Sniper scandal and SA’s arms trade – a story of print and web working together
We were working this week on a story about South Africa's sales of sniper rifles to Libya (and here in Rapport), a story based on video evidence posted on the Web and which finally exposed the reason for the South African government's continued reluctance to confirm on the specifics of its arms dealings with Libya as it lurched towards a civil war.
This story is noteworthy, I think, besides being pretty interesting, it also involved us working across platforms both to produce material for the report but also using web tools to assist with print presentation and story-telling.
Media24 Investigations reporter, Julian Rademeyer, used the web to both source evidence for his sniper's rifle story but also to produce a video (see below) which was used to back our report up, both giving us print stills and web video.
The web video was linked with interactive "tags" in print in both City Press and Rapport, allowing print readers to connect to the video via cellphone by taking pictures of the tag using their phones.
Media24 video on sniper rifle evidence
Sniper: South Africa's deadly arms trade with Libya from Investigations24 on Vimeo.
But the cross-platform work goes a little further too..
In the course of the reporting I thought it would be great to do a map visualising the big picture of our arms exports around the world last year, figures which were finaly relased by the National Conventional Arms Control Committee after months of pressure.
I remembered Many Eyes , an absolutely fantastic website which allows you to create many different types of visualisations on the fly from a single data set. It took me a couple of minutes to extract the arms sales figures from the PowerPoint presentation prepared by the NCACC and import that into Excel. I uploaded the data into my Many Eyes account and within minutes created the interactive map you see below. This in turn was used by graphic artist Jaco Grobbelaar who produced what I think is an outstanding print info graphic, using the bullet motif to represent our arms sales globally.
I think this is a good example of how we can use web tools, not only to assist with creating web-ready visualisations, but can also assist in getting material ready for print too.
Many Eyes Map
Print Graphic
South Africa's arms trade in 2010
