I chose "The Aftermath of a YouTube Apology" by The Pudding's Arjun Kakkar and Russell Goldenberg.
I am a huge fan of The Pudding's work as their stories are always clean and clear in a responsive design.
Laid out on a white background, the story begins by identifying a phenomenon/rat's tail which is the number of YouTubers embroiled in controversies, making headlines and having to submit apology videos for their part in the mayhem. The simple left-right navigation menu is lacks the usually daunting options synonymous with data visualization and costing the publisher the reader's attention.
The team at The Pudding, researched and share with the reader other instances in which YouTube apologies have been mentioned to establish the reason why the topic might be of interest to the reader. In developing it's hypothesis, The Pudding shares some of the questions it posed in developing the article whilst using a mixture of text, images and videos to support the article.
The story identifies it's sources of data and the nature of content it was looking for and proceeds to identify the apologisers by controversy type (insensitive video, racist comments and unclassified) and in unison, appearing like a bar chart. As opposed to using the usual bar chart fill colour, the height is presented as a list of names fitting that category.
The articles identifies prominent YouTuber's associated with video apologies and they expand on their hypothesis in an effort to identify if the controversies made an impact on their following- visually. The story allows readers to verify The Pudding's classification of the impact the apologies made by sharing a