Evaluation of Interactive Journalistic Design in the Egyptian Daily Online Newspapers

Abstract

Nowadays, the Interactive Journalistic design in the Egyptian daily online newspapers has become as a general reality. The Egyptian online newspapers utilize different types of Interactive features, but not on a regular basis. This study examined top three of local online newspapers, according to top Alexa rank and more visitor's number, also according to the specific fields of interested readers, like one that specialized in breaking news, other that are focused on the reports and articles, and finally that interested to present specific topics such as sports, aims through characterizing front pages of them, and the types of Interactive Journalistic design used, regardless the content elements.This paper shows that they still lag behind in the use of data visualization and do not utilize all types of interactive features. They mainly outsource services for data visualization packages or illustration-based graphics. They do not have separate or specialized departments for digital data visualization. They utilize of interactive features such as mouse-over, clicking on, hyperlinks, static and dynamic visualization only as images without any used the modern globally data visualization styles, and sharing to social medias, but do not combine data visualization with news stories. Type-based graphics are more frequently used than charts and illustration-based graphics. also, it can be seen data visualization as separately to the text and not an essential part of the journalism content.

Keywords: Information design, data visualization, online newspapers, interactive feature.