The comic strip “Mallard Fillmore” frequently takes aim at the news media. On occasion, it goes after journalism education, usually under the title of “Meanwhile, at a journalism school near you…”
Today’s variation on the theme contains two dubious assertions:
I haven’t seen much evidence of either. Therefore, I respectfully request a correction.
Alberto Cairo is the author of “The Functional Art,” a new book about infographics and visual journalism. He has extensive experience in the newsroom and in the classroom. In this interview, conducted by email, Cairo talks about the principles of infographics and data visualization, and how writers and editors can contribute to their creation.
Q. What do you hope to achieve by writing this book?
A. “The Functional Art” is a book for designers and journalists mainly, although it can be useful for anyone who has to create charts, maps, diagrams and explanatory illustrations, even if he or she doesn’t have any experience in the field.
It is not a book about software, but about principles that can guide the effective design of graphics. And it is not written in a textbook-style, but as an essay. My main goal with it is to offer a comprehensive framework to understand all kinds of visual displays of information based on the idea that information graphics are, above all, tools for understanding.
I started writing the book years ago, when I taught infographics and visualization at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UNC-Chapel Hill. When I tried to put together a list of readings for my students, I realized that there was not a single book that summarized the foundations of the discipline.
I also wrote it because journalists and designers sometimes get lost in the growing bibliography coming from related areas, such as statistic representation, cartography, scientific visualization, interaction design, etc. They don’t really know where they should get started or what are the common guiding principles and practices all those disciplines have in common.
Q. What role do writers and editors play in the creation of effective infographics?
A. Infographics and visualizations are a mix of copy and visuals (graphs, maps, diagrams). You cannot have a good graphic based on nicely designed visuals alone. You need good copy, organization, a solid structure, a clear focus, etc. That’s what writers and, above all, editors, can and should provide at first. But there’s more.
I usually say that an infographic should not be the product of a designer working alone with the occasional input from a reporter and an editor. That’s what happens in many newsrooms: writers work in their computers, and send some info to designers, who take care of the visuals.
That’s the wrong approach. A good infographic is always the product of teamwork. Editors and writers must get heavily involved in the information graphics in their newsrooms, sit with designers, sketch ideas out, do storyboards. Infographics are not about using software, and they are not just about illustration, charting, mapping or art.
The key skill to have to do infographics is not drawing, but schematizing ideas, stories, and concepts. Obviously, if you do know how to draw, that can help, but it is not mandatory.
That’s why I believe that anybody can learn to design information graphics to a certain level. And my experience has taught me that editors and writers are particularly good at it, even if they are a bit hesitant at first when I introduce them to charts and maps in my courses.
The reason many of those folks are so good (even if they don’t trust their own potential because, you know, they have been educated as “word people” in j-school) is that they are used to devise narrative structures based on raw information. They are used to extract meaning from data and from sources. They know how to create hierarchies. They spot what is important and what is background info.
All those skills lie at the core of infographics and visualizations. I can teach you the rest: a bit of graphic design and interactive design, how to use the software (Illustrator, Excel, even programming), what graphic shapes are appropriate depending on the data and the story, etc.
Q. We’re hearing and reading a lot about data visualization in journalism. You argue in the book that data visualization and infographics complement each other. How so?
A. An infographic is a tightly edited visual presentation of information. It is equivalent to a news story: a reporter gathers information, processes it, organizes it, makes sense of it, cuts out whatever is not relevant for the story and presents the results to the audience.
A visualization, on the other side, is a tool that a journalist or a designer develops for readers to explore a data set. A visualization doesn’t need to tell a particular story. Each reader will come out of the visualization with stories of his or her own. See, for instance, the interactive application that The New York Times developed about the 2010 Census data.
That’s a visualization, clearly, because it doesn’t really make any editorial point. This kind of project is also journalism, in my opinion, as it facilitates the access to relevant information, but it’s not an infographic per se.
That said, the distinction between infographics and visualization is not as clear as it seems. Take this graphic I made with a group of colleagues about how much Brazilian representatives spend on telephone usage every year.
You can easily argue that this is both an infographic and a visualization. On one side, it tells you the basics of the story. It highlights its most important points: Brazilian representatives spent a lot (in Brazilian terms) on telephone bills in the first eight months of 2011: more than $7 million (13 million reais). If you had to spend that amount of money calling a friend, you would be on the phone for 298 years, straight.
The graphic shows you the total and the ranking of the worst offenders. This is the “infographics” side of the story, what is usually considered traditional journalism: the headline, that is funny and striking (“298 years of conversation”), and the summary of the main data points.
But the graphic also includes a “visualization” side, which is that we let readers look for their own representatives, and filter by state and by party: on the big dot plot, you can look for particular candidates, click on each little circle to see how much each of them spent, and read the entire spreadsheet (click on “veja os dados completos”, which means “see all the data”). This is the “visualization” side of the graphic. So, in some sense, infographics and visualization are complementary.
Q. As people get news and information on mobile devices such as the iPad and smartphones, what does that mean for the future of infographics?
A. Designers and journalists will have to get smarter to present effective summaries of their data and stories and, second, to develop interfaces that let readers dig deeper into the information, in case they are interested.
A good infographic or visualization is like an onion: It should have several layers of information that readers can navigate. If you understand this principle, you will be able to apply it to any platform. Graphics on small screens have to find the balance between presenting short snippets and allowing depth.
Even if it doesn’t sound like an easy task, I am optimistic. I thing that tablets and smartphones are a new world to be explored, the same way that computer screens were the big thing more than a decade ago, when I started designing interactive graphics.
Learn more about Cairo’s book and follow him on Twitter.
Even as the so-called mainstream media seem to be contracting, two startups in Raleigh, N.C., hope to find audiences in print and on the air.
A lifestyle magazine called Walter hits stores, waiting rooms and residential mailboxes next month. Walter is a publication of The News & Observer, and its staff includes former N&O reporters Scott Huler and Mary Miller.
Walter is aimed at an upscale audience. People who lives in houses valued at more than $450,000 will get it for free. The rest of us can buy it on the newsstand or pay $24 for a year’s subscription.
Raleigh Little Radio, on the other hand, is a grassroots effort funded through donations on Kickstarter. I’m one of the contributors.
A pair of former staff members for a college radio station hopes to offer a mix of news, talk and coverage of live events from the downtown area. The station’s plan is start this fall online and go on the FM airwaves next year.
As a Raleigh resident since 2000, I look forward to reading Walter and listening to Raleigh Little Radio. The more local media, the better.
When I was wire editor at The News & Observer, the managing editor suggested that we needed more “ray of hope” stories on the front page. Her request came in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks and amid the Afghanistan war and anthrax mailings. It was a grim time.
Over the weekend, I thought of the need for a “ray of hope.” On the national scene, the news has been consumed lately with the Jerry Sandusky scandal and a massacre at a movie theater in Colorado. Locally, we’ve seen several drownings and wrong-way drivers on Raleigh’s Beltline, among other bleak events.
Where is the ray of hope today? Curiously, it’s in a story about a noteworthy death. Sally Ride, the first American woman to fly in space, died Monday of cancer. Her passing, at the relatively young age of 61, is undeniably sad. But her life story is one of hopes fulfilled.
As detailed in this New York Times obit, Ride set a goal, worked hard and overcame obstacles (including sexist questions from the news media) to make history as a part of the space shuttle program. She served as a wonderful example for girls interested in careers in science and education.
Despite the inspirational nature of her story, Ride’s obituary didn’t appear on the front pages of as many newspapers as I would have expected. Instead, readers of Tuesday’s newspapers were presented with incremental developments in the Colorado killings and news about Penn State football that broke nearly 24 hours earlier.
Instead, Ride was reduced to a promo on many front pages. One of those papers, oddly, was the Orlando Sentinel, which is in NASA’s backyard.
The Ride obit didn’t run on the front page of The News & Observer either, though the Raleigh paper had its own “ray of hope” story with a local angle. The Charlotte Observer played it just right, running the New York Times obit at the bottom of the front page.
As editors, we can look for rays of hope in unexpected places — even in the obituaries. It’s unfortunate that many newspapers missed this opportunity with Sally Ride. But there are other people like her, whose stories inspire us all. Let’s not overlook them amid the machinations of covering politics and mayhem.
Elizabeth Hudson is editor of Our State magazine, a monthly publication about the people and places of North Carolina. The magazine is based in Greensboro and has a circulation of 150,000. Hudson has worked at Our State since 1997. In this interview, conducted by email, Hudson talks about her job, her use of Twitter and the outlook for regional magazines.
Q. What is your typical workday like at the magazine?
A. There’s an old saying that “a chair-bound editor is a dangerous editor,” and it’s a idea that I embrace. In a sense, my office is the entire state of North Carolina!
A typical workday really depends on where I happen to be. I travel extensively, often with the other editors and our art director, visiting the towns we’d like to write about, eating in the restaurants we want to cover, and meeting with local residents and people who work in the travel and tourism industry. We can’t effectively and credibly create an experience for our readers if we haven’t had the experience of a place ourselves.
So a typical workday could include anything from a visit to the Nasher Museum in Durham or Tryon Palace in New Bern, a drive along Railroad Grade Road in Ashe County, a morning in the back of a Mayberry-style squad car in Mount Airy. (Not all of these on the same day, of course.)
The one day people can find me in the office is on Mondays. We have a company-wide meeting every Monday morning at 8:30 a.m.; I follow that meeting with a smaller one of my own with my team of editors and art directors. We critique manuscripts that have come in for the week, and we have a round-table pitch discussion to review story queries, sometimes a half-dozen pitches.
On the days that I’m not traveling or speaking to a church or rotary group, I’m making story assignments, planning content for later issues, meeting with our sales, Web, or marketing team, or working with the art directors conceptualizing layouts and magazine covers.
Q. Many journalism students at UNC-Chapel Hill want to go into magazines as writers and editors. What advice would you offer them?
A. Become a student of magazines. No, scratch that. Become a voracious devourer of magazines.
Get an appetite for the beauty and literary power that magazines hold. Go to the library and pore through bound volumes of great magazines: National Geographic, Esquire, Texas Monthly, Saveur, The Atlantic, The New Yorker (and Our State, of course!).
Learn to think visually — a magazine is a marriage of great writing and great design. One can’t work independently from the other. And try to see the magazine as a whole — think about how the front of the book works with the back of the book — the heartbeat of the magazine — and how the feature well gives your magazine its soul.
Q. You use Twitter in both a professional and personal way. What do you and the magazine hope to achieve through the use of social media?
A. My Twitter account is an extension of my job and my life; I actually don’t really separate the two and, in fact, I don’t think you can if you work in a creative field. You don’t turn it off at 5:30 p.m.
Some magazine editors use Twitter as a way to extend the magazine’s brand — that’s why you see tweets about current content in the magazine; you know, recipes you should try from this month’s issue, for example. That’s fine, but my tweets are more an extension of my personality, which really fits the mission of Our State. Our magazine is intended to feel like a friend you’ve invited into your home; there’s a warm comfort to it, and Twitter, for me, is a way to extend that friendly conversation.
My posts rarely repeat content in the magazine; they’re just a reflection of my day. Sometimes interesting, sometimes mundane, but minutia is the basis for any relationship, really. It’s a nice, easy mixture of the daily. Twitter is a great place to stay connected to the daily.
Q. In an increasingly digital/mobile world, what do you see as the future of Our State and city/regional magazines, both in print and online?
I’m excited by the potential of regional magazine now, especially since the digital world causes everything to be so global. For so long, long-form journalism was king. Great magazines, and newspapers, too, ran 4,000-, 5,000-, 6,000-word stories.
Then, in the late ’90s, you started to see a shift toward shorter, tighter, blurb-ier copy. Many magazines lost their substance. And certainly there was an appetite for shorter, bite-size stories.
But that’s the beauty of the web and of mobile. It demands short, which means that magazines now are swinging back to their heyday of rich, long-form content. I’m seeing it happen, and it’s wonderful.
There will always be readers for whom story matters. And when you can get everything you need in the short-form online or on a tablet, you’ll create a craving for long-form elsewhere. Enter magazines. The perfect portable device for delivering the kind of content, at length, that people will start longing for again.
Jonathan Jones is the editor of Carolina Blue Magazine, which focuses on athletics at UNC-Chapel Hill. A recent graduate of UNC, Jones was sports editor at The Daily Tar Heel and had internships at CNNSI.com and The Gaston Gazette. In this interview, conducted by email, Jones talks about his job at the magazine, his use of social media and print vs. online journalism.
Q. Describe your job at Carolina Blue Magazine. What do you do on a typical week?
A. I’m the editor of the magazine, which typically means I’m an overseer. But really I like to get my hands dirty and do a lot of everything with the magazine.
A typical week during, let’s say football season, includes going to Larry Fedora’s press conference on Monday and talking to players throughout the week to get enough quotes for an advance on Saturday’s game. That’s when the express edition comes into play. Our online subscribers get a weekly PDF emailed to them known as an express edition. That recaps the week that was while looking ahead to UNC’s next opponent.
Just because I’m a magazine editor doesn’t mean I don’t do game stories like the other print/online writers. While I put together the express editions, I’m communicating with freelancers, planning the next issue of the magazine, designing the current magazine and putting together longer, more broad articles that can occupy the monthly publication. It slows down in the summer, but when basketball and football overlap come late September/early October, I’ll be underground.
Q, You’ve worked for both print and online publications. Which medium do you prefer?
A. It has to be print. I’ve known I wanted to go into sports writing since I was 5, reading The Charlotte Observer back home and subscribing to Sports Illustrated a few years later.
I have an affinity to print, and that undoubtedly makes me biased. Along with that, no matter how many articles I write, there’s always something special about seeing your byline on paper, and you just don’t get that same feeling online.
Furthermore, I like having a word/inches count. On the Internet we can all ramble, but print places a premium on your words, and I feel like some of that may have been lost in the shift from print to online.
Q. When you were at The Daily Tar Heel, you wrote columns that irritated fans at East Carolina University and N.C. State. What did you learn from that reaction?
A. The Russell Wilson article happened first, and I really wasn’t prepared for the reaction. I had gotten hate mail before, but in the past I had always known it was going to come. I wrote that column and honestly forgot it was in the paper the following day until Twitter started blowing up.
What I realized after that column was that I didn’t touch on every possible counterpoint. Rightly so, the critics exploited those holes, and from that I learned to cover the other side of the argument better when writing something that may irritate folks.
The reaction from the ECU column was huge. I had learned from the amount of comments on the NCSU column that I couldn’t, nor should I, respond to everyone. So that day as my email piles up with some thoughtful (and not so thoughtful) messages from folks, I didn’t respond. I also didn’t get into any Twitter arguments. It just wasn’t worth it.
That’s not to say I don’t interact with those who critique me. In fact, quite the contrary. Since my days from the Gaston Gazette in 2005 until now with Carolina Blue, when I get emails from readers wanting further explanation or what have you, I do take my time and get back to them with what I hope to be a thoughtful response. For the ECU column though, there was no calming the masses, and individual emails wouldn’t have done any good. I made a folder specifically for messages regarding that column — it has 103 messages, some of which are still unread.
Q. You are active on Twitter. What is the role of social media in sports journalism?
A. When I was the sports editor of the DTH, I had everyone on my staff get a Twitter. Some of them hated it because of the notion that Twitter is all about quick status updates on your day/life.
Twitter is an incredible tool for sports journalists. I’m about to go on vacation, and every time I get away, I tell myself I’ll stay off Twitter. But it’s so difficult because once you get invested, you feel like you’re so far behind when you miss a day.
So much content is shared via Twitter (if you follow the right people). Those I follow are mainly sports journalists in the ACC, but I also follow plenty of national writers who create and share interesting articles, YouTube links, pop culture commentary, etc.
But as a sports journalist, you have to find the right balance. I’ve tweeted less than 10,000 times, and I’ve had my account for three years now. If you factor in my live-tweeting during games, you’ll find that I appear on your timeline a lot less than people I follow.
Just like with the print product, I try to place a premium on my tweets. When I live-tweet football or basketball games, I try not to inundate followers with up-to-the-second stats. Instead, I try to look go inside the game, add an anecdote from an interview with a player earlier in the week or just try to be funny (that fails sometimes). After the games, I like to tweet some interesting quotes from the coach and players while saving some info (things I see, 1-on-1 interviews, etc.) for my story.
Q. Many students at the journalism school at UNC-Chapel Hill have an interest in sports reporting and editing. What advice do you have for them?
A. This isn’t new advice, but it’s advice that should always be repeated: read. Read newspapers, read Sports Illustrated, read Mark Twain — just read good writing. The more you read and understand other writers’ styles, the more you can develop your own.
In that same thought, sports writing isn’t just about game stories. Anyone can write a game story, and in fact, even computers now can write game stories. When I crank out what I believe to be a good profile of a player or a team, that means more to me than a handful of front-page game stories.
That said, everyone has a story. That’s what I’ve told my staffers for years. And if you’re just starting out and you’re covering a non-revenue sport, don’t get discouraged. There are X players on that team, and each one has a story worth telling — and it may be a story that someone has yet to tell.
UPDATE: In August 2012, Jones accepted a reporting position at The Charlotte Observer, covering the Carolina Panthers football team.
Brad Walters is an art director and features designer at The Washington Post. He previously worked at The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., and the Herald-Journal in Spartanburg, S.C. In this interview, conducted by email, Walters talks about what it’s like to work at the Post and what’s in store for print designers in an increasingly digital media.
Q. Describe your job. What do you do in a typical workday?
A. In a nutshell, I get paid to draw all day! How cool is that? More specifically, I design and art-direct covers and inside pages for the weekly Health & Science and Local Living sections of the Post.
Part of the job is highly creative — conceptualizing graphics, brainstorming cover concepts from scratch — and part of it is technical and heavily deadline-driven. The features design team is a collaborative group, so we’re constantly bouncing ideas off one another and pitching in to help each other when it’s needed. I sometimes write for the paper as well, but that’s far less typical nowadays.
Q. Your career before The Washington Post included stops in Raleigh and Spartanburg. How is the Post different from the newspapers in those cities, and how does that affect what you do?
A. The biggest difference is that the Post, by virtue of its size, offers resources that smaller papers often can’t. For instance, I’m fortunate enough to have a modest freelance budget with which I can hire illustrators to produce original artwork for certain stories. It’s not something I can do all the time, but it’s a nice way to bring diverse voices and themes to our pages.
As in Raleigh and Spartanburg, the Post is highly focused on growing its local audience, more so now than ever. As Warren Buffett noted in his memo to his newspaper editors and publishers this past week, “newspapers that intensely cover their communities will have a good future.” Let’s hope he’s right.
Q. You’ve worked both as a copy editor and as a designer. Which role do you prefer, and which skills overlap?
A. The primary overlap is that I think both copy editors and designers serve as the gatekeepers and guardians of the interests of readers. In a more practical sense, it’s incredibly useful to be able to write spec headlines for display packages that stand at least a chance of making it into the paper. While everyone is encouraged to weigh in on all aspects of a story, the fact that I was a copy editor in a previous life makes me feel more comfortable doing so.
Q. You’re a print journalist in a media world that’s becoming increasingly digital. What do you see as the future of newspaper design?
If the news out of New Orleans and Alabama is any indication, I think there’s no question we’re moving toward an all-digital media world. Personally, I still read the dead-tree edition of the Post every day and have grown accustomed to how the print product organizes the news, and I think it’ll be a long while before we hit that tipping point where print can no longer wholly sustain itself.
The good news for visual journalists out there is that no matter what the medium – print, web, mobile – the need for smart, clear design and unique visual communication is only getting stronger as the media environment becomes more saturated. Print journalism may eventually die, but visual journalism – and journalism as a whole – is as important as it’s ever been.
Old stylebooks and updates from my days at The News & Observer. I recently donated these materials to a library at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Earlier this week, I stopped by the Park Library at UNC-Chapel Hill to borrow The Bluebook to assist me in a revision of a textbook chapter. The librarian, Stephanie Willen Brown, showed me a nice update to the library’s collection: freshly bound copies of stylebooks from newspapers.
The collection includes stylebooks from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Miami Herald and the San Francisco Chronicle. News services such as Bloomberg, United Press International, the Catholic News Service and The Associated Press are also represented. The oldest item in the set is the 1943 edition of The New York Times stylebook.
Nearly all of the stylebooks are print only, but you can see them at the Park Library and other libraries on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus. I’m hoping to spend part of my summer thinking of how these stylebooks could be used for research.
I have several stylebooks in my office, including three from my days at The News & Observer. I’ve donated those to the Park Library. Like many newspaper stylebooks, these are in three-punch folders, so Stephanie will look into getting them bound.
Do you have a stylebook from a newspaper, website, magazine or wire service that you’d like to share? Contact the staff at the Park Library. We can study, save and protect your stylebook, and we’d be grateful for your gift.
This weekend, I visited the Nasher Museum of Art in Durham, N.C., to see an exhibit of works by Alexander Calder as well as some inspired by him. It’s a wondrous show that I highly recommend.
In a stop at the museum’s gift shop, I ran across some newspaper-themed bow ties. They’re clip-on ties made of pages from The New York Times, covered in a lacquer of some sort.
As a former newspaper copy editor, I couldn’t resist the mix of media and fashion, and I bought two of them. I think that it’s a good look on me.
I’ll keep one tie and donate the other to the 2013 silent auction of the American Copy Editors Society. You’ll have to be at the conference in St. Louis to bid on it — or you could stop by the Nasher now and pick up one of the few left.
The News & Observer launched a redesign this week, making the biggest changes in its look and content since a renovation in 1993. The newspaper’s editor, John Drescher, explains the changes in this column.
Readers famously hate change, even though publications have always needed to update their form and content on occasion. Would anyone expect today’s newspapers to look like these?
As a former N&O editor, I have a special interest in what the Raleigh paper does. But here, I will offer my reaction as a reader. (Yes, I still get a daily newspaper delivered every day!)
WHAT I LIKE
WHAT I’M STILL THINKING OVER
WHAT I DON’T LIKE
For more on the N&O redesign, take a look at this post from Charles Apple’s blog.
