The long drop — A critical analysis of Tortoise’s investigation on COVID and UK unemployment
By: Umar Hassan
Tags: Data Journalism, Med7334, Narrative

The long drop — A critical analysis of Tortoise’s investigation on COVID and UK unemployment

Here is a critical analysis on Tortoise’s investigation into how COVID has left millions of people in the UK fearing unemployment. Umar Hassan Follow Oct 2, 2020 · 8 min read

Tortoise has not only an online website and an app to read its journalism content, it also has a podcast, called the Slow Newscast where it investigates a topic it has covered every week. Credit: Tortoise Media

Tortoise is a member-funded digital news publication which specialises in “slow news” (investigative journalism).

The publication’s focus is not on fast-paced breaking news, but what’s driving the news agenda whether that’s a story relating to coronavirus, technology or health.

It holds a series of weekly events, called ThinkIns, in which members collaborate with journalists to work on stories that are based around a number of subjects.

ThinkIns are not just restricted to the open newsroom format, Tortoise hold ThinkIn events with well-known speakers on subjects such as mental health, technology, and politics.

Here’s a ThinkIn Tortoise has done around disinformation, titled the “Infodemic: who’s really behind the COVID conspiracies?” to view below:

My latest critical analysis is a longform piece Chris Cook wrote for Tortoise, titled “The long drop”.

The article covers how the United Kingdom is heading towards a historic recession where millions of workers are facing unemployment due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Genre, mode and audience

When you first read this article on Tortoise’s website, the story is classed under both the investigative and data journalism genres.

However, there are additional subjects that the article covers, which includes business, travel and economics that are highlighted throughout the piece with COVID and unemployment.

One problem with this approach of covering multiple subjects at the same time with an investigation like this is that the article may be incoherent and all over the place in terms of reading it from start to finish.

This is an issue I need to be wary about when working on investigative data journalism stories that cover several subjects at once.

In other words, make sure the story you’re covering has a clear structure and subject matter for your audience to read through.

The article itself is multimodal with the use of text, combined with data visualisation and images throughout the piece.

When you first read this piece, there is a feature image of young people jumping into the water, which acts as a metaphor for what could happen to millions of people who are facing mass unemployment in the UK.

With Tortoise being a member-funded publication, the audience who are likely to read this investigation would be individuals who have paid a yearly membership to access their weekly content and events they hold.

Tortoise have three tiers of membership that audiences can pay for, including the Founding membership (£250 per year), Standard membership (£100 per year), and the Under 30 membership (£50 per year).

Regarding the membership audience who would be interested in this article, it would be business professionals, furloughed workers and economists.

They are interested in the long-term implications that COVID presents to unemployment, as well as how those cities and towns recover from the pandemic.

At this stage, what editorial choices could be made? The article could be turned into an episode for its Slow Newscast podcast series.

One other possibility could be an online video documentary, which shows the impact of COVID could have to people living in Penzance, Plymouth, and Exeter.

The issue with creating a documentary on a subject around COVID and UK unemployment is time, as well as health and safety risks.

This means that the cost of producing a documentary for broadcast could end up costing more money for Tortoise than what is required for their weekly investigative pieces they do.

Narrator and characters

The narrator (Chris Cook) not only plays an important part in telling the stories of the people who are affected by COVID in the three parts of South West England he visits.

Unlike most data journalism stories that have an effaced, invisible narrator, the narrator was on-location when he visited Penzance, Plymouth and Exeter at the time to report on the story.

Julian Murphet explains how verbal narratives do not have the impersonal experience of audio-visual narratives such as films, but at the same time, recognises as humans, we use language to tell stories to ourselves and others all the time.

However, this investigative piece does have the same problem with data journalism articles and investigations, which is the lack of characters at the start of the article.

This could potentially turn off readers who are reading the article and are wanting to see how unemployment is going to affect people living in Penzance, Plymouth and Exeter.

The movement generated in the first quarter of the piece is through the data visualisations that are related to issues around the UK’s economic output and the sectors facing a potential wave of unemployment after furlough.

It’s until we reach Penzance, the first town that’s covered in this piece that the first named characters are revealed (Mary Smith, Susan Stuart, and Dennis Peacock).

There’s additional movement in this part of the piece where it goes from Stuart to Peacock, which shows two different emotions from the characters themselves.

With Stuart, who owns a guest house is gloomy about the prospects of her business returning to normal post-COVID.

For Dennis Peacock, who runs parts of the Penzance antiques centre, he is more optimistic as consumers leave their homes from isolation.

There’s an additional narrative of winners and losers as you go further into the piece where the narrator visits the other two cities in South West England, Plymouth and Exeter.

Why did the narrator decide to introduce the characters in this way? With a public health crisis that has caused so many problems for the UK economy, the editorial decision to introduce the characters was to show how the contrasting fortunes of businesses in Penzance as they reopen from the restrictions.

If the narrator decided to focus on a doom and gloom narrative with the characters in this story, it would have been a more depressing read.

It would give the reader the impression that businesses may never recover (which is true), but would paint an inaccurate picture of those towns and cities affected by COVID.

Narrative structure

Using Cortazzi’s structure for narrative, we can start to deconstruct Tortoise’s long drop investigative piece into six main elements for this story.

Abstract

“Millions are fearful about losing their jobs as the cliff edge of a historic recession looms”

Orientation

Due to COVID, the UK economic output has collapsed but there’s still low unemployment to the furlough scheme.

Complication/Evaluation

Businesses who have furloughed staff may need to cut costs to keep their companies afloat, leading to millions losing their jobs.

Result

Penzance, Plymouth, and Exeter facing uncertainty over future of economies if COVID resurges, leading to more jobs being lost.

Coda

Quote from Luke Pollard MP (Lab, Plymouth Sutton and Devonport)

“We’re not yet near the end of furlough — where we still have a lot of business, especially in tourism, hospitality. And in our aerospace sector, that’s still not yet back to work.”

What is interesting about the start of this piece is it does not incorporate the inverted pyramid approach, but the WSJ Feature Formula approach to narrative.

There is some background into where we are at the moment in regards to the UK economy with COVID and the looming recession that is just around the corner with millions facing unemployment.

The introduction paragraphs highlight about how the British economy has left “terra firma”, which is the use of an anecdote to describe where the economic recession is heading as output and working hours collapsed under lockdown.

It also highlights the problems and obstacles that Penzance, Plymouth and Exeter are facing with loss of local jobs, as well as where those three areas are economically.

The ending of this piece is more of a what happens next scenario due to the fact the narrator does not know how severe the labour market will be hit once furlough ends.

Setting and movement

The setting of Tortoise’s Long Drop article is very abstract as it’s focused on only three towns and cities in South West England (Penzance, Plymouth, and Exeter) and how they’ll be affected by unemployment post-COVID.

When you read the article from the start, the first paragraph mentions about how children in wetsuits leap into the water as the narrator describes his thoughts of what he has seen.

It’s when we get to the first setting (Penzance) where it highlights the impact COVID has had to its economy, as well as the people and businesses who have been hit hard by the pandemic.

The use of a diegetic location as the focal point in the story is an important part in the setting of the story.

You could argue that the narrator (Chris Cook) is a character in this investigative piece himself. However, he has the responsibility of reporting how Penzance, Plymouth and Devon are coping with COVID and the UK unemployment crisis in an objective way.

Once the article moves from Penzance, it goes to Plymouth (the second setting) and Exeter (the third and final setting) where the movement is generated in these three South West England areas that make up the core elements of the story.

Other narrative techniques used

Iconography is used throughout the article, with several images and data visualisations used to illustrate each sector in the UK economy that is on furlough, as well as the claims for Universal Credit.

Credit: Tortoise Media

For example, the diverging bar chart of the proportion of employed people of each age that are on furlough shows you the scale of people in the age demographics that are furloughed by the government.

The use of diegesis and mimensis is an excellent way of using these visualisations to show the scale and impact COVID has had to the three areas that were highlighted in the piece.

While the visualisations explain about how the UK’s economic output has slumped due to COVID, it also looks historically at previous recessions and how bad they were compared with 2020.

One of the biggest challenges as a data journalist is bringing a human face to the story. If a story has numbers and charts, but no people to explain about the trends in the data to a selected area or industry, then the audience will give up before they’ve even read the article.

Data journalists need to strike the right balance of explaining what the data means while adding the human faces that add context to the story in order to engage the reader in their work.

Why should we care?

There are many reasons why we should care about this story, not least because it’s very timely in the period that we’re in with COVID.

As a data journalist, there are many narrative and storytelling techniques I can use in my own work. I’m keen to pursue data journalism that not only questions why certain policies affect the economies of cities and towns across the country, but also job creators and communities.

This could be telling those data stories through formats such as longer-form articles to explainers and graphics around the business and economics beats.

You can read Tortoise’s The long drop article in full here (This article is under a paywall so you need to be a Tortoise member to read this article).