A project of Icfj

Media organizations experiment with digital storytelling features at Winter Olympics

by Christine Schmidt
Oct 30, 2018 in Digital Journalism
VR

Each edition of the Olympics offers a shining host city, compelling tales of athletic triumph, and an opportunity for news organizations to test out new storytelling technology with a meticulously scheduled global event.

The 2018 Winter Olympics are no different. Here are some of the Olympic digital news coverage experiments to keep an eye on during the Winter Games, running until February 25.

NBC (+ Snapchat + BuzzFeed)

The proud owner of the Games’ American broadcast rights, NBC has a combination of live/virtual reality video, a collaborative podcast with Vox Media, and of course Snapchat up the wazoo, thanks to NBCUniversal’s prior investment in the company.

On the NBC Sports VR app, footage is available to watch on VR headsets like Google Cardboard/Daydream, Samsung Gear VR, and Windows Mixed Reality headsets — or you can just watch it with your phone. (Tilt your phone to see more of the scene.) At the outset of the Games, it showed some behind-the-scenes of the crowd streaming into the stadium and Olympians preparing to compete — but do people watch the Olympics for the immersive experience or the breathtaking stories of sport?

For the latter, NBC is broadcasting much of the Games live in what it’s calling the “most live Winter Olympics ever,” including a portion on Snapchat. It will introduce the Snapchat Live tool designed for TV networks, according to Digiday’s Sahil Patel, to cover key moments of the games. They’ll also utilize cards built into Snapchat’s Our Stories to show the Games’ schedule, medal counts, etc. and launch a handful of new shows on Snapchat Discover. The shows clearly fit Snapchat’s quick-paced, flashy style, which NBC News has already been practicing with its twice-daily show. The shows feature the trials Olympians face to compete and the stories of how they made it to the Olympics in the first place.

BuzzFeed (in which NBCUniversal also has a hefty investment) is working with NBC to craft content for Snapchat, similar to their arrangement in 2016. And The Hollywood Reporter’s Natalie Jarvey also notes that special car coverage from NBC will be shown to Uber riders (not necessarily in South Korea) during the Games via the Uber app, showing “exclusive ‘in-car’ interviews as [athletes and announcers] travel to and from the various Pyeongchang venues.”

Viewers can also satiate their thirst for the stories coming out of the Olympics with NBC’s podcast partnership with Vox called The Podium. The Podium was introduced in December, with early episodes focusing on the global political and cultural context of these Games, but it also includes an Intel-sponsored episode on how technology is changing the Olympics. (You’ll never guess: NBCUniversal is also an investor in Vox Media.)

The New York Times

As my colleague Ricardo Bilton reported, The New York Times has brought back its personal messaging feature connecting readers to an on-the-ground reporter. Instead of using SMS, as in the 2016 Olympics, the team has revamped it to run through their mobile app (much cheaper than mass texting, they learned!) and to personalize content sent to users based on specific sports interest.

“One of the big benefits here is that we do control the whole space,” Troy Griggs, graphics editor at the Times, told Ricardo. “So much more is on the table now. Any interactive experience we build now we can tie together in a way that we wouldn’t be able to elsewhere, even on Instagram or Snapchat. We can really integrate our content and experience in a way that is new.”

On the heels of its augmented reality announcement — “Something profound has happened to your camera” — the Times has also introduced Olympics coverage in AR. Its first feature explores the multidimensional dynamics of Olympic bodies.

The full AR experience is available in the Times’ iOS app, with some nifty-but-sub-AR visuals also available on the website. The Times also translated its AR feature into four pages of print.

The Washington Post

In 2016, the Post used a bot to write certain Olympics results stories (there are a lot of events!). This year, the Post said there would be “automated storytelling to generate short multi-sentence updates for readers on the opening and closing ceremonies, medal events and the latest updates in major sporting categories such as figure skating and hockey,” though both the Twitter bot and the Messenger bot seem to be dormant this cycle.

The Post also introduced an AR quiz-based game in its classic app for users to play with the speeds of competitors in nine Winter Olympic sports. I’m not sure what more the AR component added beyond an in-the-room experience as the mini Olympians raced over my desktop keyboard versus just keeping the game within the app, but this game could ride high on the group sofa competition HQ Trivia has thrust upon us.

The paper’s Olympics coverage also includes a daily newsletter and, in a nod to the Post’s recent lean toward demystifying the jobs of journalists, first-person accounts of covering the Games from rookie Olympics reporter Chelsea Janes.

Other ways news orgs are Olympic-izing

This article originally appeared on Nieman Lab. It has been edited and republished on IJNet with permission. 

Main image CC-licensed by pexels via bruce mars.