From the Wild to the Mind🎥🧠: Where immersive reporting meets inner reflection

Benchies, it’s Friyay!!

This week’s newsletter brings together stories that sit at the intersection of craft, curiosity and impact. From revisiting the challenges behind a groundbreaking interactive documentary to exploring how broadcasters find their voice on air, our featured pieces highlight the many ways storytelling evolves through trial, reflection and collaboration.

We’re also pointing you toward interactives that help make sense of global power shifts and personal emotions alike, plus tools from the vault that show how data can move — literally — on the page. Whether you’re here to learn, reflect or just explore something new, there’s plenty to dig into. 

Let’s get started!

Here is our featured content this week:

🐻📈 Tracking Success: Pablo Vio Looks Back on the Development Challenges of BEAR 71

Pablo Vio reflects on the technical and editorial hurdles faced while creating BEAR 71, a pioneering interactive documentary that explored wildlife, territorial surveillance and human impact through immersive storytelling. 

The piece highlights how experimentation, iteration and collaboration across developers and reporters shaped the project’s evolution and ultimately its success.

⚾🎤 Finding His Voice in Baseball: A Conversation with Mike Antonellis

In this Q&A with Storybench, baseball broadcaster Mike Antonellis discusses his journey into sports media and how he uses storytelling to deepen fans’ understanding of the game. He touches on the importance of preparation, narrative framing and connecting with audiences while covering America’s pastime. Thought broadcasting was just winging it, yeah? Read more here

Cool Stuff Corner: What are we reading?

🗺️📹 NYT Interactive: Maduro Capture — Maps, Videos and Photos of How Maduro’s Capture Unfolded

The New York Times interactive piece chronicles the early-January 2026 U.S. military operation in Venezuela that led to the capture of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.

It uses maps, videos and photos to show initial strikes in Caracas, the transfer of the couple into U.S. custody and key moments up to Maduro’s first court appearance on federal charges in Manhattan. The report illustrates the sequence of events and logistical actions that marked one of the most dramatic international operations of the year.

🎡🧠 How Are You Doing? — A Journey Through Emotions With an Interactive Emotion Wheel

The Pudding’s Emotion Wheel interactive invites users to actively explore and name their own feelings through visual tools and exercises, rather than passively reading about emotions. 

The experience combines a revolving emotion wheel with supplementary activities that help users articulate what they are feeling and reflect on emotional states. It emphasizes the value of emotional awareness and provides a hands-on way to understand and communicate feelings.

From the Vault🏛️

🛰️🎞️ How to Build a GIF of Satellite Imagery in R

This Storybench tutorial walks readers through a step-by-step process for creating animated GIFs from satellite imagery using R, showing how to pull sequence frames, manipulate raster data and render motion graphics for visual storytelling.

The guide is designed to help data journalists add dynamic spatial visuals to reporting without advanced animation software.

🎶🤖 AI Is Transforming Music Faster Than We Think — The Washington Post’s Yan Wu Explores the Intersection of AI and Creativity

Yan Wu of The Washington Post examines how generative AI tools are reshaping music creation, from composing original melodies to mimicking specific artists’ styles, and the ethical, legal and artistic questions raised along the way. 

This piece by Namira Haris in conversation with Wu highlights both promising innovations and concerns among musicians, producers and listeners about authenticity and creative ownership. Check it out

PHOTO OF THE WEEK📷

Winter has settled in at Northeastern’s koi pond — usually one of the calmest corners of campus during spring, summer an fall, now transformed by snow and cold. As another winter storm approaches the East Coast, this is a friendly reminder to prepare ahead, whether forecasts call for a dusting or a foot of snow. Check local alerts, review emergency plans and stay warm!

That's all we've got for this week! Thanks for reading, and let us know if there's anything you'd like to see in these newsletters or in our coverage at [email protected].

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