Interactive News Via Online Gaming

Incorporating news stories into online games is a way to encourage deeper engagement with the audience.

This is the view of entertainment technologists Eric Brown and Asi Burak – the founders of the Play the News website.

Visitors to the website can play a range of games based on news events or long-running global issues, taking on different roles and sharing comments and ideas with fellow gamers.

For example, a current game about October’s commando raid in Syria by American forces enables the player to take actions and make predictions representing either the US or Syria.



And it features video footage about the incident from Reuters.com, as well as maps of the region and information on events before and after the raid.

The duo’s company – Impact Games – has also created a popular online game based on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict entitled Peacemaker.

In an interview with Poynter Online, Brown said that Play the News helps people to gain an understanding into complex issues.

“It’s the concept and forms that we’ve developed that can help people understand the issue: looking for the underlying issues and then projecting into the future what the possible roles and actions might be.”

He added: “When you package it in this way, you’re engaging someone with an interactive.

“You’re increasing the likelihood that they’ll come back because they care about the story.

“Or the likelihood that they’re following the story because they want to see the next event in that string of actions.”

How To: Plan Online Projects

A step-by-step guide to creating online journalism projects has been published by academic and blogger Ryan Thornburg.

On The Future of News blog, Thornburg has posted a six-point guide to producing an online news feature which takes journalists from the initial brainstorming stages through to execution and realisation of the project.

Here are his six stages:

*A product concept

In its simplest form, Thornburg believes this means starting “with a good question”.

But getting to this good question takes in finding out who your audience is and what they want to know.

*A storyboard

Thornburg writes that the storyboard’s “real power lies in its ability to get you thinking about non-linear storytelling - stories through which each consumer can choose his or her own path”.

He adds that when storyboarding “you’ll also want to note the medium you’ll use to tell that part of the story.”

*Asset management

Comprises several elements including file-naming conventions, version control and stylesheets.

*A clear workflow

Using a dedicated software package or Excel / Google spreadsheets, this helps organise who’s doing what tasks etc.

*A financial budget

“Even if you don’t have to worry about the financial costs of building something, it’s important to keep a constant eye on the opportunity costs.”

*A testing and quality assurance procedure


Visit Thornburg’s The Future of News blog for the full post, which contains links to some useful planning resources.

Obama Pledges Tested Online

Journalists at the St Petersburg Times are holding the new president to account with their all new topical Obameter.

Featured on The Times’s PolitiFact.com website, the Obameter will measure Barack Obama’s success in meeting some 500 of his pre-election promises.



To create the list of promises, reporters had to plough through transcripts from speeches, TV interviews and more during Obama’s campaign to find the things making up his future to-do list.

PolitiFact explains the process: “To make sure we selected promises that could be measured, we set some definitions.

“We said a promise ‘is not a position statement. It is a prospective statement of an action or outcome that is verifiable’.”

Journalists then track the progress of these promises putting them into categories: Promise Kept, Promise Broken, Compromise, Stalled, In The Works and No Action.



The site’s editor Bill Adair told Editor & Publisher: “Although we rely on the new technology of the Web to publish our work, our mission remains a simple and traditional one: to empower democracy.”

PolitiFact.com was set up by the St Petersburg Times to fact check the statements of politicians via its Truth-o-Meter checks.