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At the end of January, I'll be teaching a workshop at the University of Washington on "news apps," thanks to an offer from the outgoing news app editor at the Seattle Times. It's a great opportunity, and a chance to revisit my more editorial skills. From the description:

This bootcamp will introduce students to the basic components of creating news applications, which are data-powered digital stories tied together through design, programming and journalism. We’ll walk through all the components of creating a news application, look at industry examples of what works and what doesn’t, and learn the basic coding skills required to build a news app.

Sounds cool, but it's still a wide-open field — "data-powered digital stories" covers a huge range of approaches. What do you even teach, and how do you do it in two 4-hour workshops?

It turns out that for almost any definition of "news app," there's an exception. NPR's presidential election board is a data-powered news app, but it's not interactive beyond an auto-update. Snow Fall is certainly a news app, but it's hard to call it "data-powered." How can we craft a category that includes these, but also includes traditional, data-oriented interactives like The Atlantic's Netflix Genre Generator and the Seattle Times mayoral race comparison? More importantly, how do we get young journalists to be able to think both expansively and productively about telling stories online?

That said, I think there is, actually, a unifying principle for news apps. In fact, I think it cuts to the heart of what draws me to web journalism, and the web in general. News apps are journalistic stories told via hypermedia — or, to put it simply, they have links.

A link seems like a small thing after years on the web, so it's good to revisit just how fundamentally groundbreaking they are. Links can support or subvert their anchor, creating new rhetorical devices of their own. At the most basic level, they contextualize a story. More abstractly, they create non-linearity: users explore a news app at their own pace and with their own priorities, rather than the direct stream of narrative from a text story.

A link is a simple starting place. But it starts us down a path of thinking about more complicated applications and usage. I'm fond of saying that an interactive visualization is constructed in many layers, with users peeling open the onion as far as they may want. If we're thinking in terms of other hypertext documents (a.k.a., the TV Tropes Rabbit Hole) from the start, we're already prepared when readers use similar interaction patterns to browse data-based interactives — either by shallowly skipping around, or diving in depth for a specific feature.

By reconceptualizing news apps as being hypermedia instead of a specific technology or group of technologies, such as mapping or graphing, introducing students to web storytelling gets a lot easier — particularly since I won't have time to teach them much beyond some basic HTML and CSS (in the first workshop) and a little scripting (in the second).

It also leaves them plenty of room to think creatively when presenting stories. I'd love for budding news app developers to be as interested in wikis and Twine as they are in D3 and PostGIS. Most importantly, I'd love for an appreciation of hypertext to leak into their writing in general, if only to reduce the number of print die-hards in newsrooms around the country. You don't have to end up a programmer to create new, interesting journalism that's really native to the web.