And Now, the Cartoon News 107
theodp writes "Would you read a cartoon version of Slashdot? Quality stuff, not half-baked MS-Paint posts like 'Introducing Microsoft Monocle and Self-Driving Bentley'. Erin Polgreen has big plans for illustrated journalism. In October, Polgreen will be launching Symbolia, a tablet-based magazine of illustrated journalism, through Apple's App Store. 'Illustrated journalism draws you in, Polgreen explains. 'It's accessible in a way 5,000 words of text isn't. Regardless of age, gender or anything, you grasp it faster than most journalism.' Polgreen follows in the footsteps of other cartoonist-journalists, including Joe Kubert (RIP), Joe Sacco, and Josh Neufeld."
Nope. Not from that app store. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Would you read a cartoon version of Slashdot? (Score:5, Interesting)
When will people seriously get it into their think marketer heads that although cartoons or videos may be more initially eye-catching, they have low information density and are worse at getting actual information across than plain old text?
Not necessarily. Depending on what's being reported on, a picture can be worth a thousand words. And "information density" isn't always the only objective of journalism. A lot of stories are about evoking the emotion of the situation, so a lot of it tends to be descriptive. Quality news sources like the BBC are pretty good at almost transporting you there by capturing the sensations of what's going on. Illustrated news lends itself very well to that kind of reporting.
Re:Would you read a cartoon version of Slashdot? (Score:4, Interesting)
When will people seriously get it into their think marketer heads that although cartoons or videos may be more initially eye-catching, they have low information density and are worse at getting actual information across than plain old text?
First, density != effectiveness in human-to-human communications.
Second, text has medium density... it's more dense than a comic but less dense than a well-designed graph.
Finally, consider that your view of cartoons may not include everything the medium is capable of. Have you seen, for example, Scott McCloud's comic-book introduction to Google Chrome [google.com]? Plain old text could have conveyed the same information, but it's doubtful the audience would have been as large or absorbed as much. Scott argues that cartoons can be more effective [amazon.com] than pure text, and while I suspect he's only partially right, it is still worthwhile to try experiments like the one Polgreen is talking about.
Re:Two words (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's an idea:
.' .' # '.
1 '. _
2-= (~) =-
3
Why don't we just replace slashdot articles with ascii art?
Of course, we'll need to modify the junk character filter for this to work....
Nooooo!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Please.
No.
Giga bandwidth wasting graphic simplification.
Text is best.
Be eloquent.
Re:Would you read a cartoon version of Slashdot? (Score:4, Interesting)
It depends upon what you mean by "information" or what you mean by "news" in the case of this article (cartoon journalism).
At its best, "the news" is much more than just raw data. A graph can visualize data but it cannot provide analysis. And the thing we're sorely lacking in most of our media (no, one of the many things) is serious analysis. I don't even mean "unbiased" analysis, because there is no such thing. I mean actual analysis, with some disclosed opinion as gravy.
Seeing the streets of New Orleans flooded and a body floating facedown may be worth a thousand words, but it does not tell me what I need to know. It does not tell me about the failure of the Army Corps of Engineers or the history of those levees. It does not tell me how Katrina compares to most hurricanes that hit the Gulf Coast. It's a dramatic picture, "dense" in the parlance of visualization, but has no value as news. I could have gotten the same information that "Hurricane hits New Orleans. People die." from a tickertape or a tweet.
And I really, REALLY don't need a moral equivalence based on some coward's notion of "fairness". I don't need the kind of BS "fact-checking" like the Washington Post or politifact, where facts are only checked against conventional wisdom, not against what's actually happening or has actually happened. And always now, the only bias is not a political one in the usual sense, but a bias based on the corporate hegemony. The conventional wisdom is the convention of mindless consumerism.
It's not that hard, really, except for the change in the business model of the news media. Before there was an expectation of huge profits, when most media outlets were family or individually owned by people who had a sense of civic duty (even with their political bias generously applied), we were able to discern some useful picture of our larger world from the news media.
Now we get either useless posturing or glaring images of things over which we have absolutely no control. That isn't news. That's exploitation of the consumers of media.