product / service. This is partly true. In terms of allocation of production budget, you should spend more on your hero content than on your hygiene content, but with regards to output, you should be creating a blend of all three types of content to ensure your customer’s journey to purchase is seamless.

High end, luxury brands are not exempt and should still be creating hygiene content that can (assuming it doesn’t breach brand guidelines) be of a lower production value, providing that they aren’t leading with it.

When planning your content, it’s important to look at your strategy in its entirety and not just your video strategy in isolation. You will be able to identify and apply cost saving measures if you take a holistic approach to planning content and avoid working in silos.

For example, you may be able to film your hero, hub and hygiene content all in one go if your hub content will be excerpts from the hero video or quick vox pops filmed on a phone in your breaks and your hygiene content is a behind the scenes video or a trailer/ teaser.

You could perhaps take photos of the actors or customers you are using on the day of your video shoot so that you can create a bespoke landing page for when someone clicks through from your video to create a seamless journey for your customer. Or if you are engaging display advertising, you could shoot still or moving images in specific formats to suit your chosen ad units.

If gathering all of these assets over one shoot is too much to manage personally, then consider hiring an additional cameraman. The cost of one extra person on the day will be far cheaper than an additional shoot day and time spent organizing diaries.

5. Allocate your media spend at the outset

A good rule of thumb for budgeting creative is to use the old methodology of 80% of your budget should go on media and 20% on creative. This still stands true today. Before organic reach diminished, social media practitioners were not concerned by ‘media’. This led to increased content budgets and practically zero media spend for a lot of companies. As algorithms changed, platforms have begun to monetise their propositions and we now see a necessity for paid media on social channels.

Make sure you include media spend when you budget your video project or you may find you have to allocate more funds when you come to delivery.

6. Make sure the right people are seeing your content

When it comes to targeting, a common mistake is either going too broad or too narrow, with an audience. Even though targeting on social channels is getting better, it’s not perfect and if you target too broadly then your message is unlikely to resonate with the intended audience. Are 15 million people really interested in your product or service?

Conversely, if you go too narrow you will find CPM’s (cost per mille/ 1000 impressions) increase dramatically and the effectiveness of your campaign will diminish.  At Jellyfish, we plan to reach a maximum of 70% of any given target audience on social and utilize reach and frequency tools, where appropriate, to drive awareness.

It’s also important to match the format with the campaign objective. If you’re trying to drive conversions, then utilizing video may not be the best way to go. Video is best used to drive top funnel metrics and can help tell a brand story. The more advanced strategies out there involve sequenced messaging, which essentially retargets engaged users of a video with another piece of content.

Put simply, understand your audience. Make sure that if you are creating content for an audience in the US for example, that your planned launch time suits that time zone. Take a look at your analytics and see when your target audience is most engaged with your content and plan your launches around that.

As mentioned above, a good idea always wins and with the power of media behind your efforts you do not necessarily need to create a video for every day, or even week. Focus on delivering quality content that is cost effective to make but excites your audience.

Thanks to Greg Allum for sharing advice and opinions in this post. Greg is Head of Social with Jellyfish. Greg challenges brands and leads high performing teams to deliver compelling visions through content storytelling, using social media effectively and engaging in purposeful conversations with audiences. You can follow him on  Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.

Thanks to Abigail Howson for sharing advice and opinions in this post. Abigail is Head of Video at JellyFish. Abigail works with brands to develop cross-platform video strategies that focus on creating seamless customer journeys through engaging content at each stage of brand consideration. She manages a talented in-house team covering production and graphics. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.

from Blog – Smart Insights http://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-platforms/video-marketing/create-social-video-doesnt-break-bank/

[newsroom-digital-blogs]

Helping Vox report on the future of U.S. health care

Growing uncertainty around the future of health care in the US has insurance providers scrambling. A number of them have decided to stop offering their products on the health insurance exchanges (HIX) — marketplaces where Obamacare compliant insurance plans are sold.

More and more providers are joining the ones who have already exited, leaving many who depend on these exchanges with little or no choice in insurance options.

Vox’s Sarah Kliff and Sarah Frostenson have been tracking and reporting on the evolving insurance coverage landscape. But at the pace things are changing, there is a need for a solution that would make it easy for reporters to keep abreast with these rapid changes.

With this challenge in mind, the Storytelling Studio collaborated with Vox to create an internal tool for managing HIX data and generating coverage maps from it.

Prioritize aggressively to define the product

Building a tool to manage a complex dataset such as health care coverage comes with the risk of “scope-creep” — attempting to build too much into one tool.

To avoid losing sight of the main objectives, we came together to first list all the things the tool should and could do. We then aggressively prioritized, cut and refined items in the list to come up with a compact set of features to include in the first version of tool.

The tool was to be built as a dashboard that can act as a place for reporters to look up current coverage status, as well as generate maps at both the national and state levels. Another feature that made the cut was generating maps simulating providers leaving a county or state.

Once the list of features was finalized, we had to figure out the best way to build it.

A tech spec in progress... http://pic.twitter.com/tedKMSMPyp

— Kavya Sukumar (@kavyaSukumar) April 12, 2017

This would have been an easy candidate for a simple CRUD dashboard with Rails or Django. But like most newsrooms, we lean toward building static sites whenever possible. Building something outside the Studio’s general workflow and infrastructure often end up being maintenance overheads.

In addition to the data management and mapping features, the dashboard also needed to have a robust authentication system because it allows users to change data permanently.

After evaluating a lot of different approaches, we decided to build it like our other apps — a static page built with Middleman and hosted on Chorus, Vox Media’s media stack. For dynamic data we used Kinto, an open source JSON storage service from Mozilla.

We used our existing servers, workflow and tools. This approach also came with an added advantage of being able to plug into Chorus authentication.

The tool had enough moving parts to warrant two developers. While I focused on the data management aspect of the dashboard, Casey Miller built mapping and image generation.

Simplify the data management

One of the reasons we built this tool is because there is no one place where HIX data can be reliably scraped. The data is often hand curated from various sources. This tool does not remove the need for curation. It merely makes it easier by giving the users an interface to update and view the data.

But we still needed a base data source to begin with, which came from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). RWJF sent us an Excel file detailing the current coverage status by county.

With a combination of rake tasks and shell scripts, the data was parsed and uploaded to our Kinto instance.

On the client, a common data adapter script fetched data asynchronously from Kinto and made it available to both the maps and the data management page via callbacks.

Export dataset as static maps

Once I set up the backend, Casey began working on the map generation UI for the tool. The tool needed to be able to create both maps of the United States and individual states. It also needed the ability to display either the most up-to-date provider count data or provider count data based on a hypothetical scenario that could then be exported as an image for use in stories. While the user would set the hypothetical provider info in the app’s provider view, the map view needed some sort of UI to allow the user to create these different subsets of maps.

Since this is a relatively simple tool with only a few options, Casey decided to place the UI elements in a sidebar to the right of the map. This also happens to coincidentally follow the same format that we set up for creating projects in Autotune, Vox Media’s open-source centralized suite of tools for creating charts, graphs and other story elements.

When finished filling out the information in the sidebar, the user can hit “Submit” to update the map on the left. Once the user is happy with the map they’ve generated, they can click “Save image” to download a png of the map to their local machine.

The save image functionality relies on a version of pancakejs, “A mini-library for easily flattening SVG and Canvas elements into images on the fly,” that was ever so slightly tweaked to allow for the saving of retina images (rather than the lower resolution images it was exporting by default).

Refactor and optimize

At nearly 5MB, HIX data is a heavy payload to download in its entirety on each reload of the dashboard. We needed a way to manipulate data locally and share it between mapping page and the data editing page.

There was a definitely a case to be made for caching data locally across sessions.

LocalStorage was quickly ruled out as an option. With multiple versions of the data we needed to store, and with future plans for extending the tool to handle historical data, we would easily exceed the 10MB cap on localStorage.

We decided to use IndexedDB instead. IndexedDB has some set up overhead but, in the end, it turned out to be exactly what we needed.

Data fetch from Kinto is asynchronous. Unlike localStorage APIs, indexedDB APIs are also largely asynchronous.

It was only a matter of time before the code descended into async hell. At one point, there were seven levels of nesting of functions with eight different potential places for callback. Code readability hit rock bottom. Debugging got harder and harder. Something had to give.

Before adding Promises

All callbacks were replaced with JavaScript Promises. Code started looking much better and less error-prone.

After adding Promises

Release the tool

The tool is now available to Vox reporters.

Since we started developing the tool, Alabama has already seen some changes in coverage. Depending on how the story and data evolves, we may add more features, such as comparing historical data and combining it with other datasets.

Keep an eye out for health care coverage maps as the insurance coverage changes in reaction to the market and policies. And if you want to keep up with the latest twists and turns of the health care debate, sign up for VoxCare — Vox’s afternoon briefing on the health care news that matters the most.

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[newsroom-digital-blogs]

Stories we’re talking about this week: May 30

Every two weeks, the Storytelling Studio hosts an open meeting where we share story inspiration. We read or watch published stories (by Vox Media or elsewhere), and spend an hour with teammates and other colleagues discussing each. Spoiler alert: we don’t always agree!

This meeting is separate from our project-specific design reviews, and might cover everything from written content and visual design, to user experience and data analysis. Here’s a sampling of what we reviewed this week.

Looming Floods, Threatened Cities, The New York Times

The New York Times recently published a 3-part series about Antarctica and how the changes it’s going through will affect the world. The Times used data from NASA and NOAA but also sent reporters and researchers to round out their reporting. Here’s what we thought:

We talked about the fact that each part of the series had its own interactive structure; each piece felt tailored to the narrative and data presented. The experience on wide breakpoints was immersive, and the beautiful imagery made it more compelling for a user to scroll.

This piece ties action to user scrolling but feels more elegant than other experiences we’ve seen in the past.

We checked out the performance of one section and found that size was upwards of 10MB, which makes for a heavy page. Designing and building highly immersive experiences often comes at the cost of a highly performant page. Because of the heavy page load, this piece is best received on a quick internet connection but is still a worthwhile storytelling experience.

We said, They said, Trump Said, Politico

Recently, the American news cycle has been in a bit of a tailspin with statements from the White House saying one thing, journalists responding (or refuting), and late night tweets from the Commander-in-Chief speaking over both. Politico tries to make sense of this, showcasing all views next to each other. Here’s what we said:

Studio Senior Designer Tyson Whiting thought the design of the story was an interesting way to show three divergent viewpoints at once, which is a story in-and-of itself.

This feature is more of a summarization than a deep dive on each scandal. The information breakdown is clear, and the headlines of each are easily scannable so users can pick up on the broad strokes.

We loved the use of using President Trump’s tweet bemoaning accuracy as the set-up for the rest of the piece.

Unfortunately, the experience doesn’t translate to mobile as well — we thought the side-by-side design was more successful than cards stacking on top of each other.

Climate Change May Force Millions of Americans to Move Inland, Huffpost

Our second climate change story of the week focuses on the effect of rising sea levels in America. Here’s what we thought:

We discussed how effective a bubble map was for this type of story — it was clearer than a shaded choropleth map because it indicated the scale of people better than simply shading counties.

However, because they are separate, static maps, it was hard to see the difference between the two. We talked about the possibility of an animation to show the difference between the two instead of static images.

The rising sea-level mockups from Climate Central were helpful in visualizing extreme scenarios, but we didn’t think Mar-a-Lago interactive image slider added much value and could have been visualized with a static image.

Are Pop Lyrics Getting More Repetitive?, The Pudding

Here’s what we said:

There was a lot of research and analysis put into this piece and we thought the first section was an interesting way to walk a reader through the difficulty of a compression algorithm. However, we ended up asking whether the article was meant to be about the compression or the lyrics.

Because there are so many artists to parse through, we liked that the team featured the most interesting data sets in the form of sentences, with the artist name as a clickable button that would change the responsive graph (e.g. Rappers like J. Cole and Eminem tend to be consistently non-repetitive). This gives the user two avenues for their experience; one for quick hits, the other for a deeper dive.

What stories are you talking about this week? Tweet us @voxstorytelling to let us know.

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