Custom Opener Guidelines

• Scrollytelling Guide (by Lena)
• Custom Openers with Video (by Lucas)

How to Approach a Custom Opener

Have a meeting with the graphics team about your idea. A couple of additional recommendations:

• While it is helpful to have examples (either prior ProPublica stories or from other news organizations), be open to other ideas. Just because something’s been done before does not mean it’s easy to do, or appropriate for your story. We want to make the best opener specifically for your story, not simply copy what’s been done before.
• Approach us early in the story writing process – working drafts are good! – not at the end of the process. What’s in the custom opener can have a structural effect on the rest of the story.
• Think about how the opener should be presented on other platforms (such as our iOS/Android apps, Apple News, SmartNews, RSS, etc) that do not support custom openers. It will look like a standard story, meaning you’ll have lead art (static), caption/credit, a hed and dek.

Templating Helpers

The following special strings can be included in the embed field:

• {hed}
• {dek}
• {byline}
• {share}
• {date}
• {topic}
• {image}
• {series}