"Decoded" is a series we launched in 2021, in which we report a story by breaking down the symbols and messages found in footage, photos and satellite imagery, sometimes with the aid of graphics to elevate the visual experience. In a world where mistrust of news organizations has become rampant and misinformation spreads easily, we wanted to offer a purely fact-based series that didn't include analysis but rather presented and explained what you're looking at. In all, we've produced around 20 episodes covering a variety of topics including the Miami Condo collapse, the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, and what Putin has planned for the North Pole.
The first episode of this series was unintentionally 'We Decoded The Symbols From The Storming Of The Capitol' where we examined the symbols donned by Trump supporters as they stormed the Capitol on January 6. It was meant to be a single feature, but we soon realized we had room to create an entire format or series with this framing.
We sent a freelance shooter to the Capitol on January 6, and she came back with hours and hours of footage. When we started scouring through it, we found flags, symbols on clothing, slogans on banners and chants that we weren't familiar with but were key to understanding who these rioters were and what propelled them. So we pulled out these symbols, cross checked them on different databases, identified their origin and evolution, and then decoded them for our audiences using a series of graphics that made the visual experience even more powerful.
In another notable episode, titled 'We Decoded The Guns People Bring To Protests And Rallies Across the US', we looked through hours of footage and interviewed arms experts to decode the weapons people carry to rallies across the US no matter their political ideology. Our experts were able to help identify the type of gun it was, its special features, and its legality. We included animations throughout the episode to help people understand the technical aspects of these weapons.
With every episode, we have followed the same strategy of first finding visuals from a variety of sources and then dissecting those visuals to present the story with helpful graphics.
The main challenge we've faced in developing this series has been finding creative sources for information and visuals. We often use wire broll, UGC and original footage for our videos, but for this series we trained our producers on open-source intelligence tools and how to find publicly available information to dig deeper into a topic. We've obtained surveillance footage, looked through FBI and DOD video databases and have utilized satellite imagery when necessary.
Another challenge we faced since was verifying the authenticity of visuals in a world plagued with doctoring and fake sources. Our producers worked tirelessly to trace the original source of the visuals, cross-check them against other sources and run the episodes by local and/or subject-based experts in the field for fact-checking purposes before any videos went live.
Our episodes are published to a variety of platforms, including Insider's Youtube channels, Insider's Facebook pages, and even on editorial partnerships like Yahoo.
Our most successful "Decoded" episode on Youtube is "We Decoded The Guns People Bring To Protests And Rallies Across the US." It has over 750K+ views on the Insider News YouTube profile as of January 2022. It's quite an accomplishment given that the channel has only been live for a year and has only 200K subscribers.
On Facebook and Yahoo, our most successful episode is "We Decoded The Taliban’s Takeover Of Afghanistan" which garnered 1 million views on each individual platform.
