I refuse. Omitting aesthetics from journalism is a mistake.
Visualisation within reporting for a long time has been reduced to it’s absolute basic. Use a bar chart here, a line chart there and that’s about it; it’s accurate.
Now with the rise of the www. certain possibilities have risen so that even beginner fact-chasers can have a go at making something “pretty”:
With that in mind, I think that we’ve gone past the time when people look at charts and infographics just for facts. Now there’s a new possible reaction: “This looks cool!”. I think that people want to be impressed by design as well. After all, despite the danger, a Corvette is still more fun than an Audi. Emotion is the surest way to get someone’s attention and journalists should use that venue. Even if the facts are there, it’s always worth going on the extra mile to make something a pleasure to look at.
Within the academic MA module that these later entries were part of, I’ve discovered that there is a very narrow and limited community for visualisation in journalism. I believe that is because there’s a wide gap between journos who just show the facts and designers who follow those steps towards visual Nirvana. There could be a market for people who have training as reporters but a keen interest in this. The author finds the idea very appealing.
Where to?
Having finished my assignment, expect longer pauses between posts. That’s still good, considering I had a single article for a few months.
I will go on to finish my map and I will try to be creative about the outcome. It won’t be enough just to see the locations but also to invite people in interacting with the map and discovering facts. This is not mentioning the stories that will be drawn from that.
I will also go more into code. I have been through introductions into several languages but the general lack of time has been an obstacle. With the Easter break coming, I should have time to get away from my primary tool into mark-up, the buggy Edge Animate. Code is genuinely easy to learn. It’s programming in general that’s the hardest. My opinion: because you can’t see it working.
