Skip to content

This Northeastern graduate and animator is helping ‘reinvent’ local TV news

After building a strong skill set at Northeastern, Gabby Aidam landed a fellowship with the Reinventing Local TV News Project. 

by
Gabby Aidam speaking in a microphone in front of a slide.
Animation fellow Gabby Aidam participates in the Reinvent: Video Innovation Summit at Northeastern University in Boston on March 21, 2025. Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University

Gabby Aidam has been passionate about drawing since childhood. 

Her mother loves to recall how little Gabby would stay up late, “helping” her study for her Ph.D. by drawing all over her notes.

In school, Aidam created comics, making sure to include every classmate as a character. She also enjoyed connecting with others through video games like “Just Dance.”

So, it was no surprise that by high school she knew she wanted to become an animator. She chose to attend Northeastern University for its game art and animation program.

“I’ve always been interested in art and, especially, digital art,” Aidam says. “So fusing art and technology has always been a passion of mine.”

At Northeastern, she explored a wide range of opportunities. She took biology classes that could help her create scientific visualizations. She joined Scout, a student-led design club, where she worked on motion graphics and 2D animation. 

She also discovered a passion for Virtual Reality (VR) and did a co-op at Northeastern’s Immersive Media Lab, where she learned about other Extended Reality (XR) technologies.

“Northeastern was really great in allowing me to explore different things,” she says. “Through all those different experiences, I really was able to see what I liked most and what I maybe didn’t love too much.”

Gabby Aidam speaking into a microphone.
As the animation fellow of the Reinventing Local TV News project Gabby Aidam created supplemental animation and visual content for news stories produced by other fellows for the three partner TV stations. Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University

For her second co-op, Aidam worked at General Motors, building 3D conceptual models used throughout the car production process.

“I’m always trying new things,” she says. “I’m always pushing myself to learn a lot of skills and have different experiences.”

This mindset helped her land a fellowship with the Reinventing Local TV News Project after graduating in 2023. 

Reinventing local news through animation

Funded by the Stanton Foundation and launched at Northeastern in 2017, the Reinventing Local TV News research project aims to bridge the gap between local newsrooms and communities. Led by Mike Beaudet, professor of journalism and multimedia investigative reporter, and John Wihbey, professor of media innovation and technology and director of the AI-Media Strategies Lab, the project focuses on understanding viewer behaviors and introducing innovative storytelling techniques to engage younger audiences.

In its first phase, the team worked with six TV stations across the country, Beaudet says, remixing their best content by adding more file footage, historical footage, additional interviews and animation. 

An animation of a soccer player taking a shot.
A graphic of different city trains and what time they stop running at night.
A graphic showing a chart of the percent increase spent on drinks.
Examples of the visual content Gabby Aidam created during her fellowship with the Reinventing Local TV News Project for stories about a women’s soccer player, Boston’s nightlife dependent on public transportation and “Dry January. ” Courtesy Gabby Aidam

When tested with viewers, especially the younger demographic between the ages of 18 and 24, they found that viewers engaged better with hard-news stories that utilized animation. Animation helped audiences better understand and remember key facts.

During the second phase, the project partnered with two stations — WLS-TV in Chicago and WCVB-TV in Boston — to create two new newsroom positions for animation fellows. These animators enhanced news segments by adding data visualization such as graphs, charts, and maps; animated sequences to explain processes or timelines; and emphasis text and icons to highlight key information.

Subsequent research confirmed that viewers found animated news stories more satisfying and more interesting to watch.

Aidam’s experience with the Reinventing project

Aidam joined the Reinventing Local TV News Project as an animation fellow during the third and most ambitious phase. 

Three young journalists were placed as over-the-top streaming and digital content producers at partner stations in Boston, Chicago and New York. While they focused on storytelling for the stations’ digital platforms, Aidam supported them by creating supplemental animation and visual content. 

She is the only Northeastern graduate so far selected for the fellowship by the stations.

“Gabby has such a creative eye, and her style of animation is both current and fun,” Beaudet says. “Her animation is different from the typical graphic design you might see on local TV news, and because of that it consistently stood out.”

All three partner stations were impressed with her work, Beaudet says, and how her animation fit with a key goal of the research project — connecting with younger audiences.

The spirit of the fellowship was largely experimental, Aidam says. The stations and the fellows learned together what worked best along the way. 

The high-pressure world of journalism, Aidam says, where conveying important information and data to the public is crucial, taught her the value of clear, readable and engaging visuals.

“The role of animation in news is to tell complex and nuanced stories and ideas that just straight up video can’t tell because we as people are all visual learners, we need to see things to understand,” Aidam says. “So animation is able to accomplish that, breaking down complex topics into understandable bites and chunks.”

She created a variety of data visualizations, including maps and graphs. Since the other fellows worked on longer-term projects rather than breaking news, she typically had a few days to a week to complete her assignments.

“That’s how I was able to manage working between three stations,” says Aidam, who worked remotely from her home state of Maryland.

“My style is to bring character to whatever I make,” she says. “Even if I was making a graph, I would make it more interesting than just bars and lines.”

For example, for a story about Boston’s nightlife, she replaced traditional bar graphs with images of trains from different cities to illustrate how late public transportation ran.  

“I definitely think that visuals that you care about and that you feel, as a creative, are drawing people in will definitely have more success than just boring, straight up graphics,” she says.

Life after fellowship

After her one-year fellowship, Aidam was hired by Neumotion, an advertising agency founded in 2023 by former Twitter/X head of production Ted Harrison. She continues to create motion graphics and has more creative freedom to utilize her other skills like 3D visualization.

“My agency is trying to diversify the different types of animations and experiences we get into,” she says. “And because we’re at such a young stage, I have the opportunity to influence the direction we take.”

University News

Recent Stories