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Episode #107: Jane Pong
181 Plays7 years ago
Jane Pong is a Data Visualization Journalist at the Financial Times. Previously, she produced information graphics at Thomson Reuters in Singapore and South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. She is a graduate of the University of Sydney with a combined Arts/Science...
The post Episode #107: Jane Pong appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction to Jane Pong
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policy Vis podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. Happy holidays, everyone. I hope you are having a great end of 2017 and looking forward to early 2018. I am excited for this week's guest because we have a lot to talk about. I'm very excited to have Jane Pong with me.
00:00:29
Speaker
From the Financial Times, Jane has done an amazing amount of work, FT, and of course, a number of other places before she was at the FT, which she's going to tell you about. Jane, thanks so much for coming on the show. Hi, thanks for having me. Happy holidays to you. How are things in Hong Kong? Things are great. It's winter and not humid.
00:00:50
Speaker
Oh, nice, nice. Well, we were in DC. It's still warm here. Well, like we have had a few days of 60 degree Fahrenheit. I know there's a Celsius Fahrenheit thing, but we've had some nice warm weather. So we still haven't hit the cold yet. I have a list of things I want to talk to you about, including tile grid maps, because you did this awesome animated GIF a few weeks ago. I want to talk about data visualization in Asia and Hong Kong.
From Science to Data Visualization
00:01:13
Speaker
But before we get into all of that, maybe you could start by introducing yourself and talk about your background a little bit for folks.
00:01:19
Speaker
Sure. So my name is Jane Pong and I am a data visualization journalist at the Financial Times based in Hong Kong. Before this, I've worked as a graphics editor at the South China Morning Post, which is the main English language newspaper here.
00:01:34
Speaker
And for a while, I was part of the graphics team at Thomson Reuters in Singapore. So like a lot of people, I sort of got into the database in a really long, roundabout way. I actually have a background in both science and arts, and I was trained in chemistry, linguistics, and psychology. Wow. So say that chemistry, linguistics.
00:01:58
Speaker
and psychology. So okay, so how did you go from there to database? Yeah, it's quite a funny story. So after graduation, I worked as a research assistant at a university back in Australia, where I grew up and the research center that I worked at kind of focused on studying human choice behavior, which is very interesting and lined up with my psychology background.
00:02:21
Speaker
And there I worked with many brilliant econometricians and statisticians, and we tried to model and predict choice behavior in areas like policymaking and marketing. So as I was doing that job, I realized how terrible the charts in the reports were. And then so gradually I shifted my role from running the statistical models to kind of communicating the models instead.
00:02:49
Speaker
And yeah, it was a lot of fun to be able to communicate academic research in a way that more people could understand them because the reports looked very boring and just difficult to understand. But they were talking about human choice behaviours and studying how you can influence how people make their choices.
00:03:15
Speaker
So yeah, so I was doing that for a little while and then I decided that I was going to quit my job and pursue database as a career.
Journey into Journalism
00:03:28
Speaker
So back then, database wasn't really a thing. So I was just reading up on it classics like
00:03:36
Speaker
know, Edward Tufti books and following data online. And I started learning coding as well. So I was trying to figure out where to go in this database career. And there weren't any degrees available back then. There weren't any
00:03:55
Speaker
agencies that had database as a specialty. And newsrooms were kind of at the forefront in producing great database work. So I found my way into a newsroom. Thanks to some very wonderful people who took a chance on this just random person showing up and say, Hey, I love database, please give me a job.
00:04:19
Speaker
So you went to the newsroom and said, I'm interested in doing the data viz, but I don't have a journalism background. Yep. I mean, you certainly had a writing background, but not a journalism background. Yep. That's exactly what I did. Wow. And I was very, very fortunate that they took me in. And that was at South China Morning Post here in Hong Kong.
00:04:38
Speaker
Right. So can I just step back one moment because, um, you know, as you know, I spent a lot of time working with researchers trying to communicate their data. So when you were doing that, did you get a lot of pushback where people like, no, no, no. Like, so, and so how did you, how did you try to try to convince people that there's a better way?
00:04:57
Speaker
Um, just by showing them there was a better way. Uh, they had really, they had just the default Excel charts, um, with 10 million lines. So I'm just like, well, which line do you want to actually show because you can't see anything from this mess.
00:05:13
Speaker
And then I would just sit down and talk to them and be really patient and trying to get to the bottom of what the main message was. And I think they researchers appreciate that a lot as well, because there's someone actually trying to understand what they're doing. And then we would together come up with a better solution. And because at the research center, we worked with industry partner as well. So we get a lot of good client feedback in terms of
00:05:42
Speaker
what makes sense and what didn't, and that helped a lot. And were the researchers trying to publish in both academic journals, but also get the information to a broader audience? And did they try to think differently about those different audiences and different outputs? And then have you tried to also help them think differently about those?
Graphics in Newsrooms
00:06:04
Speaker
They were mostly focusing on publishing in academia, but part of their work is to work with industry partners
00:06:12
Speaker
So I was the person pushing them to think about communicating to a wider audience and people who are not also statisticians and econometricians and just trying to say, you know, I understand this model is at 99.89% accuracy, but that's pretty good. That extra 0.1% they're not going to care about.
00:06:40
Speaker
So funny. So then when you went to the newsroom, did you face some of the same challenges of convincing journalists to think in a visual way or sort of a better visual way or was or people already sort of buying into this? And it was a concept or an idea that, oh, we can have a person who's dedicated to really doing a lot of this and doing it a lot better.
00:07:05
Speaker
I think I was very, very lucky when I joined the South China Morning Post because there was already some great people working there in terms of database. So my ex boss, some of your listeners might know him. His name is Simon Ska. So he was the graphics director at South China Morning Post back then. And he has already established like a kind of culture within the newsroom doing these
00:07:34
Speaker
big print data viz pieces at the back of the newspaper.
00:07:41
Speaker
And so when I joined, people already knew what it was, and they've seen a few of those pieces published. So they understood what we were trying to do. And that made the process a lot easier. But at the same time, because we were publishing a separate feature section, there wasn't a lot of overlap with the journalists at the paper.
00:08:10
Speaker
Oh, I see. Yeah, because we did all our own research, all our analysis, and all the charts and data is ourselves. It was sort of all it was just it was sort of siloed off in some way. Yeah, yeah. Right.
00:08:26
Speaker
So then what did the journalists do for their graphics? Or was it really they would write a story, they had some data, they needed a graph of it, they would just send it to you? Yeah, it worked kind of like a service desk back then. Oh, okay. But there's a lot more integration now, I think. Right.
00:08:45
Speaker
Right. I mean, it seems that way that it's a lot of the desks all seem mingled together. Now I think even we're seeing the data visualization team getting their names in the by-lines of the articles instead of just, you know, at the very bottom, you know, Bob Smith or Jane Smith made this graph, which is I think a great evolution. Yeah, definitely. So you're at the South China Morning Post and then from there you go to?
Visual Storytelling in Asia
00:09:10
Speaker
Reuters in Singapore. Right. And how was that?
00:09:14
Speaker
It was like the complete opposite of my experience at the post. I think like I would do those two experiences as kind of like two extremes because at SCMP, the newspaper was, this was back in
00:09:35
Speaker
2013. So the newspaper was still kind of operating primarily in print, and the focus was on reading like a daily print deadline. But then that was a completely different setup from Reuters, which is a wide new service that runs 24 seven. So the nature of the work that I did at those two places were like, it's just completely different. Right.
00:10:00
Speaker
Was it organized in a similar way in terms of having the graphics desk siloed off from the rest of the journalists or was it more integrated because it's a wire service and there's just a lot, I don't know if there's a lot more, but it's just the nature of what you're producing is different. Yeah. There was a lot more communication between reporters and us because we needed them to do some of the groundwork because we were doing breaking news graphics.
00:10:28
Speaker
So anytime we had someone on the ground, we would talk to them and get information from them as quickly as possible and try and do a graphic as quickly as possible.
00:10:38
Speaker
Right. Like the graphics I made at Reuters were a lot more targeted and driven by the news cycle. Whereas at the post, it was more kind of exploratory. It was more featurey and just had more kind of details than your average news graphics.
00:11:00
Speaker
those two jobs you really had really seems like both ends of the spectrum of the real quick turnaround, maybe more standard graphics, and then the stuff where you get to maybe be a little more creative, or longer term dive in a little bit more. Yeah, I think it's great to have worked on those ends with both ends.
00:11:22
Speaker
And it's kind of helped me a lot in understanding how the news industry works and just to figure out how to make data journalism work in those different settings as well. What would you say to a data visualization person coming into the newsroom for the first time? Like what would be the one thing, the number one thing you would say for that person to be aware of or to try to do in a new job for the first time? I think really talk
00:11:51
Speaker
with your colleagues and understand what they do and then help them understand how you can collaborate together. Because my specialization is data visualization. I don't have a beat per se. And when it comes to, especially in Asia, you really kind of need domain knowledge from reporters on the ground.
00:12:16
Speaker
to do good journalism. So talking to them is essential in figuring out what's a good story in their beat and where you can find sources of data and how you can make that data be valuable in terms of storytelling. I mean, I think that's the core of what we're seeing a lot of places is trying to build these teams as opposed to having them siloed off and communicating
00:12:47
Speaker
you know, it's like inner office envelopes, right? Instead of having these envelopes where we pass them back, we try to get people more integrated together. Yeah. And I think where the bylines reflect that now. Yeah. Yeah, they're getting longer. But I think it demonstrates this integration. And it also I think demonstrates the value that the newsrooms place on the visualizations.
00:13:14
Speaker
Um, that the visual is as equally important as the reporter doing the interviews and writing the text. Um, that they're both part of this storytelling or this, this communication. Um, okay. So South China morning posts to Reuters and then to the financial times in Hong Kong. So you've been at either end prior to the FT. And so now the FT where you place the FT newsroom on the spectrum.
00:13:40
Speaker
solely in the middle as a combination of both. Yeah, I'm the first graphics person hired in Hong Kong. So my role is to bring visual storytelling more to Asia.
00:13:59
Speaker
And so, yeah, so part of my role is to do some graphics to go with stories that are in short term and also work on bigger projects any longer term. You now have both the digital and the print, right?
00:14:13
Speaker
Yes, yes. Literally in the middle, you've hit the whole range. It's pretty awesome. So can you talk a little bit about the newsroom there, the size of it, and maybe a little nuts and bolts of how it works? So I have this image of the South China Morning Post of literally a graphics desk over in the one side and then the reporters on the other side. Yeah, literally in the corner.
00:14:39
Speaker
What about the FT? I mean, I had John Murdoch and Martin on the show a few months ago from the UK office of the FT, and they seem like a central part of the newsroom there. So is it similar? Is the same thing in Hong Kong?
00:14:55
Speaker
Yeah, but on a much smaller scale. So the Hong Kong office is the Asia headquarters for the FT. So we have a desk of editors and they would edit stories from all around Asia in the region. And it's a very small newsroom. We only have about 15 people in editorial.
00:15:17
Speaker
And I actually sit on the main desk with all the editors. I sit right next to the editors because it's such a small newsroom. So I'm involved in the planning meetings. I'm right there when they talk about the daily stuff. So it's easy for me to kind of.
00:15:37
Speaker
be integrated within the workflow and say, hey, I heard that you were planning this story. Have you thought about visual elements to it? There might be some data that we could get. Can we ask the reporters whether they have heard anything or have any sources that can lead us to good data? And then I would develop graphics in parallel with writing the stories, which works really
00:16:01
Speaker
Great. And wow. Yeah. I mean, it seems like you're able to get in at the very beginning of a project, which seems an ideal way to build out a workflow. Yeah. And just by proximity. Yeah. Right. Right. And literally sitting right in the middle of the whole thing.
00:16:21
Speaker
I'm not sure you'll be able to answer this question, but I'm curious about whether you've noticed a style to graphics geared towards an Asian audience that might differ from the graphics that are created for a Western European or an American audience, comparing what the FT graphics desk in the UK does, how that might differ from what you do in the Hong Kong office.
Cultural Differences in Data Visualization
00:16:48
Speaker
I wouldn't say
00:16:50
Speaker
At the FT, I wouldn't say there's a huge difference because obviously, we would have a style guide that we all have at issue. And also, the majority of our readers would be in Europe or in the US. So Asia is a smaller market than the rest of the world.
00:17:10
Speaker
So for the FT, I don't think there is much of a difference in the things that I produce and the things that the London team produces. But in living in Asia, I've noticed there's definitely a cultural difference in terms of how people kind of read or look at database. And most of that is just related to the language because
00:17:39
Speaker
as a language, Chinese characters are lock characters. So things like typography and layouts would be a lot different from English. And also culturally, I think in Asia, people are more used to having a lot of dense information thrown at them. And so they're very good at separating signal from the noise. Oh, interesting.
00:18:07
Speaker
In Western audiences, there's this focus on having clean design, using color to highlight important points and things like that. In Asia, that's less of a concern, I think. In Asia, I think very often the goal is to gain attention. So it's a lot of colors, it's a lot of noise, it's just things
00:18:36
Speaker
flashing and animating and using kind of
00:18:42
Speaker
the tips and icons and things like that to attract attention. And then after that, the information will speak for itself. So it's yeah, I find it really interesting. And it's definitely something that I want to explore. I was born in Hong Kong, but I grew up in Australia. So I can't say that I have a really low called knowledge of how it works.
00:19:08
Speaker
But like me being kind of from the two sides allows me to kind of fridge those two ends. Right. Yeah, I hope to kind of think more about it and maybe write some things about it as some of our observations. Yeah. That's super interesting. I mean, do you think it's, is it coming from the kanji, the different, the form of the letters, or is it
00:19:37
Speaker
a broader cultural origin to having more dense information? I think it's both. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the living environments are different. The lifestyles are different. So I think it both factors.
00:19:56
Speaker
Yeah, that's, that's so interesting. Well, I want to ask about your tile grid map, animated GIF, because that was, that's really what sort of spurred me to get in touch. And I'll post it on the, on the show notes, but you, you basically collected, I don't know, probably about a dozen different layouts of US state level tile grid maps to just show how different newsrooms are laying them out. So, so I guess the first question is what spurred you to take that on?
00:20:26
Speaker
Well, the idea came to me when I just started noticing the US grid maps popping up a lot in the last year, just done by different news organizations.
00:20:36
Speaker
And I'm not very good with US geography. So I just got curious in how the different versions are different. So instead of comparing each of them to the actual thing, I just figured, oh, I'll just compare them to each other. And it was a very fun exercise to figure out how to make them as well with code. And it allowed me to practice my D3 skills.
00:21:03
Speaker
So yeah, that was part of the reason I made it as well, which is to code more. I mean, it was really interesting whenever I talk about them, I always point out that South Carolina is not to the east of North Carolina. And we're not we're not even close to South Carolina, but you know, on a lot of these maps as they end up. I mean, do you use tile grid maps for the Asian market? I mean, I, I tried creating this world tile grid map and doing Asia was
00:21:30
Speaker
incredibly different. Like, yeah, it is quite a challenge. I really liked the world grid map, by the way. What a feat. I mean, especially for some like Russia is the one that I always point to, like, you know, come on, you know, it was sort of comical to try to put Russia into the same square size as, you know,
00:21:56
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. It's Fiji, right? And then you have countries in Asia, like Vietnam is super skinny and long, and to try to figure out where to place that. So I can imagine where may not be as useful, but I'm wondering if you've ever tried and thought about trying to pull them together for that market. I actually tried one for the provinces in China. Okay. And it has not worked very well.
00:22:23
Speaker
I think the main challenge with tile grid maps is trying to kind of preserve the outline of the country, but maintaining kind of accurate positions of the individual states relative to each other. So something is north of something else.
00:22:43
Speaker
but then the whole shape kind of just falls apart, right? So that was the problem with China. So China has this shape that kind of looks like a rooster and it has like a huge area with Tibet and Xinjiang and very small areas like Beijing and Shanghai.
00:23:02
Speaker
trying to preserve kind of relative positions while maintaining that outline of the rooster was just impossible. So I pretty much gave up, but there is a gist on GitHub that I've put online. So if anyone wants to take a look and give me feedback, that would be great. Yeah, that's great. I'll look to that too. I mean, does China have the same or similar population density issues that the U, I'm guessing it does because of the eastern part of the country, but
00:23:31
Speaker
Yeah, so the coastal states are very heavily populated. Whereas Tibet has a huge area, but very few people and very small economy. So that makes kind of corrupt lists sometimes a problem. But then I think how well it works, at least for China, I think it depends on what your
00:24:00
Speaker
trying to, like what the variable you're trying to show. I think it probably works best for illustrating data where the important point is the number of regions meeting some kind of criteria. So if you want to say, you know, 10 out of the 20 provinces have above average something.
00:24:23
Speaker
then a grid map is great for showing that. But if it's geographically related, like some kind of commodity or some kind of industry along the coastal states has higher output, for example, then the tile grid map doesn't work because it doesn't conserve that kind of
00:24:40
Speaker
outline, that coastal outline. Yeah, so it really, I think it works in some cases, but not so well in others. Yeah.
Challenges with Tile Grid Maps
00:24:48
Speaker
Just like you said, it's the other fundamental problem is that people when they see a map of the US or of China, where they live, they easily recognize their city or their town or their state. Whereas you manipulate it to create a tile grid map or to create a tile gram or a cardogram or whatever it is, it might be a better way to present data. But suddenly, the reader is like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
00:25:09
Speaker
Where am I on this? Yeah, definitely.
Closing Remarks
00:25:12
Speaker
Well, this has been a great conversation. I'm really excited to have talked to you about this whole spectrum where you've seen both ends and now sitting right in the middle of the data journalism field. I'm really excited to see all the work that's coming out of the FT office from China and Asia. And I'm going to keep checking in to see how dense the information is. So I'll look forward to hearing more from you about those differences. So Jane, thanks so much for coming on the show. It's been really interesting.
00:25:35
Speaker
Thank you for having me. And thanks to everyone for tuning into this week's episode. I hope everyone has a happy holidays and I will talk to you soon. This has been the Policy Viz Podcast. Thanks so much for listening.