You can even make videos interactive

Hello, reporters! I have an exciting one for you this week. It’s not often that a tool comes to me that I have never heard of before, is journalism relevant, and ready to use.

Well here we have Genially! I heard of it through Kloop, an ambitious news outlet here in Kyrgyzstan, who made an interactive video about recognizing signs of child abuse.

The video is in Russian, but you can see how you can click on options right there in on the screen, which take you to other parts of the video. Genially makes interactive embeds, including videos, and to my surprise, they were both easy to make and looked relatively polished at the end.

You can also use it for interactive graphics, either with or without video. The map template, for instance, would let users click on a location on the map to lead them to an article. They also have timeline and gamification templates, providing a lot of different potential routes (get it?) for journalists to use it in real life.

To make a very bare bones interactive map and video, it took me about five minutes to learn the controls, so I would say this is a more-than-breaking-news but still not a six-month-investigation kind of investment. Stay creative, reporters!

One more thing...

Did you miss the last TFR? Make your pullout quotes more eye-catching with NPR’s Quotable