As journalism increasingly shifts online, the media industry is finding new ways every day to combine technology and old-school print media to produce creative and flashy alternate forms of conveying news.
From a journalistic perspective, news delivery is more impactful when you can visually convey how the new information conveyed in each text block updates the situation. For example, in the Syria article, as the textual story progress throughout history, we simultaneously see how the territories and warzones updated on the map.
From a data perspective, it is a relatively seamless transition from visual graphs to visual animated graphs, so it’s especially useful to HODP.
From a marketing perspective, attention spans of users are probably dropping and the trend in online new is to include visual and audio components.