Why 7,000 people die needlessly every day — A critical analysis
By: Umar Hassan
Tags: Data Journalism, Med7334, Narrative

Credit: Sky News

Carmen Aguilar Garcia and Philip Whiteside published an interactive longread in August 2019 on the Sky News website on why 7,000 people die needlessly every day.

Within the confines of data journalism, this is a great example of a longform data story that has some narrative concepts built into the story.

This can be applied both critically for media workers and data storytellers who are engaging audiences in their interactive pieces for their news organisations and publishers.

The article uses multimodal techniques to present this story on the Sky News website. Despite the primary communication of an online news article being text-based, there is a heavy emphasis on using data visualisation to visualise what the figures mean and why the audience should care to read this article.

The genre

It’s recognisable when you scroll through this story, it is aligned within the genre of data and interactive journalism.

With a story that has a global health focus, the genres tend to overlap with data and health, particularly around the issues of deaths from preventable diseases.

If you break the genre down even further, then this story is classified under the scrollytelling genre, alongside data and interactive journalism.

Drasko Vlahovic defines scrollytelling as:

“It refers to online multimedia stories that unfold as you scroll. The stories can be longreads that allow users to choose which parts or aspects they want to explore.”

When you start reading the story, it shows a visualisation of dots, which represent one person for every death from a vaccine-preventable disease.

The narrative when you read the story from the start has a powerful and emotional effect on the reader, which is followed by similar visualisations with captions as you scroll through the webpage.

An issue with starting a longform data story with a scrollytelling approach of charts and captions is that the characters are introduced later in the piece, making it very abstract.

This means that the reader has to scroll through the first half of the article looking at charts and numbers before they get onto the more interesting parts around saving lives and anti-vaccination.

The use of scrollytelling at the start of the vaccine-preventable diseases story focuses in on a fact while you scroll through each visualisation in the article. Credit: Sky News

Deconstructing the audience who would read this article

It’s worth remembering when creating media, audiences are constructed. When it comes to figuring out the audience for this article, it would cater to readers who are keen to learn about public health issues (preventable deaths and vaccination), as well as health professionals.

As an individual who regularly reads longform data pieces from several news outlets, I am able to dedicate my time to reading an article like this on a regular basis.

However, putting myself in the shoes of someone else (a retail worker or administrator), then I might not have as much time to consume an article that covers an issue in depth as this piece.

Helen Fulton argues that trying to identify a literal mass audience is “unknowable” beyond individuals in small groups (Fulton, 2005).

Applying this in an editorial choices context, the journalists and developers involved in creating this piece for Sky News.

They would have found that the article not only needs to be readable for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.

This is an important consideration to make when you’re creating narratives for stories that can be read on various devices.

At this stage, what alternative editorial choices could have been made?

As the subject covered goes in-depth around the causes of preventable diseases, this longform piece could be turned into a TV documentary or into a 90 second video for audiences on Sky News social media platforms.

The article could be turned into a series of articles, that cover the issue in far more detail compared with one longform article.

What’s the setting behind the story and characters?

In terms of the setting, it’s very abstract as there’s no clear setting behind the story due to the fact that the charts touch upon the area of disease in a broad way.

Once we go further into the story, that is when it touches on the issues of vaccination with children.

While the main setting focuses globally on the countries where people who have died from those diseases, there is an additional setting around how diseases which were once eradicated are re-emerging across the world.

The narrative is built on finding solutions to stopping preventable diseases from killing people, as well as preventing disinformation around vaccines.

That’s where the main characters come into the setting of the story, which is focused around public health and preventable diseases. They create the movement behind this longform piece.

The representatives from the World Health Organisation, GAVI, and UNICEF play a central role as characters in this story.

However, the first named character is almost half-way through the story with Robin Nandy, who explains how with more children born, vaccinations need to continue to stop preventable deaths from happening.

Robin Nandy, Principal Adviser and Chief of Immunisation at UNICEF is the first named character in this piece under the title ‘VACCINATION IS NOT FINISHED BUSINESS’. Credit: Sky News

While the health organisations are seen to be the heroes in this story, there is a villain which is the anti-vaccine movement.

The central character in this is a study Dr Andrew Wakefield made around autism being caused by the MMR vaccine, which led to him being struck off the UK medical registry.

This in turn creates a narrative of uncertainty, as well as an element of distrust and conflict with governments and health organisations from families who are vaccinating people from preventable diseases.

It’s an essential part of creating that movement around finding solutions to stop people dying from these diseases, as well as highlighting the issues of why individuals are sceptical about vaccines preventing diseases.

From an editorial decision context, bringing in the anti-vaccination movement in two-thirds through the story was a way of bringing the character to balance the representatives from the health bodies who have spoken in the piece.

Having a less abstract setting around preventable deaths and focusing on the cause and effect for a particular group using a similar longform format would make context of the setting easier for the reader.

The issue is time because with interviewing case studies, particularly young adults is that the journalists are having to move forward with getting the story done, which can make reading this piece very dry in places.

The main narrative techniques used

Throughout the article, there is a strong use of iconography with the interactive charts being used to illustrate improvements or declines in vaccination across various countries.

In particular, the use of an interactive visualisation is a great way of showing which countries have been vaccinated against a preventable disease (i.e. measles).

It’s a good example of using diegesis (showing the figures for those deaths in countries around that disease with data visualisation) and mimensis (telling what could be done to prevent these diseases from killing people globally) to highlight this issue in a factual, and evidence-based way.

The narrators (Carmen and Philip) use the visuals and text to paint a picture for the reader to explain why people are dying from these diseases and what could be done to stop it from killing many more people through vaccination.

As the case with online articles, you cannot see or hear the narrator so you have to paint a picture of what the situation is in your mind.

It’s one of the biggest challenges when you are working on a data story and that’s keeping the audience engaged and interested in reading the piece from start to finish.

Why should we care?

Despite the story being covered pre-coronavirus, there are many reasons why we should care about this story.

As a journalist, there are a lot of storytelling and narrative techniques I can utilise in my own work. The use of data visualisation and journalism to dissect and explain about why people are dying from vaccine-preventable diseases.

The narrative of the anti-vaccination movement and health organisations makes it clear that there’s a narrative of urgency and conflict to prevent those diseases from becoming endemic all around the world.

I would like to pursue data stories that have a clear narrative and focus while utilising new storytelling techniques to bring these stories to life.

This could be through the format of a longform article, an explainer or covering a story in-depth around a particular issue (i.e. privacy).

At the end of the day, data journalism is not just about numbers, it’s about people and every data point has a story that is waiting to be shared with the world.

You can read the “Why 7,000 people die needlessly every day” interactive longread on the Sky News website here.