The main features of the infotainment are:

1. Prioritize images over ideas
2. Focus on the emotions aroused in the audience
3. Simplify the message
4. Highlight the drama of the events
5. Exaggerate to add appeal to the information.

Given the premises, we ask ourselves whether it makes sense to combine infotainment and data storytelling.

Data Storytelling is communicating the results of a data analysis process to an audience through a story. Unlike data reporting, whose objective is to describe the results of data analysis, and also unlike data presentation, where data is organized in a structured way, data storytelling exploits the principles of storytelling to make data usable by a ‘audience. Storytelling is the art of telling stories about any topic in order to inform, entertain, or convince an audience.

Very generally, there are three types of audiences for a data-driven story:

• General public – the set of people who do not know the data and whose main objective is to be informed, or to be entertained
• Professionals – the set of technicians, who know the data in a very in-depth way, and whose objective is to better understand the data in question
• Executives – the group of people who make decisions, and whose objective is precisely to make choices based on data.

The following figure summarizes the three types of audiences and their objectives. The following figure summarizes the three types of audiences and their objectives.

Based on the type of audience, the data storyteller will have to select:

• Language and Tone – The set of words (language) and the emotional expression conveyed through them (tone)
• Context – The level of details to add to your story, based on the cultural sensitivity of the audience

Regardless of the type of audience considered, data storytelling usually uses the following main tools:

1. Creating a story around the data, in order to involve the audience and make the data more accessible
2. Visual representations of data, such as graphs (line, bar charts, etc.), infographics
3. Adaptation of the message to the type of audience.

Data storytelling and infotainment share some things, such as the use of images, the focus on the audience and the simplification of the message. For this reason, we can therefore make a mapping between the characteristics of infotainment and those of data storytelling.

The only element of infotainment that does not adapt to data storytelling is the last one: exaggerating to add appeal to the information, as data storytelling is based on data, which represents reality.

Combining infotainment and data storytelling could mean adding the element of entertainment to each story, in order to involve the audience more. More properly we could talk about:

• Infotainment, for the general public
• Understainment, for the professional audience
• Decisionment, for the executive audience.

The answer to the question Can we combine infotainment and data storytelling? is then Yes, we can, provided that we base the story on real facts, and we don’t exaggerate to add appeal to the information and transform it into a fake story, with the only objective of attracting an audience.

References

Boukes, M. (2018). Infotainment. https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199756841/obo-9780199756841-0200.xml

Lo Duca, A. (2024) Data Storytelling with Generative AI using Python and Altair. Manning Publications. https://www.manning.com/books/data-storytelling-with-generative-ai

Morcellini, M. (2011). Neogiornalismo. Tra crisi e rete, come cambia il sistema dell’informazione. In Neogiornalismo. Tra crisi e rete, come cambia il sistema dell’informazione. Mondadori Università. https://iris.uniroma1.it/handle/11573/380440