ProPublica
Retuning the Online Newsroom
The traditional newspaper business is in decline, and all forms of publishing are in transition, so journalism needs new models and new forms.
ProPublica is one of those new forms—an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. They started in just 2008, and earlier this year they won a Pulitzer Prize, the first online-only source to do so.
Challenge
ProPublica’s work is compelling, excellent, and exciting, but their site didn’t match their high-quality content.
The site had grown organically over its two-year history, driven by traditional investigations and the development of innovative news applications. New visitors might come from anywhere and land on any page with no context and no knowledge of ProPublica. Our challenge lay in comprehending the operations of the organization, their vision for the future, and all of the myriad interwoven forms accountability journalism could take online. Establishing credibility and creating contextual paths were paramount.
We set out to draw and engage more readers by keeping the writing at the forefront, helping people find what they want, and making lengthy stories as enjoyable as shorter ones.
Solution
Working closely with the ProPublica team, we identified the key story types and their constituent parts. In doing so, we unearthed a lot of complexity. Content types were defined as much by their relationship to one another as by their core elements. We defined a set of navigation systems based on context rather than hierarchy to orient readers in the stories, create the right expectations, and present opportunities for exploration.
We looked at how investigations evolved, whether they started with an assertion or a dataset, so that we could create containers and paths that maintained contextual relationships for readers no matter at what point they first encountered the story. We moved away from broad topics that failed to reflect the true publishing priorities of the organization, despite their naive appeal as an organizing principle. We worked towards a more data-driven future, creating a home for interactive tools, graphics, and data related to the investigations. This offers another way for concerned citizens and policy makers to explore evolving stories and a starting point for journalists and community members researching their own.
From a visual branding perspective, we knew that ProPublica wanted to stay with some key identity elements: the magnifying glass and the color blue. Working from these, we created a more sophisticated visual system that reflects the quality of the journalism with a strong grid and a few visual cues, and then gets out of the way. We provided the ProPublica team with a strong, simple design that is flexible enough for them to focus on what they do best.
Typography is perhaps no more critical anywhere than in the publication of news, so we were pleased that TypeKit came along. The ProPublica site features headlines in Meta Serif and solid HTML-based typography throughout.