Digital News Journalist

‘Journalism in the Age of Visualization,’ produced by Geoff  McGhee as part of his 2009-2010 John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University, is a must-see for journalists  interested in data visualization and visual journalism more broadly.

The seven-part video – an hour in total – along with the rich assortment of examples, resources and tutorials is as compelling as it is complete a road map of the way forward.  Journalists ranging from the indie blogger to those working in large corporate outlets need to learn how to present stories extracted from the unprecedented amount of  data now available. That data may be collected independently with free and easy-to-use polling tools like Polldaddy or gathered  through sites like Data.gov and Google Public Data Explorer.

Here are two examples of data visualization presented in the documentary:

The Jobless Rate for People Like You, developed by The New York Times, allows viewers to drill down and personalize unemployment data.

The Stimulus Tracker, by MSNBC.Com, allows viewers to see where stimulus package money has been spent down to the county level and weigh its effectiveness. Viewers can also track where the money was spent relative to the voting records of politicians.

The idea that information presented visually and interactively on the web is a powerful way to draw in readers isn’t all that new. Infographics and interactive illustrations of events ranging from the trajectory of a plane crash to a winning Superbowl play have been around for years.  But growth in data visualization specifically has been hampered by the prohibitive  time and cost of parsing the data, developing the code and producing the final product.

The documentary does an excellent job of addressing these issues and the many other practical realities of producing and presenting visualization in a journalistic context.

In ‘Part IV: A New Era in Infographics’ Hannah Fairfield,  Graphics Director  for the Washington Post,  points out the importance of simplicity and the need to clearly present to viewers how to navigate the visualization. It’s also important to present the information in a way that is meaningful to those represented in the data.

In ‘Part VII: Technologies and Tools’ an assortment of heavy hitters in the field discuss the variety of tools now out there or in development that allow news organizations large and small to reduce the coding involved in producing interactive data visualizations. Many Eyes,  Protovis, and Flare are examples of software that offer templates to present timetables, charts and maps among other things.

In addition to their value as news content data visualizations have a lot of design appeal. IBM researcher Marten Wattenberg acknowledges that while stream graphs like ‘The Ebb and Flow of Movies: Box Office Receipts 1986-2008‘ are beautiful and effectively draw readers in, in reality they may not provide much depth of information. In the news world there is often a trade-off between design, approachability, deadlines and the actual information contained in a graphic.

In ‘Part VI: Exploring Data’ the documentary hones in on a topic that comes up throughout: the need to contextualize data and to give it narrative structure — the need to tell compelling stories with the data. Award-winning New York Times designer Amanda Cox along with others acknowledge the difficulty in striking a balance between allowing users to personalize data and draw their own conclusions while also providing the kind of narrative context that makes the information valuable journalism in the first place.

This may endure as data visualizations most vexing challenge.