Using interactive features to explain business issues

Ryo Yamaguchi of Cision writes Thursday about how some media are using interactive technology to explain the federal debt issue and other complicated financial topics.

Yamaguchi writes, “Work on such features has been going on for some time in news media, but some have taken the current budget impasse as an opportunity to push the envelope on not only what is technically possible to do on a Web page, but what is possible to do as a news story. The Associated Press has recently designed a number of interactive features detailing the pricing and purpose of some of the most important budgetary items, the most thorough and media-rich of which is Debt Dilemma, a series of graphs, columns and timelines that provides both a structural view of the important parts of federal revenue and spending, as well as a linear view of the events and decisions that have led to the current crisis.

“The New York Times in November of last year had a more direct approach, presenting a puzzle to readers wherein they take the helm of the nation’s finances to try and close gaps five and 10 years out. The most comprehensive of an attempt at such a feature, however, is the recent interactive put together by the Public Insight Network at American Public Media, which is so immersive of an experience it has reached the level of game: Budget Hero 2.0.

“The idea of presenting a complex news subject such as the budget through the medium of a game is so perfect it seems obvious in hindsight, but there are very real benefits to the innovative approach. Andrew Haeg, co-founder, senior producer and analyst at the Public Insight Network, described the benefit as ‘providing a holistic view of the issues.’

“‘The typical way that you cover a budget is piece by piece,’ he said. ‘This person is fighting for this or that bill, etcetera, and the cumulative effect for the average news audience is a bunch of disconnected pieces that don’t really add up to a holistic picture of the hard tradeoffs involved in balancing or managing a budget. We saw kind of early on that a game could, in a really unique way, bring all the disparate pieces in and help people grapple with those tradeoffs.'”

Read more here.