With Mathew Charles
What happens when you ask journalism students to think like web designers? Eighty undergraduate multimedia journalism students at Bournemouth University were given exactly that task: creating interactive documentaries using a branching-narrative software called Klynt. What they discovered had less to do with technology than with something harder to name.
The challenge exposed a deep structural tension: journalism's instinct is to deliver everything to the audience, clearly and efficiently. Web design's instinct is to withhold, to create environments where users seek, discover, and interact. These are not merely different aesthetics; they represent fundamentally different theories of authorship and audience.
For most of these students, the hardest part was not learning new software. It was surrendering control of the story. The storyteller, once responsible for guiding the audience from beginning to end, now had to design the conditions under which meaning might emerge. That is a fundamentally different role, and a fundamentally different relationship to truth.
"Learning to think like a web designer means shifting from pilot to planner, stepping out of the driver's seat and creating an array of potential pathways."Designing Journalists, Journalism & Mass Communication Educator, 2018
What looks like a change in medium is, in fact, a change in power.
The traditional journalist controls what the audience sees and when. The web designer creates a system of possibilities, and then steps back. When journalism enters that space, something fundamental shifts: the storyteller is no longer guiding the audience through a narrative. They are designing the conditions under which meaning emerges.
That is not just a pedagogical challenge. It is a philosophical one. And navigating it requires journalists to interrogate assumptions about authorship, truth, and responsibility that the profession has rarely had to examine so directly.