The Vatican’s “trial of the century” had so many twists and turns that explaining the case involving the bungling of a 350 million-euro property investment – and all of its tentacles – to readers proved a challenge ahead of the appeals phase.
After writing her appeals trial text preview in a traditional story form, Vatican correspondent Nicole Winfield flagged the issue to her editors. Knowing the AP’s embrace of alternative story forms for sidebars and breakouts, religion news editor Holly Meyer proposed reworking the mainbar into a newsletter-inspired story form and cleared the experiment with several AP editors.
To enhance the reader experience, Southern Europe editor David Biller proposed highlighting a key text message exchange through video. Digital’s Dario Lopez developed a tool to emulate text messages for this assignment that now can be used for future stories that require replicating an online chat conversation.
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