FOLD

Imagine reading about the 2008 housing crisis without knowing what a mortgage is. Jumping into complex news stories is difficult, particularly stories requiring historical or technical context. We hypothesize that the feeling of frustration and inadequacy that comes with not being able to understand the news causes readers to turn away from specific pieces or entire stories. FOLD is an authoring and publishing platform allowing storytellers to structure and contextualize their stories to make their work more accessible. Authors can provide “curated tangents” to readers by integrating contextual information from online sources or by reusing other authors’ context blocks. Readers can progress through a story vertically to read the narrative, and side-to-side to access these context blocks. We believe that FOLD can help readers of all ages and backgrounds confidently engage with complex stories.