Show and Tell

I was reading through the NPR homepage this morning when I came across this story: "A girl was rescued by police after she used a distress signal popularized on TikTok." It's pretty much what it says on the tin: A teenaged girl was rescued by police after she was able to signal another motorist with a hand signal shown in videos posted by the Canadian Women's Foundation. It's not, as the headline hints, just a TikTok thing; it's just that TikTok is the current name synonymous with "social media" these days, and as such is a handy journalistic shortcut.

In any event, after a quick run-through of NPR's headlines, I figured I would see what had caught the BBC's attention, and, lo and behold: "Missing girl found after using viral TikTok sign." Of course, by this point, I knew how the story went, but I read it anyway; it's interesting to see how differing new outlets cover the same story.

But what caught my attention in the coverage was the imagery. Both stories lead off with a stock image of a smartphone with the TikTok logo on it. There must be a rule or something. It's an image for the sake of having an image, and it adds nothing to the story. And for the NPR story, that was that, what folowed was the text of the story, and that was it. The BBC, however, went further. They devoted some page space to the Laurel County (Kentucky) Sheriff's Department's Facebook post on the arrest, but they also showed a diagram of the hand signal the girl used.

Both stories describe it, and it's fairly simple. One holds up their hand, palm facing the camera, tucks in the thumb and then traps the thumb by curling their fingers over it. But the diagram makes clearer what one would be looking for without needing to demonstrate it oneself.

It's the age-old idea of a picture being worth a thousand words. Like I noted, it's pretty easy to describe; after all, it's only two steps. But I suspect that even after having read it, had I seen someone make the sign on a video call (which is what it was first design for) or from a car window, it wouldn't have been clear to me what I was looking at. The illustration makes it very clear.

The BBC then goes on to show a video from the Canadian Women's Foundation of how the sign might be used in action. Again, very helpful. And I started wondering why NPR hadn't presented a graphic of the same sort. It's not like NPR is allergic to illustrating its stories. They went to the trouble of having someone draw a picture of someone freaking out at a karaoke bar that the singer might infect them with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, so it's not like they didn't have the resources.

What the NPR story did instead was links. There were five links in the story: to the Laurel County Sheriff's department, to the Signal for Help campaign, to a story about the spread of the campaign on TikTok, to the Canadian Women's Foundation and finally to another NPR story about the surge in domestic violence that lead to the Signal for Help campaign in the first place. A number of NPR stories are like this, with the potential to lead one off into a rabbit hole of other stories. The BBC story felt, in that sense, much more self contained, bringing into itself the context that a reader would want to see. I suppose that it could easily be a matter of policy or of audience tastes, but in this case it came across as better journalism. But I'll have to be on the lookout for more stories like this on both sites, to see if a pattern emerges.