How Canva is transforming design for newsrooms and journalists
We spoke with news organizations to find out how they’re using Canva to collaborate on and publish visually compelling stories with speed and consistency.
It’s been a long, long time since rolling words off a printing press was the only way to publish content. The way we all communicate has completely changed. It’s now a visual economy.
The digital revolution has powered a visual revolution unlike anything we’ve seen in human history. Never before has there been so much visual content competing for our attention and affection – and nobody knows that better than journalists.
From Gannett in the U.S. to Global in the U.K. and The Times Group in India, Canva is fast becoming the essential storytelling tool for journalists of every kind, empowering journalists and news organizations around the globe to tell great stories that engage audiences in visually compelling ways.
Why is this important? Because the game has changed: every journalist is now a visual journalist.
As Sam Koslowski, co-founder of Australia’s fastest-growing online news business, The Daily Aus, explains: “Being a good journalist is now no longer just about being a good writer. It’s about being a good writer, but also a good designer and a good publisher.”
The tools journalists use have a direct impact on the quality of the stories they tell. Nowadays every journalist needs the tools to create, manage and deliver content with speed, simplicity and brand consistency; and they need to do so across multiple platforms – broadcast, websites, social networks, bespoke apps, and more.
However, the tools most journalists have been using to navigate this new visual territory have not been built for this visual century. They’re not fit for purpose for every channel, medium, and/or journalist.
With so much visual content to create, the need to manage this creative process at scale across everything a journalist does is a real modern-day issue.
“Journalists play a unique role in translating all the facts into something easily understandable to an average audience,” Simon Crerar, a well-seasoned journalist at leading mastheads such as The Times in London, The Guardian and Buzzfeed and now co-founder of an Australian local media startup *PS Media said.
“Taking all of a story’s complexity and turning it into an Instagram tile that explains, at a glance, the crux of the issue, is a real skill and something quite unique to journalism as a discipline.”
“What I love about Canva is the ability to create content our reporters can easily turn into a TikTok video, an Instagram reel, or another piece of content that can be shared elsewhere. Canva makes a transformative difference to our newsroom workflows.”
From keeping content on brand through to the development and publication of social media, video, and e-newsletter assets, infographics, data visualizations, YouTube and podcast imagery, and much more, Canva is an essential tool for every journalist, regardless of whether they’re part of a big newsroom or building their own media brand.
Founder and managing director of ausbiz Kylie Merritt and producer Eliot Hastie describe the pressure of communicating with their audience and how visual communication is key.
“The biggest change for journalists is that you’re on and you’re communicating with your audience from the minute you’re up in the morning until you go to bed at night.
“Our team does about 50 interviews a day, and the majority of that content is made available as VOD (video on demand) across our website and app. TV is a visual medium, so in order for us to be successful, we have to have design elements that people want to watch,” explained Merritt and Hastie.
“Our entire team is on Canva – it’s all about creating graphics that go directly onto the screen to ensure visually compelling content at every step”.
Canva’s recent acquisition of Flourish has seen more powerful and interactive data visualization formats made available as part of Canva’s growing suite of visual communication tools.
“Whether it’s economic, political, financial, or sports, data is absolutely everywhere, and telling stories with that data just works better if you do it visually,” says Duncan Clark, co-founder of Flourish, the data visualization tool of choice for newsrooms globally, and now part of the Canva family.
“On the Canva side you have this incredible tool that newsrooms can use to produce images, socials, videos and things like that. On the Flourish side, you’ve got the toolkit for data storytelling, but also interactive content generally – and if you put those two things together it’s a pretty killer mix.”
Canva doesn’t just make it easier and quicker to create content – it’s better for the audience, and reinforces your trusted news brand. With so much content flying around these days, it can be hard to tell what news is legitimate, so having a consistent, recognizable visual identity backs up anything you publish with credibility and authority.
The beauty is, Canva puts all the tools of the trade in one place, which is why it’s trusted by journalists in long-established newsrooms like USA Today, Bloomberg, CNN and Huffpost, to the next generation of media mastheads like The Daily Aus in Australia.
Regardless of the size of the news outlet or team you’re working in, Canva powers journalism workflows with ease. Not only does Canva help streamline processes, outlets are consistently reporting higher audience engagement and stronger audience growth since embracing the power of visual communication using Canva.
This article was first published on https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/canva-for-journalists/