Playbook for Journalists

The evidence is strong, linear, searchable, and does not need a room, rule system, spatial model, or performed encounter.

Use it when clarity, chronology, citation, speed, or public record matter more than experience.

Do not force form onto a story that only needs sharper reporting and editing.

Presence, voice, timing, collective attention, or public listening changes the force of the story.

Use it for reported stories that can be rehearsed, sourced, credited, and carried by a room.

Stagecraft can make weak sourcing feel stronger than it is.

The story is a system of pressure: incentives, scarcity, rules, choices, failure, money, time, or trade-offs.

Use it when the audience should learn through constraint and consequence.

Games can trivialise harm or make people responsible for forces they cannot control.

Sequence, memory, anonymity, inaccessible places, or visual interpretation carry the reporting better than camera evidence.

Use it when drawing protects, clarifies, or structures reported reality.

Drawings can invent certainty unless every observed, inferred, symbolic, or reconstructed element is disciplined.

Place, scale, confinement, distance, perspective, or atmosphere are part of the evidence.

Use it when the audience must understand spatial relation, not only read description.

Presence can become spectacle. Feeling present is not proof.

Documents, testimony, hearings, transcripts, or public records need to be heard in relation to one another.

Use it when the source material can become a public script without losing context.

Compression can distort testimony or turn people into dramatic devices.

The story needs civic encounter, location, scale, repeated viewing, or public memory.

Use it when place and material change who meets the evidence.

A public surface can expose trauma, sources, or communities without enough care.

Voice, silence, listening, description, screen-reader structure, or sensory access changes the editorial method.

Use it when access is part of the story, not a compliance layer added later.

Intimate sound can violate consent, and access can be treated as decoration.

The evidence is spatial, fragmented, technical, contested, or needs public inspection.

Use it when a model, archive, map, or data interface lets people challenge the method.

A polished model can hide assumptions and make partial evidence look final.

The strongest public value is explaining what was done, how decisions were made, and what the field can learn.

Use it when production history, source choices, risk, and afterlife are as important as the final artifact.

A case study becomes marketing when it hides mistakes, limits, or editorial compromises.