On Innovation

When details of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal and the subsequent closure of the best-selling British tabloid hit the Web, social media went into overdrive and the continuing saga became a global trending topic. Newsrooms around the world elevated the online conversation with articles, interactive graphics, video and various media.

One of the most informative and visually arresting synopses of Tuesday’s British Parliament hearing is The Guardian’s interactive timeline of Twitter activity during Rupert Murdoch’s testimony. The word bubbles grow larger or smaller depending on the frequency of use in the Twittersphere and the most retweeted Twitter messages in each particular time frame are displayed in the sidebar on the left.

The nation’s debt is inching closer to the legal limit of $14.3 trillion. That’s a pretty big number, but what does a trillion dollars look like? A mountainous stack of $100 dollar bills as wide as a football field and almost as high as the Statue of Liberty, according to a visualization at WTFnoway.com.

With no immediate end in sight for debt-limit talks, news organizations are taking to the Web to explain the importance of these discussions and what they mean for government spending.

CBC News’ interactive chart  shows the history of the U.S. debt limit since 1961. You can also visualize the U.S. current spending with BGov’s interactive graphic.

The Post’s Graphics team has also created an interactive visualization — this one lets you choose which government departments receive funding and see which Americans are affected by your hypothetical choices.

If you’re still having trouble understanding what this whole debt limit thing is all about, check out The Post’s motion graphic that explains the federal debt in simple terms.

Mark S. Luckie/National Innovations Editor

The President’s first Twitter Town hall inspired not only marked participation from Twitter users but also analysis and visualizations of the interaction surrounding the event.

During the event, Barack Obama sent the first presidential live-tweet (and became the first president to be Instagrammed doing so). The Post liveblogged the town hall and featured tweets from inside the room by Post reporters.

One of the most notable visualizations to emerge after the town hall is Boston.com’s simple but effective bubble chart of the questions asked by Twitter users compared to those asked by journalists. Very quickly, one can tell that journalists asked far more questions about Congress and negotiations, whereas social media users focused on jobs and the deficit.

The White House, in partnership with Mass Relevance, a social media consulting company, analyzed in real time the subject of incoming tweets that included the #askobama hashtag. Twitter analytics provider TwitSprout provided its own visual analysis of the more than 70,000 tweets sent during the town hall.

After the town hall, The New York Times analyzed the length of each of Obama’s answers and found that on average, each response was more than 2,000 characters, nearly 15 times the number of allowed characters per tweet on Twitter.

If you’re looking to create your own analysis of Twitter users’ interaction with the President, Expert Labs has posted spreadsheet files that include mentions and replies to the @whitehouse Twitter account from April 2010 to July 2011.

Mark S. Luckie/National Innovations Editor

As protests continue in Greece, the country’s financial crisis seems to be in check — at least for now. If you’re still wondering what precipitated the financial strain on the country, look no further than the following multimedia explainers.

In “The Greek Crisis Explained” video series, the financial problems of the country are stripped down to kid-friendly, animated allegories that anyone can understand.

Photographers, both professional and amateur, were stationed at every conceivable location to capture the launch of the Endeavor shuttle Monday. In the end, it was a photo taken from a passing plane that captured the attention of the world. The striking image of the shuttle skyrocketing into the stratosphere was captured on a cell phone by airplane passenger Stefanie Gordon and posted to Twitter once she reached the ground.

The photograph ultimately went viral and even made it to the front of the St. Petersburg Times newspaper.

Photo: AP/Stefanie Gordon

The sky-high photo wasn’t the only celestial image to capture the attention of the web this week. If the shuttle whetted your appetite for out-of-this-world photography, check out this interactive, 5,000-megapixel image of the night sky. The digital image was captured by photographer Nick Risinger and was created from more than 37,000 exposures captured in various locations around the world.

In keeping with the starry trend, this photo of the night skies above Ireland by astrophotographer Stephane Vetter was also circulated widely on the web recently. The popular images are further proof that a photo doesn’t have to be produced by a newsroom or even appear on a mainstream media news site for it to be seen by millions of people.

Even before President Obama made his Sunday night announcement that U.S. forces had killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, many around the world had already heard a rumor that the  long-hunted al-Qaeda leader was dead.

So who was the first to break the news of Osama’s death? Was it the IT consultant who inadvertently live tweeted the raid of Osama’s compound? Was it Donald Rumsfeld’s former chief of staff Keith Urbahn, who tweeted a rumor he heard from a TV news producer? Or was it action superstar Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who was one of the first people to tweet about bin Laden’s death?

In the end, whoever broke the news first is the person or media outlet you heard it from first.  Even the old-fashioned newspaper showed that it’s still a big player: The morning after the president’s speech, the Newseum’s daily collection of front pages received a surge in online traffic.

Of course, the most important thing is to get the news—and names—right. When information comes in at lightning speed, the chances for error multiply. Below is a video mashup of the “Osama”/”Obama” mixups made by mainstream news media. The Post was guilty of it, too, including this writer. What’s most important when that happens is making the correction—and making it fast.

Mark S. Luckie / National Innovations Editor

“Royal wedding.” The two words either fill you with delight or bring on a wave of royal fatigue.

The pomp and pageantry of the coming ceremony is rivaled only by the media coverage. On the Web, the royal courtship is chronicled in timelines, interactive features, blogs, photo galleries, video, quizzes and, of course, a Lifetime movie dedicated to Prince William and Kate Middleton’s royal wooing. (A list of the various types of online coverage can be found at the end of this post.)



While a recent New York Times/CBS poll shows that only 6 percent of Americans are following news of the royal festivities very closely, Google Trends and numbers from inside The Post suggest there is an insatiable appetite for royal wedding news. Also worth noting is recent data from Nielsen that indicates American media are covering the wedding much more than UK and Australian counterparts.

Not-so-distant memories of Princess Diana’s wedding extravaganza, combined with Kate Middleton’s Cinderella story and other factors, probably contribute to the appetite for royal wedding news. The question is whether all the coverage, time and resources dedicated to the event is overkill, especially for stateside audiences.

How newsrooms and developers are using technology to explain the federal budget and a possible government shutdown, brought to you by Mark Luckie.

Featured in this video:
Washington Post: The looming government shutdown (motion graphic)
Jack Daniels Explains The Deficit (video)
Obama Budget Cuts Visualization (video)
New York Times: Budget Puzzle: You Fix the Budget
NYT: How Twitter Users Balanced the Budget
Budget Climb

Mark S. Luckie/National Innovations Editor