Friday 8 July 2011

News of the World phone-hacking timelines: How online media depicted the scandal in timelines

I was looking forward to seeing how the online media would handle the timeline of events surrounding the drama of the phone-hacking revelations, the closure of the News of the World and the subsequent arrests and political fallout.

But I have to say I'm a little disappointed at how static many of the treatments are. Okay, events have been moved very quickly but I thought by now we would have seen some more interesting ways of handling the story.

Here's a random selection of what I've seen so far:

One of the most interesting has to be from The New York Times. It's clickable and it looks like it's still being updated. The same goes for The Financial Times.

Plenty of sites, including the BBC, took a more pedestrian approach and went for a standard print media-style list in reverse chronological order. CNN and The Telegraph prefered to tackle things the other way round, beginning from 2005 and 2006 respectively. The Telegraph didn't even bother linking out from the text.

The US Huffington Post opted for a slideshow of events from 2002 up to the closure of the newspaper. The Guardian did something similar, but with a little bit more activity.

Press Gazette's dipity timeline first appeared back in January this year, but unfortunately it looks like it hasn't updated since the end of May.

Yahoo News, meanwhile, has a static infographic which you can't click on and ends with the NOTW closure.

Of course, a timeline isn't necessarily the best format. Live blogs like the one from the newly-launched UK Huffington Post use a Covertilive approach to keep up with unfolding events which was useful for integrating tweets and other updates.

But if you want to incorporate all the background history it still suggests some form of RSS-updated timeline to me.

The phonehacking and police payments stories will run and run, as they say. Let's hope we see some more interesting visualisations.

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