The Third Pole
An environmental news and data-sharing site
- Role
- User experience design, information architecture, type/layout for screens, and front-end web development
- Client
- Earth Journalism Network, Internews, and The Third Pole
- Live site
- thethirdpole.net
The Third Pole, a nonprofit organization with offices in the UK, India, and China, covers environmental in the Himalaya–Hindu Kush region—the largest reserve of fresh water after the polar icecaps, and a souce of water for a fifth of the world’s population. This redesign gave the organization new ways of building stories, moved the site onto a new publishing system, JEO Newsroom, and marked a new collaboration between the Third Pole and the Earth Journalism Network (EJN).
Modular content system
EJN and the Third Pole cover environmental issues that flow freely across borders; they look at problems that present themselves across scales and in a surprising variety of forms. This kind of journalism needs a publishing system that encourages these kinds of connections, and lets the editorial team build stories out of many smaller, sometimes evergreen pieces.
The Content Containers concept aims to provide a resilient, expressive, and structured system for combining a heterogenous array of text-, image-, and data-based stories. The building blocks are individual text-and-image articles, image sequences, maps, and collections.
Variable display options for stories and other content types, changing to fit available space and to meet editorial goals.
Organizational structure
Environmental problems, and the EJN/Third Pole reporting on them, are strongly rooted in The site organizes material by topic and, simultaneously, by geographic region—countries or watersheds. This dual-factor organizational concept drives the site's navigation system and labels.
Third Pole DataNet
A companion site, backed by an on-the-ground outreach effort, supports the sharing of spatial data among organizations working within the region.