There’s no doubt that one of the biggest storytelling forms to emerge within the last few years — especially online — is the infographic. Everywhere you turn, outlets are taking advantage of the highly visual, very sharable medium to give readers easily digestible pieces of data. And, from high tech studies to psychology research, it’s obvious that infographics not only enhance data content for readers but also show no signs of slowing down.

But it’s not as easy to create a high-impact infographic as it looks, even when your research is so interesting it can speak for itself. And, if you’re on a budget or with limited resources, it can cost a pretty penny to get competent work that can cut through the noise and go viral. Read more

Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) has released a report in collaboration with The Economist Group that looks at news consumption on mobile devices. The comprehensive study looks at the activities of 9,513 adults on tablets and smart phones, and their feelings about advertisements and paying for news.  Though PEJ has already created its own infographic, they’re asking the public to come up with something better. Read more

A reader (and fun Tweeter) had a smart idea following our post last week on using ThingLink creatively in journalism. I had to pass it along.

One of the ideas laid out in that post was how to quickly make infographics interactive, adding another meta-layer to the data you already made look pretty. Ivan Lajara, engagement editor for Digital First Media’s East Region, had an idea to make that even simpler:

.@kevinloker I was thinking that Thinglink + Easel.ly just might be the thing

— Ivan Lajara (@ivanlajara) October 1, 2012

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Interactives can easily take time, resources and skill-sets that not every newsroom (or individual journalist) has. For those situations, ThingLink is simple tool that anyone can pick up and use today (or, really, right now) and create an engaging experience that helps tell a story.

We’ve written about ThingLink before, but as more notable newsroom uses pop up, it’s worth again walking through where its strengths lay.

To do that recap: take a look at this interactive image that former contributor Elana Zak, now social media producer for The Wall Street Journal, used as an example in our previous piece. It was inspired by this tagged image by Berliner Morgenpost. Hover over the dots.

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Comic Sans is the proverbial red-headed step child of typefaces. But beyond being derided for its cutesy looks and people’s penchant for using it in inappropriate communications, a recent “experiment” conducted by filmmaker Errol Morris in a piece he wrote for NYT.com shows that perception of the font can cause readers to do more than snicker. It may cause them to question your facts and affect whether they believe what you’ve written at all, he concludes in a follow-up.

We all know that we are influenced in many, many ways — many of which we remain blissfully unaware of. Could typefaces be one of them? Could the mere selection of a typeface influence us to believe one thing rather than another? Could typefaces work some unseen magic? Or malefaction?
Don’t get me wrong. The underlying truth of the sentence “Gold has an atomic number of 79” is not dependent on the typeface in which it is written. The sentence is true regardless of whether it is displayed in Helvetica, Georgia or even the much-maligned Comic Sans. But are we more inclined to believe that gold has an atomic number of 79 if we read it in Georgia, the typeface of The New York Times online, rather than in Helvetica?

To test this, he wrote a post in which a script changed the typeface of an identical passage and then asked readers (apparently more than 45,000 of them) to take a quiz asking whether they believed it to be true. The fonts tested were Baskerville, Computer Modern, Georgia, Helvetica, Comic Sans and Trebuchet.
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