Transcript
Speaker: Welcome back to the Policy Viz Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. This is one of the July editions of the show. Thanks for listening. I'm here today with Aaron Pilhofer from The Guardian in the UK. Aaron, welcome to the show. Thank you. Glad to be here. Thanks for coming on. I'm really excited to have you. I think there's a lot for us to talk about, so let's just jump right in.
Speaker: Well, I would guess a lot of people know you from your work at the New York Times and now you've jumped across the Atlantic to the Guardian. You want to talk a little bit about the sort of things that you've been working on at the Guardian since you moved over?
Speaker: Sure. I mean, yeah, so I was at the Times for nine years and worked in various capacities. I got there as a reporter, actually, and then ended up running a technology team, a combined technology team of about 20 developers and social media community and newsroom analytics. But I came over to The Guardian in August of last year
Speaker: with a slightly larger portfolio, created a team here called Guardian Visuals basically modeled after National Public Radio's visuals team. That kind of brings together, as I like to say, sort of all the raw materials of visual journalism on one desk.
Speaker: which is really, really important today as you're trying to do innovative digital journalism. I also run social and community for a few more weeks until Mary Hamilton, an amazing editor, comes back to London to take over in a couple weeks. And I started an analytics team here as well in the newsroom. So that's kind of what I'm doing. So the whole graphics team is under your thumb?
Speaker: Yeah, that sounds really highfalutin', but it's not that many people. At the time, I had 20 developers. The graphics team in total was probably 50 people. We had a multimedia team for a while of five. We had a video unit that's now ballooned to like 75 back in the day at the New York Times.
Speaker: a photo desk that went on for days. We do not have those kinds of resources here at the Guardian. So the total team on visuals is probably 40, 45. About half of that is the photo desk. And the other half is a combination of developers, designers, motion graphic artists, graphic artists, just sort of a range of very, very talented visual journalists.
Speaker: So when you are building all these different platforms and tools with the graphics for the print version of the newspaper and then the online, both static and interactive, let's focus on the online. What are the things that you find work well in terms of trying to engage readers in a deeper way?
Speaker: Yeah, so back in the day we started building a lot of standalone, what I might even call sort of destination interactives, and these are sort of big, meaty, impressive, data -driven things that you would browse to and then experience and then browse away.
Speaker: And over time, I think we realized that that approach doesn't really work that well except in some very specific cases. It's hard to carry a piece of journalism or to carry a story exclusively.
Speaker: with data, data viz. Data viz, visualization, interaction, to me, in a lot of cases it's better if it just sort of complements or adds to a piece of journalism and particularly when it's presented in context or sort of organically within the piece of journalism. So what we've been doing more and more is weaving the sort of interactive elements into a narrative.
Speaker: And are there certain elements that you find work?
Speaker: Well, with certain, I mean, are you able to assess what elements work with certain types of readers versus other types of readers? Are there social aspects of data visualization that you find work well? I know that the upshot at the Times is doing more and more of these, what I'm trying to, what I think I'm calling social viz, where people sort of play with the visualization and see how they sit relative to others. Are you finding similar sorts of things with your readers?
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I think some of the work that Upshot's doing in that area is actually kind of leading the industry. LA Times is doing some similar things, or has done in the past, the St. Petersburg Times now, the Tampa Times has done some of that work in the past.
Speaker: Finding ways to use just a great interactive that can be Highly customized or highly personalized and to sort of find yourself in the data And the project I think you're you're talking about an upshot is a great example of that so you were it would it would it would allow you to to
Speaker: It would actually kind of rewrite the story based on geography and what geography was relevant to you. We've tried to do some of that and we did it in particular around the election. So around the election, it's a very local. The UK is a really interesting election system for a variety of reasons.
Speaker: I obviously had to, there was both a referendum on Scotland and then a national election within my first six months, so I had a crash course in parliamentary politics once I got here.
Speaker: It's really interesting because races are both local and national, and there's really nothing in between. What's relevant to a particular reader in any given moment is very much dependent on what's going on. Their local election is super relevant at one particular part of the evening, and then the national election is super relevant at another part of the evening.
Speaker: And so we tried to create an interactive that would allow you, again, to sort of personalize it, find yourself in the data, find what's relevant to you. So that, to me, as a design pattern, that's a super, super important, as kind of key with those kinds of interactions. And have you found any difference between the UK audience and the New York Times audience in the US?
Speaker: The Guardian itself definitely does have a different audience. In many ways, they are similar. It's safe to say that both readers of the New York Times and The Guardian tend to skew left of centre, no doubt about that. The main difference is The Guardian has an audience that is far more global than The New York Times.
Speaker: So the times was about 70, 75 % US and about 25%, 25 to 30 % non -US. And even that's a bit misleading because a big chunk of the non -US is actually Canada.
Speaker: You're talking about a very big North American audience compared to the rest of the world. The Guardian is about a third the UK, about a third the US, and about a third the rest of the world, which includes Europe and India, Africa, South America, Central America, and so forth.
Speaker: And so, given that, our audience, I think, you know, we have to think in terms of a global audience. We can't be too UK -centric in the things that we do. I mean, obviously, UK elections, you know.
Speaker: Yeah, but even there, you know, we produced, prior to the election, we produced a motion graphic that we called sort of the British election for non -brits as a way of sort of, because we knew this was, we did the election and we also did the referendum, the Scottish referendum.
Speaker: same concept for non Brits because we knew that at some point this is going to be a new story that would have sort of a global, that would have global interest. It might be a day ahead of time but at some point someone was going to be you know looking for that kind of information and you know that motion graphic particularly the one that Scotland did incredibly well, traveled incredibly well on social.
Speaker: So when you are putting these sorts of things out for the election or for whatever, how are you measuring success? You just mentioned, you know, did well on social, but what are the sorts of metrics that you're using to measure, to figure out whether these visualizations or stories, let's say stories more generally, are successful?
Speaker: Yeah, so I look at success on different levels. So right now, I would say the tools that we have in newsrooms to measure success, I think, are fairly rudimentary. And that's a big part of why I created this analytics team, is to help us
Speaker: become a little more sophisticated in how we think about and measure success. So one of the absolute treats about working at The Guardian is we have a platform here that I had nothing to do with. It is a gift to come here and discover that this thing exists. It's a platform called OFAN.
Speaker: which is sort of, you can imagine it's sort of a Google Analytics on steroids, but hyper, hyper, hyper specific to Guardian content. And so any reporter, any journalist in the newsroom at any time can log on to OFAN and see
Speaker: you know, incredibly detailed up to the second sort of analytics about content, where traffic's coming to, where it's coming from. We recently implemented mediums, was it medium or up worthy? I think it's up worthy actually, the total reading time. They've developed kind of what I call a metametric, which is, you know, how much time are people reading?
Speaker: on their site, not how many page views, not how many uniques. It's like total reading time. That's an important metric for them. We bake that into OFAN. So for us, as we're looking at a piece of visual journalism, we look at all kinds of things. We look at the obvious ones, page views, uniques, but we also look at referrals. We also look at median attention time, and that can be a really important
Speaker: indicator of engagement. So as an example, a lot of the pieces we produce get a ton of page views, but if the total, if the median attention time is, you know, 30 seconds, that indicates to me that the piece, you know, received it was, the reach was significant, but the engagement was fairly low. A piece we put out about a week and a half ago about the American Civil War,
Speaker: the media attention time was over three minutes which is astounding, just mind boggling by web standards and even though that piece ended up getting 250 ,000 page views or there about, that kind of attention time says to me well that was
Speaker: a piece that people engage with very deeply. What I want to get to is sort of the next level where you can look at things like scrolled up. You can look at things like the individual elements of an interactive. In that case, we sort of came up with a new UI for
Speaker: scrubbing between a historical photo and a modern picture of that same location. And we would want to sort of add some instrumentation to be able to measure whether people are engaging with those individual UI elements. And that would tell us a lot about success or failure there.
Speaker: as well as A -B testing, which we do not do at this point, but we absolutely need to start doing. We have a framework for doing it, so I think by the end of, I would say by the end of, well, middle next year, I would say that we would have much of this in place.
Speaker: Now a lot of the metrics you just mentioned are readers coming on, how much time they spend interacting with the story or with the visualization. What about sort of direct communication with the reader? So using the comments, the comment boxes allowing people to sort of chime in. Do you sort of measure those and do the writers or the visual folks try to interact with the readers in any way after the stories or the visualization has been put out?
Speaker: I think in some fairly limited ways we do, but I don't think, I think if you were to ask me what is the one sort of area of storytelling, of news gathering, particularly in a digital environment that is the most under explored, underutilized, it's community. And again, I was lucky when I got here, The Guardian has a platform called Guardian Witness.
Speaker: which is a platform for reader interaction. The back -end technology is pretty straightforward. It's a system that allows you to upload a text, a story, a comment, whatever it is, an image or images. You could also upload a video. And we've used it in a fairly
Speaker: I would say basic and fairly highly templated ways, you know, sunsets, send us pictures of food, things like that. We've used it in some cases for news gatherings, but nothing too sophisticated. But I think it's like platforms like that where you're really scratching just the surface of what's possible. And so right before the election, we used Witness and some other tools to create, I think, a pretty
Speaker: beautiful piece of journalism, which was called A Hundred Voices, Immigrants, A Hundred Voices. And immigration here is a huge issue. And politicians often talk about immigration. We write a lot about immigration, but we never actually talk to people who have immigrated. And so the idea here was to create sort of what I like to call a sort of collaborative piece of journalism, along with our readers who happen to also have immigrated.
Speaker: And it ended up being a really beautiful piece, highly edited. I mean, we edited it just like you would edit any piece of journalism, but the raw material was provided by readers. It was images and stories. And it turned out pretty amazing. We just did another one.
Speaker: around the crisis in Greece, and we have another one queued up in a couple of weeks. And so to me, the more we can do along these lines and the more advanced, the further you can go with this, I think the better. Yeah. And when it comes to sort of the traditional comments, people read a story and they end up commenting, are you
Speaker: I guess managing or curating those comments, are you moving them up or down the queue so that certain comments get more attention? Nick Diacopoulos was on the show a few weeks ago talking about the algorithms that news agencies use. Does the Guardian use similar sorts of approaches to do that?
Speaker: To my knowledge, we don't. The comment system, I think, here is a fairly traditional comment system where it's much more or less sortable by newest, oldest, and so forth.
Speaker: We have had, at The Guardian obviously, is a very early adopter of community and comments and has a, you know, open journalism is, you know, is kind of core to our philosophy and values.
Speaker: And so comments are something that we take very, very seriously and we put on as many stories as we possibly can. We have not, to my knowledge, done a ton algorithmically to surface comments in ways that might make them
Speaker: more relevant to particular readers or something like that. That is something I am very, very, very interested in. Because I do think there is an interesting way to, I think there are more interesting ways to surface relevant comments than the ways we have, which is the newest, oldest.
Speaker: most recommended things, editors, picks, things like that. So with all these trends and tools that you've been talking about in terms of how you interact with the readers and the technology that's used to create different products,
Speaker: where do you see journalism going in the next two to five years? Are there these smaller sets of changes, or are you seeing big shifts coming up in the near future? Or is it just the evolution of the field in general? I think it's a combination of all of those. I would say, though, that
Speaker: If I can't speak for other news organizations, but I would say that the areas I think the Guardian that are consistent with our values and that fits kind of our model of
Speaker: storytelling and our approach to journalism, I would say you will see far more collaborative pieces of journalism. You'll see a lot more engagement with readers. You'll see a lot more of that sort of seamlessly brought into our reporting.
Speaker: Ideally, even informing our reporting in ways that you may not even ultimately as a reader even know. We have a very, very smart, very large audience.
Speaker: And as Dan Gilmour pointed out many, many years ago, that collectively our audience is a lot smarter than we are. Why news organizations are not taking advantage of this given all the tools that are now available to us to do this at scale is really beyond me.
Speaker: Beyond that, The Guardian also, and this is one huge difference between my last newsroom and this one, The Guardian, like many UK news organizations, does occasionally campaign. We launched a climate change project a few months ago, about six months ago.
Speaker: right, right around when Alan Resford, who's our editor here for 20 years, a little bit after he decided, he decided to step down, it ended up being his last sort of big, big project. But, you know, as part of that, we gathered 200 and, what is it, 280 ,000, I believe, signatures
Speaker: on a petition, we ran a campaign around divestment. And with that community that we've sort of built around the campaign, around the issue of climate change more broadly, I think what you'll see over time is more and more collaborative journalism with our readers. And so I think this is where I think it is all going.
Speaker: At least here, I hope that's where it's all going. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, really interesting. I'm excited to see what you and your teams come up with, and excited to hear about the sort of assessments you guys can do on their work during. So thanks so much for coming on the show, and I appreciate it. Yeah, no problem. And thanks, everyone, for listening. Again, if you have questions or comments, send an email, or hit me up on Twitter, or visit the site at policyvis .com. And I am John Schwabisch, and this has been the Policy Vis podcast. Thanks for listening.
