Explanatory journalism: What it is and how to do it

A question and answer explainer is an easy way to get started. It’s also one of the easiest explainers to create, because you can answer your own questions about the topic as you go along. Think of it as having a chat with a friend and explain it the way you would to them.

A key part of explanatory journalism is to make sure you always include as much context and background as the audience needs. Don’t write “Ursula von der Leyen”, write “Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission”. If you’re writing for readers who aren’t experts on EU politics, you may even want to briefly explain what the European Commission does.

At this point you might be rolling your eyes at me. Doesn’t everyone know what the European Commission does?! No. They don’t. That assumption is the first pitfall. More on that later.

Three things to do today:

• Go through your next story with a fine tooth comb. Does it answer any questions the audience is likely to have? Does it inform, not confuse? Does it have enough context?
• Write a fact box to go with your next article.
• Go through the editorial email and see if you’ve had any questions from readers lately. Pick one that you think will appeal to your wider audience and turn it into an explainer. 

How do I level up?

Explainers are often some of the most valuable content products you can have on a news site. Every editor has at some point remarked that when you step away from the short-term traffic monitoring and look at the long term, the stories that got the most clicks over time weren’t those viral videos or those important news events, but often, simple, straightforward explainers.

So how can you make the most of them?

First of all, while some explainers will inevitably be tied to news events, the ones with the longest shelf life are the ones that aren’t. Newsrooms usually want to explicitly tie everything to a news event – where’s the hook, the impatient editor asks – but it’s worth asking: does it have to be?

Keeping all your explainers up to date is a full-time job, so save yourself the headache by making them as evergreen as possible from the beginning. Cut out references to current news – or include them only in the lede so that it’s easy to go back to them a week later and delete them.

When you write an explainer about a broad topic that you know will be relevant a year from now (say, “how to file your taxes”), but some of the details will have changed (the tax rate has been adjusted for inflation), make a note of them in a spreadsheet – a goldmine for the future. Every time you write a news story linked to the topic, make a habit of updating your explainer too. 

When it comes to headlines, the more straightforward the oftentimes better. A lot of people will come to your explainer not via your site, but via search engines. Think about what search terms they’re likely to use and what’s going to attract a completely new user to your article. One of my journalism teachers used to tell us that “how to” headlines were the top performers. This was at a time when print was still dominant, but it holds true in the digital age today, over a decade later.

It’s a shame when some of your best explainers drop down the site, fall off the homepage and out of the memory of Google and his friends. Don’t hide them, celebrate them. It might not work for all news sites, but can you create a new page specifically dedicated to your explainers? Label them as explainers and communicate to your audience what you’re doing? Can you create a newsletter “how to” series? Share them as a weekly “Tuesday tip” on your social media?

Three things to do:

• Search engine optimise your headline
• Think about how to make your article evergreen
• Maximise the impact of your editorial archive  

Pitfalls – mistakes to avoid

When you’ve been covering the same story for a while, you feel as though you’re repeating yourself. Surely the reader already knows this? But among the many humbling things a journalist has to accept is: your stories aren’t so interesting that every single member of your audience has read every single story you’ve ever produced. For every story you create, assume that there’s at least one person coming to it for the first time. Don’t turn them away on the doorstep.

Never assume that a story is too simple to explain. There’s a reason why the most popular recipe in the New York Times Cooking Database remains a no-frills beef stew from 1994. And there’s an argument to be made that in the digital age when it’s easy for casual readers to stumble on your coverage, it’s worth designing your stories partly with them in mind, too.

But there’s a fine line between explaining and over-explaining. Just as important as it is not to exclude new readers, so it is not to alienate those who are familiar with the story. It often helps to slip explanations into the conversation – you don’t have to hit your readers over the head with it. For example: “Ursula von der Leyen, who is the president of the European Commission” sounds condescending. “European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen” less so (but it depends on who you’re writing for – a group of EU politics experts arguably may not even need her title).

Think of your audience as your peers. You’re explaining something to a friend; not a teacher talking to a student or a parent to a child. Remember that your audience isn’t stupid. Assume that your readers are smarter than you but not very familiar with the subject being discussed, advised John O’Neil as part of a recent course in explanatory journalism by the Knight Center. 

Don’t be tricked into thinking that explaining means having to have the answer. Going down this road can lead to over-simplistic or in the worst case misleading coverage, or coverage that is bogged down by so much detail that no one will follow it, or you end up avoiding it altogether.

Instead, explanatory journalism can be a tool for guiding the audience through a complex story not by ignoring but by shining a light on its complexities. It can explain the context, what we know and more importantly what we don’t know, without claiming to have a one-size-fits-all answer.

Three things NOT to do:

• Assume that the audience are experts 
• Include too much detail or not enough detail
• Think you have to have the answer

Where can I find out more?

• US-based news site Vox is the global media giant of explainers, which guide readers through everything from the norovirus to the criminal probes into former US president Donald Trump.
• Vad Vi Vet (“What We Know”) is a Swedish site, founded by Per Grankvist, which uses straightforward language to produce stories that explain the key phenomena of our time, disregarding opinion and speculation and focusing only on what its name suggests.
• John O’Neil is the editor of Bloomberg’s QuickTake team. He recently hosted a course in explanatory journalism for the Knight Center, which informed a lot of this article. 
• Dron Media is a Russian-language news site with a focus on countering misinformation with reliable, fact-based journalism, founded (including by some journalists from The Fix) in 2022.
• This 2014 essay by Digiday reporter John McDermott explains the rise of explanatory journalism.

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