Storybench and Northeastern’s Media Innovation program are proud to announce that we’re launching a new longform visual storytelling site. Today, Ochre passes from its previous owners Blue Chalk Media, a digital media company based in Brooklyn, to the Media Innovation program, a new graduate program in digital journalism at Northeastern University.

Ochre’s first story edited by the Media Innovation program is about The Boat, an interactive graphic novel published by SBS Australia that tells the fictional story of Mai, a 16-year-old girl whose desperate parents decide to send her to Australia by boat to save her from conflict. On Ochre, Media Innovation student Yingchi Wei dissects the digital techniques and aesthetics used to create The Boat.

The Media Innovation program and Storybench editors will oversee the production and editing of stories for Ochre, which is designed as a gathering point for reflecting and highlighting the changes in today’s visual storytelling landscape.

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Five years ago the Guardian asked me to evaluate the effects of the Tunisian uprising on the rest of the Arab world, and specifically Syria. I recognised the country was “by no means exempt from the pan-Arab crisis of unemployment, low wages and the stifling of civil society”, but nevertheless argued that “in the short to medium term, it seems highly unlikely that the Syrian regime will face a Tunisia-style challenge”.

That was published on 28 January 2011. On the same day a Syrian called Hasan Ali Akleh set himself alight in protest against the Assad regime in imitation of Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Tunisia. Akleh’s act went largely unremarked, but on 17 February tradesmen at Hareeqa in Damascus responded to police brutality by gathering in their thousands to chant “The Syrian people won’t be humiliated”. This was unprecedented. Soon afterwards, the Deraa schoolboys were arrested and tortured for writing anti-regime graffiti. When their relatives protested on 18 March, and at least four were killed, the spiralling cycle of funerals, protests and gunfire was unleashed. In 2011, I wrote that Assad personally was popular, and so he remained until his 30 March speech to the ill-named People’s Assembly. Very many had suspended judgment until that moment, expecting an apology for the killings and an announcement of serious reforms. Instead, Assad threatened, indulged in conspiracy theories, and, worse, giggled repeatedly.

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