Nerd Journalism: How Data and Digital Technology Transformed News Graphics

272 Pages·2017·36.7 MB·English

by  Alberto Cairo Touriño

NERD
journalism
How Data and Digital Technology Transformed News Graphics
Doctoral thesis submitted by
Alberto Cairo Touriño
to the Doctoral Programme in the Information and Knowledge Society
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
Dr Jordi Sánchez Navarro
Dr Lluis Pastor Pérez
Dr Ramón Salaverría
IMPORTANT NOTE:
THIS IS THE LATEST DRAFT
OF THE DISSERTATION.
UPDATED ON JUNE 5, 2017
Many corrections and edits remain to be done
Computers don’t make a bad reporter into a good reporter.
What they do is make a good reporter better.
—Elliot Jaspin
Te greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice
what we never expected to see
—John W. Tukey
Numbers have an important story to tell.
Tey rely on you to give them a clear and convincing voice.
—Stephen Few
4 Nerd Journalism
INDEX
INTRODUCTION: A DINOSAUR IN THE MATRIX 7
• About this project 8
•Te explorers 12
• Journalism frst 13
• Questions and hypotheses 17
CHAPTER 1: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK (1): DEFINITIONS 21
• Te craf 21
• Te products of the craf 23
• Departments and people 31
CHAPTER 2: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK (2): HISTORY 35
• Early pioneers in the news 35
• Te rise of data charts and maps 39
• Te pictorial turn 45
• USA Today is born 50
• Te frst computer age in news graphics 63
• Te backlash against “chartoons” 68
• Te conferences 72
• Te second computer age: interactives 77
• Te third computer age: geek takeover 84
CHAPTER 3: HYPOTHESES AND METHODOLOGY 91
• Justification of interest 91
• Questions and hypotheses 92
• Ethnographic observations 93
• Grounded theory 98
• Interviews 103
• Coding and theory 109
• Malofej analysis 111
Nerd Journalism 5
CHAPTER 4: RESULTS. HOW GRAPHICS JOURNALISTS THINK 113
• It’s just journalism —but data changes everything 117
• Professional backgrounds 129
• Passion, learning, and collaboration 141
• Tool creators and pioneers 155
• Service vs. autonomy 171
• Infographics will be everything, everything will be infographics 185
• Attention to audiences 192
• Summary 205
CHAPTER 5: MALOFIEJ ANALYSIS 211
• Malofej winners 212
• Te rise of the data-driven graphics 218
• Regional diferences 224
CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH 233
• Data and visual journalism 235
• From service to autonomy 238
• Pioneers and innovators 239
• Changes in form and roles 242
• Paying attention at attention 248
• Further exploration 250
SOURCES 255
Nerd Journalism 7
INTRODUCTION
A DINOSAUR
IN THE MATRIX
It is a most disturbing experience to walk into a modern newsroom and feel like
a creature of a forgotten past.
In the Summer of 2014, I spent more than a month at ProPublica1 observing
how its News Applications team designs news graphics, from static infographics
to interactive visualizations. I felt that I needed a refresher afer teaching at the
University of Miami for a couple of years. I began my career as a news graph-
ics journalist back in 1997. I have worked in news organizations in three coun-
tries, I’ve published three books about the craf (Cairo 2008, 2012, 2016,) and
been part of most of the international conferences related to it, like the Malofej
International Infographics Summit and Awards2 and the Society for News De-
sign Annual Workshop,3 besides teaching how to design news graphics in many
countries. I thought I knew quite a bit about journalistic graphics.
I was delusional.
—
1 ProPublica (www.propublica.org) is a nonproft investigative journalism organization based in
Manhattan, New York. ProPublica’s News Applications team is in charge of data, visualization, and
infographics projects. Its members call themselves “the nerds,” and their collective blog is the Nerd
Blog: https://www.propublica.org/nerds Tis was the main inspiration for the title of this study.
2 Te Malofej International Infographics Summit takes place in the School of Communication of
the University of Navarra (Pamplona, Spain) every March since 1992: http://www.malofejgraphics.
com/
3 Te Society for News Design is the largest trade association of graphic designers in journalism
8 Nerd Journalism
None of the endeavors listed above prepared me for what I witnessed. Te
craf of news graphics has changed much in just a handful of years, and in fun-
damental ways. At ProPublica, I saw a department that embodied most of the
transformations I later explored for this study consulting with dozens of pro-
fessionals at several news organizations, and analyzing two decades of Malofej
Infographics Awards. Te central role of data and code, the increasing autonomy
and infuence of visual journalists in award-winning newsrooms, the rise of a
new generation of tech-savvy news graphics creators, are the most noticeable
changes.
I had hunches of some these changes before, during my tenure at Época mag-
azine, a Brazilian weekly outlet where I was director of infographics between
2010 and 2012. I was trained as a journalist and as a print designer in the late
90s. I transitioned to online and multimedia journalism in the early 2000s, when
working at El Mundo online, in Spain, using of-the-shelf sofware tools like Ado-
be Flash. Years later, the team that I led in Brazil still used Flash (Figure I1),
but also designed animations and interactive visualizations with HTML, CSS,
JavaScript, ofen based on connections between graphics and databases. Because
of this, I had to hire professionals with backgrounds much diferent than mine,
folks who were versed in coding and web development, not just in drawing, visu-
al design, or classic 2D and 3D animation.
ABOUT THIS PROJECT
Te present study intends to explore the turmoil that news graphics as a form
of doing journalism and as a professional endeavor has experienced in the past
decade and a half. News graphics in the 90s and early 2000s used to equate to
illustration-driven explanations, sometimes supplemented by small and straight-
forward statistical graphs and data maps. Tat’s what I learned to do in the early
stages of my career. Today, according to the fndings of this study, the balance has
shifed to presentations that rely mainly on the visual display of data, both quan-
titative and qualitative, as we’ll soon see. Illustration-driven explanation graphics
have ofen become a secondary consideration. Te style of news graphics has
changed profoundly.
Newsroom dynamics are also diferent. In the past, news graphics used to
be made mainly by visual designers and artists who took “orders” from report-
ers and editors. Not anymore. Today, individuals and departments who produce
news graphics, at least at elite publications, are content creators. Tey are autono-
mous. Tey generate their projects, or they partner up at equal footing with other
Nerd Journalism 9
Figure I1: http://tinyurl.com/3pphgcc
departments to gather information, process it, and then deliver it to the public.
As a consequence, many professionals who do news graphics for a living nowa-
days see themselves primarily as journalists, and only secondarily as designers,
artists, or programmers.
Moreover, news graphics creators in many cases don’t even work in “graphics”
departments. In some places, like ProPublica or NPR Online, the teams are called
“visuals,” “news applications,” or “interactive journalism.” To highlight the fact
that news graphics —explanation infographics, interactive data visualizations,
etc.— are just one of the multiple ways to convey information to their audiences.
A specifc professional group doesn’t own news graphics as a craf. It may
well be in the process of becoming a language, skill, and a resource that can be
embraced by anybody, very much like writing. In some newsrooms, any reporter
or editor, not just the members of specialized teams, can put together basic charts
and data maps thanks to tools developed for internal use, not by IT departments
—as it used to be the case in the past,— but by visual journalists within the news-
01 Nerd Journalism
Figure I2: http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/
Figure I3: http://tinyurl.com/pke94a2