Data journalist Aleszu Bajak and visual designer Ramon Padilla of USA Today have won the Innovative Storytelling Award from the National Press Foundation.
Bajak and USA Today’s graphics director Javier Zarracino, present on behalf of Padilla, accepted the award at the NPF awards dinner Feb. 23, 2023:
Bajak analyzed more than 2.8 million Tweets from members of Congress to create an engrossing interactive report on the rise of partisanship on Twitter since 2011.
They used computational tools from linguistics and political science to show readers not just how and how far Congress has polarized, but also how Democrats and Republicans increasingly do not even use the same language or talk about the same topics on Twitter.
The winning story titled “‘Hope’ is out, ‘fight’ is in: Does tweeting divide Congress, or simply echo its division?” left that seminal question unanswered. But the animated analysis unspooled to show how lawmakers are “segregating into distinct rhetorical clusters linked by party, effectively speaking different languages” and how the parties are increasingly talking about different issues.
From 2019 to 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, the analysis showed how the words being used by each party became increasingly partisan and the language highly combative. Today, the journalists wrote, “Republicans and Democrats, for the most part, occupy different rhetorical wings of Congress, as if they’re in entirely different rooms.”
National Press Foundation judges found the motion graphics of the animation matched to the news events being discussed, triggered by the reader’s scroll, to be a particularly effective storytelling method.
The Innovative Storytelling Award was created in 2015 to recognize digital journalism of the highest quality that re-invents the way stories are told. Judges take into consideration originality, how re-imagined delivery vehicles enhanced the audience’s understanding of the underlying journalism, and creativity in applying tools or technologies. Recent winners include Hiroko Tabuchi and Jonah Kessel of the New York Times in 2020 and a Washington Post team led by Monica Ulmanu in 2021.
Bajak is now director of data visualization at the Urban Institute. Padilla is a visual journalist at USA Today.
They will accept the award at National Press Foundation’s annual awards dinner in Washington D.C. on Feb. 23, 2023.
The 2022 Innovative Storytelling Award judges were NPF Board members Heather Dahl, Jim Brady, Rafael Lorente and Tom Davidson. Davidson, who works for Gannett, which owns USA Today, was recused from this decision.
