Vidi Vaka are a new type of media, Vidi Vaka provides video and other interactive content adapted for online use of the digital generation. Vidi Vaka creates news for the generation that receives news on their mobile devices through social media.

They largely create video content that is credible, easy to watch, and saves time in communicating key information.

Vidi Vaka Facebook –  https://www.facebook.com/vidivakamedia
Vidi Vaka Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/vidivaka/
Vidi Vaka Twitter – https://twitter.com/vidivakavideo
Vidi Vaka YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpfYcWDYyzmKyOzeU60Reqw
Vidi Vaka website – https://vidivaka.mk/grafickivesti/

Graphic news was part of a bigger project of IDEA SEE, the organization behind Vidi Vaka. With this project, i.e. these contents, they aimed to change the negative narrative for the Roma community.

Through a series of (video and graphic) content focusing on personal stories, they tried to change the prevalently negative narrative to a positive one.

The main goal is for the Roma community to receive the health services they are entitled to, to remind doctors of their responsibilities and to inform the public about healthcare rights in an objective and well-structured visual way.

The reason is simple, increasing the visibility of the problems that Roma face when seeking health services. This activity aims to encourage change in the prevalently negative perception of Roma in the health system and to raise awareness of health rights and access to health services.

Aleksandar Manasiev – Editor-in-Chief of Vidi Vaka

Creating a journalistic story about a complex societal problem that aims at getting people’s attention is not an easy task. The task becomes particularly complex when the problem involves a marginalized target group and the target audience is the general audience that is not overly interested in learning about the problem.

Another challenge is the protection of the personal identity of the people whose stories are being told, due to the sensitivity of the problems that this community faces.

Therefore, the solution was to use visual-graphic storytelling, deploying comic, i.e. graphic novels techniques. This technique is visually appealing; thus, it attracts an audience and is much more suitable for telling complex stories in a simple way. Furthermore, the graphic panels included minimal, yet sufficient animation, which increased the reader’s interactivity with the story itself.

For the purposes of this project, a specially designed website was created, and the stories were also shared as an Instagram multi-photo essay (1, 2, 3), and some of them were shared as Instagram stories.

The whole project lasts 9 months. In addition to the graphic stories, other video content was created that was predominantly shared on Vidi Vaka’s Facebook and Instagram accounts. The first 7 months were the planning and development stage. The sharing was left for the end of these 9 months, following the publication of the other contents.

The central point of communication was the dedicated website, which got more than 10 thousand unique visitors in a relatively short period. The Facebook stories have reached more than 60 thousand users and the Instagram posts had more than 10 thousand views.

Graphic news is not something new around the world. There are great numbers of large and small targeted media that opt for using this way of storytelling for different purposes. Here are just a few examples of good storytelling using this technique.

• https://www.graphic-news.com/stories/zika-and-the-olympic-games/
• https://www.graphic-news.com/stories/all-the-evil-the-world/
• https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/23/magazine/brexit-illustrated.html
• https://note.com/tomomishimizu/n/n4cade047aed8