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12 categories of digital storytelling formats

The BBC's R&D lab shares 12 story formats used for news that "aren’t legacies from print or broadcast, that try to use the affordances of digital, that have been specifically designed for news and that are re-usable across stories and genres."

Tristan Ferne, with the BBC’s R&D team, sums up 12 types of digital storytelling formats, with examples for each. Specifically covered are:

  1. Short & vertical video; often with captions, pioneered by AJ+ and NowThis

  2. Horizontal *Stories; swipeable cards like Snapchat Stories and its clones

  3. Longform scrollytelling; evolved from the original NY Times Snowfall

  4. Structured news; like the original Circa or the reusable cards at Vox.com

  5. Live blogs; frequently used for big events

  6. Listicles; like Buzzfeed

  7. Newsletters and briefings; which seem to be on trend right now

  8. Timelines; which I expected to be more common

  9. Bots and chat; from the chat-styled Qz app to the many attempts to deliver news within chat apps

  10. Personalised; which typically is used to filter the choice of stories, rather than the story itself

  11. Data visualisation; from graphs to interactives

  12. VR and AR