NewsTrack: Interactivity on Slate

I think it would be a bit of an exaggeration to say that interactivity is a focus of Slate, but it does feature some interactive elements. For the most part, Slate's stories feature a basic text/picture format with a few links thrown in, and sometimes some videos. I couldn't think of any examples of interactivity off the top of my head besides the weekly news quiz — which I use to help prepare for our in-class news quiz! — which offers multiple choices and also shows you how you compare to the scores of different Slate writers and other readers. Some of the questions are obscure, but for someone who reads Slate regularly, they shouldn't be too difficult to answer. It's a good way to accumulate all of the news of the week but also to pique readers' interest for stories they might not have seen on the site previously and encourage them to seek out those stories. Upon further digging/searching, Slate has created some interactive and animated features, including this graphic showing a map of the slave trade. It's not particularly interactive in terms of readers actually being able to click and move things, but it adds an interesting element nonetheless. More recently, Slate also annotated one of Herman Melville's texts, and allowed readers to choose which tags and annotations they were most interested in and it filtered those annotations for them. While Melville isn't exactly my cup of tea, I think it's an interesting concept that allows readers to consume the information most interesting to them more quickly. It's something that I think could be used for more longform articles, in terms of highlighting the most important people or concepts in a story. It's basically a more advanced form of command-F, which is pretty cool. I'd definitely like to see it used on more sites. Andrew Kahn creates many interactive graphics for Slate, and they're shown on his author page. It appears as if Slate is making a shift to using as many interactives for its political coverage as possible, including weekly Twitter "power rankings" to see which candidates are receiving the most social media traffic. It's an interesting idea and it's something unique to Slate — it's useful to have that visual and interactive representation of just how popular political candidates are, and to see the most absurd things these people are tweeting.