Visual Journalism Empowering Journalism at BBC

Joanne Kuai

22, February 2019 | London

Journalisms are coming up with innovative formats to enhance audience engagement. At BBC, the Visual Journalism team brings interactive storytelling to the widest and most diverse audience possible by creating beautifully crafted, innovative, bespoke products, the team lift the BBC’s output above its competitors.

Toby Cox, Software Engineering Team Lead at BBC, introduces that the visual journalism team works tightly together with the editorial, design, data and development teams aim to produce content that informs, educates and entertains. The team takes narratives beyond traditional words, photos and videos, striving to create formats that will define new journalistic standards.

“I believe we are the only BBC department to simultaneously output to the highest accessibility standards, researching and implementing new ways of dealing with complex subjects, output in 41 languages, operate a team spread across four time zones and distribute our code to 9 different endpoints…” says Mr Cox.

Mr Cox says they have team members based in Delhi, Lagos, Jakarta and Nairobi to serve the audience in the local context. With their products reaching nine different platforms and being translated into 41 languages, they can reach as many as 369 endpoints so far, and the number is counting.

He demonstrates some examples of their works on US Midterms, Brazilian Election manifesto, Life expectancy calculators, among which, some have reached a considerable number of audiences worldwide.

Mr Cox was speaking at the Product Development and Design Thinking Summit, which took place in London 21-22 February 2019. As part of the 9th Data & AI for Media Week, the event aims to inspire participants to imagine how to earn revenue with AI-driven products for their own media companies.

The Data & AI for Media Week was created in 2013 by World Newsmedia Network’s Martha Stone Williams. Since then, the conference has been held in London five times, Hong Kong once and twice in New York. The 10th Data & AI for Media Week is planned for San Francisco and Silicon Valley for 29 April to 3 May 2019.  https://sanfrancisco.dataaimedia.org/

As part of the 10th Data & AI for Media Week, the 2019 Global BIGGIES Awards competition is also calling for entries. The BIGGIES Awards aims to reward media companies’ best practices in Data and Artificial Intelligence products, projects and strategies. The deadline to submit BIGGIES entries is 1st, April 2019.  https://sanfrancisco.dataaimedia.org/