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Episode #110: Ben Welsh
169 Plays7 years ago
Ben Welsh is the editor of the Data Desk at the LA Times (@LATdatadesk), a team of reporters and computer programmers in the newsroom that works to collect, organize, analyze and present large amounts of information. Projects that he has contributed...
The post Episode #110: Ben Welsh appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction of Ben Welsh and Data Desk
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policyviz podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. Now we're into 2018. It's probably a good time to look ahead, but also to look back a little bit on what happened last year with data visualization, what happened in the last several years, and of course, what's going to happen in 2018. And to help me do that, I'm very excited to have Ben Welsh, who is the editor of the Data Desk at the LA Times to chat about what's going on over there on the West Coast. Ben, how are you? Happy New Year. Thanks for coming on the show.
00:00:40
Speaker
Happy New Year, John. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to chat about all things LA Times because some of the great stuff that you guys do that tends to be west coast doesn't always make it over here to
Role and Integration of Data Desk at LA Times
00:00:51
Speaker
the east coast. You know, it's sort of like the little story about the wildfires and then I get to go to the LA Times website and really see some incredible stuff about wildfires or agriculture work that doesn't sort of make the front page over here.
00:01:03
Speaker
Why don't we start with having you talk a little bit about yourself and how long you've been at the times and the work that you all do there and how that data desk works in relation to the rest of the newsroom.
00:01:13
Speaker
Yeah, sure, no problem. So I've been doing the kind of nerdy thing for, gosh, I guess I have to count now. I guess probably about 15 years. And about the last 10 of those have been at the LA Times. And when I started in 2007, I was working for latimes.com, which was in an entirely different part of the building and wasn't even in the editorial quote unquote section.
00:01:40
Speaker
Of the newspaper and and the ten years since that's changed and we've kind of gradually integrated and we have one newsroom now and within that one newsroom at actually kind of the center of it physically is where our team the data desk sits and we're kind of a small squad.
Technical Roles and Challenges
00:01:56
Speaker
Reporters and computer programmers who use our technical skills to get stuff done to find and tell stories to solve problems to do research to.
00:02:07
Speaker
make things happen on the internet, and there's really a lot of different shapes and sizes that takes. I don't think any of it would really surprise you. One observation I would kind of make about our industry is that the types of things people are doing are really quite similar from place to place, but the way in which they're done sort of within the organization or who does it can vary quite a bit. Kind of the mix of different tasks that are done by the mix of different teams in newsrooms can vary a bit.
00:02:36
Speaker
And even though our team is called the data desk we do a little more than that just because of the way things have evolved and so in addition to the kind of you know old school computer assisted reporting type stuff where you're generating not grass from big hairy databases.
00:02:52
Speaker
We also do a lot of systems administration for newsroom tools that help us publish custom stuff and fancy stories and things on the web. We do the design for a lot of the long form and fancy packages that come through each year. And we do some data visualization and other work as well. And it really can kind of vary depending on the project and the people involved and what needs to get done.
Organizational Changes and Digital Shift
00:03:16
Speaker
So I tend to describe our team as kind of the nerd Swiss army knife.
00:03:20
Speaker
where we're trying to use our computer skills to solve problems and make stuff happen. Right. I mean, I assume there's a big culture shift having moved the two newsrooms together. What was the transition like from going from a newsroom that was your, I would guess, a traditional shoe leather newsroom and a separate sort of dot-com newsroom and then pushing those together? Was there a big culture change, a big effort to try to merge those two different, I would guess, cultures and skill sets together?
00:03:50
Speaker
Yeah i mean so when i started the la times dot com was in a different part of the building with the different reporting structure i was hired there and didn't even work you know i guess for the editorial department and now you know i'm i guess an editor within it and we're all employees under that umbrella so like organizationally it was all kind of moved under which was done in kind of a big reorganization that went along with some pretty large layoffs.
00:04:13
Speaker
a number of years ago and that was kind of you know a big moment for the LA Times when all that happened but you know just one change like that doesn't sort everything out. These types of changes are really long and complicated and evolutionary and uneven depending on you know where you are or what you're doing and it's kind of really a struggle that everyone in the industry is facing and we are to just try to you know get to where we need to be
00:04:43
Speaker
I don't think there was ever one moment where suddenly the switch went on and things were different. But there's been milestones throughout. That was a big one when the merger happened. Another big one that's very procedural that I'm proud our team was involved in was having all of our copy being written
Impactful Projects and Mobile Strategies
00:04:59
Speaker
in the
00:04:59
Speaker
web cms first and then exported to a print publishing platform rather than vice versa which might not sound too impressive for people who work on websites and haven't worked in a print newsroom but the reality is is actually the reverse most places where you're writing in a print cms and then at some boring bureaucratic process has to play out before it is you know exported to the website and just even reversing that last year to me was in its own way kind of a major milestone in the la times history
00:05:28
Speaker
Yeah, were there certain stories over that time span that maybe drew people in even more, engaged them to say, oh, this is something that I can use in my reporting to connect with or communicate better to the audience? Were there milestone projects that you remember over that time as well?
00:05:46
Speaker
Well, there's definitely been a lot of big projects that I'm proud of on our team. I don't know if we can necessarily take credit to having done the big story that changed the whole thing. I don't know. I don't know if you could say there's one story that really flipped things here. But I would say there's projects we've been involved on that were entirely kind of untraditional, that didn't involve creating a traditional print story at all.
00:06:11
Speaker
Things like we had a project eight or nine years ago when I first started called California's War Dead, where we compiled all the obituaries that had been written about Californians who died or Iraq and Afghanistan, made it into a database, then made that database into a website that had a page for each person.
00:06:29
Speaker
and then also powered a lot of enterprise pieces and then on a going forward basis after that we were publishing to that application before we were. Even researching and writing the obituaries and sort of incrementally updating them as the work continued and i think that that because the obituary writing process was a project that.
00:06:47
Speaker
So many people in the newsroom were involved in the writing and research for. I think it was a way for us to expose a lot of people to doing things kind of a different way and kind of conceiving of what you're creating in a more structured but also, you know, less conventional storytelling format. And so I guess in my time here, I think that's been a big one.
00:07:06
Speaker
Yeah. Now that you have the newsrooms together and we've seen a big change in technology and the way people are receiving their news, can you talk a little bit about the balance between desktop and mobile and how you all think about that as you're creating either the small projects or even these big narrative features?
00:07:24
Speaker
Sure I mean everything has got to work on the phone if it doesn't work on the phone it doesn't work you know and increasingly you know majority of readers are often seeing stories on the small screen and so I think you know from the design standpoint if not start with it you have to be paramount or equal to the desktop.
00:07:43
Speaker
And that's just now fundamental to the custom web development our team does and I think probably every team like ours does. I think one symptom of that or one outcome of that is this won't surprise you I'm sure is kind of a move to more static graphics over interactive graphics in many cases because they're oftentimes just better suited for.
00:08:06
Speaker
Mobile and sort of the recalculation of the cost-benefit analysis of how much work you put into something. The increasing weight on mobile as an input makes the investment on the interactivity kind of often seem less worth it. I think you definitely would see a lot more static graphics at the LA Times and pretty much everywhere across the industry. I think that's probably only going to increase. I think that trend is going to continue.
00:08:30
Speaker
And I think you know really boring nerdy stuff like you gotta make sure the page isn't too heavy. And you have to think about also how you can maybe output stories from data.
00:08:43
Speaker
in an automated way are things that maybe serve that mobile audience, that maybe wouldn't serve a print or sort of a long reading audience that's putting more attention in. Little bits and bytes of information. Like an example I would give is a few years ago, one of my colleagues developed a bot that automatically writes and publishes stories about earthquakes within seconds of them happening by converting
00:09:04
Speaker
The sort of pulse of information that comes out of the government seismographs into a very simple post, which then is sent to the copy desk automatically who review it before sending it live. And that allows us almost literally within seconds to have a post with a basic map and a basic summary of the earthquake ready to ship.
Story Development for Digital Platforms
00:09:23
Speaker
and then if it all worked out publish. And that allows us to get that little bit of information that people more often in a mobile space are trying to find kind of like immediately, hey, was that a big earthquake here in LA just seconds ago? And conceiving of kind of the audience's needs from kind of the mobile point of view can lead you to like put an emphasis on creating more things like that.
00:09:44
Speaker
Yeah, that's really interesting. Everyone says mobile first. You just said mobile first. Are you literally thinking about, oh, we're going to do this new story on, I don't know, wildfires. Is it the development is literally mobile first or is it, you know, we have an idea for how we want to tell this story and now let's make sure that it works on mobile. So my question is really whether it's thinking initially in a small screen versus thinking sort of broader and then
00:10:12
Speaker
modifying elements of the story so that they work on a mobile screen. I mean, in the last couple of years, our narrow team, the data desk has kind of evolved more to projects work, off breaking news work. And so that particular example you gave hasn't come up for us. But you know, our graphics desk, which is, you know, just increasing in strength and does a great job on
00:10:32
Speaker
of the breaking news work like that, they definitely are thinking that way and are taking that approach. When it comes to something more like a long-term project or something that you want to have kind of be special, I don't know if we think mobile first, but we're kind of thinking at its bare essence, what is the story we're trying to tell,
Audience Engagement and Commercial Benefits
00:10:52
Speaker
right? And then what is the most powerful way to reach our audience as we conceive them with the tools we have?
00:11:00
Speaker
And I think, you know, as part of like that conception and that idea development process, you have to be thinking about people's phones because that is.
00:11:08
Speaker
this gigantic percentage of your audience. And so for me, when it comes to the projects work, I think it really begins with what's the story and how do we best tell it. That's really interesting. You sent out this tweet in December about 30 of the most viewed pages in 2017 and nine were by apps or designers. Can you talk a little bit more about that, expand about that? What does that, I guess really, what does it mean to you as someone who has seen this transition to have about a third of the biggest hits be from
00:11:38
Speaker
your team or from the development team? To me, it's just a sign that what we're doing is connecting with our audience and is kind of at the core of what our newsroom is doing to try to change and survive like in the digital space. One of my sort of maybe secret motivations for writing a post like that is that one of my kind of pet peeves about particularly about data analysis projects or about sort of the card investigative work is sometimes there's an idea out there that you know, they don't draw a large audience, you know, or that they're sort of
00:12:07
Speaker
part of an outdated sort of prize-winning process that happens in newsrooms or something. And I just think that that is, at least in our case, 100% untrue and that our team is contributing to and trying to really move the needle with reaching a digital audience and doing new things. And I think that's almost certainly true probably in most other teams like ours. And I think it's just an idea that I want to kind of reinforce and spread because I don't often see it
00:12:35
Speaker
I hammered as hard as I think it should because there's really good reasons to invest in the type of work we do that are, you know, to be frank, you know, commercial. And I think that's fine with me. You know what I mean? And so that, you know, that's, that's one reason I think that that's an important story to tell. And two is I'm just really proud of the people who work on our team.
00:12:54
Speaker
because I feel like that's a sign of their hard work paying off. You know, if you were to look at those nine things, I didn't really elaborate on what they were, but you would find kind of a broader array of things than you might think of with our team being called the data desk. They're not all just like data stories.
Credit and Recognition for Digital Contributions
00:13:08
Speaker
The number one most viewed thing at the LA Times, at least so far this year, was a series of editorials that our opinion page put out early in the year about President Donald Trump.
00:13:20
Speaker
and some problems they had with him. In an effort to make a bigger splash out of this series of a half dozen editorials, Andrea Roberson, who's on our Data Desk team, designed using our Data Desk custom publishing tools, a series of pages outside the content management system that really blew these up and made them look special.
00:13:41
Speaker
and improve their presentation and you know i think obviously you know the primary reason that those editorial succeeded is the content in the writing and the people not on our team who you know did all that. But i do think a significant opponent of it was the excellent works you did in in in the design of it and so that's why i think you know that that would be a case where team kinda had a hand in in something that you might not think of as the narrow data work but was.
00:14:05
Speaker
really important. Right. You know, I've noticed over at the New York Times that they've started adding the developer names to the bylines of news articles. Have you all started to do that? And if not, is that something that you think, I think going in line with what you were just talking about of your team being a crucial part and a central part, is that something that your group is looking to do in 2018? Oh, totally. Yeah.
00:14:28
Speaker
I mean it's something we've done for years to be honest it's something we've done for I can't even remember but at least five years or more a long time. You know there's different ways it gets kind of handled depending on the context and you could I'm sure finding consistencies and how it's been applied. With zero exceptions you know if someone has done custom web development work that even if it's strictly cosmetic they receive a production credit at the bottom of the page.
00:14:53
Speaker
If you know that production work is for like sort of a data graphic like say election results or some sort of standalone visualization, we do traditional bylines at the top of the page. And then, you know, in cases where it's like a long form narrative where we haven't done just cosmetic design, but we've also contributed data analysis.
Significant Data-Driven Stories
00:15:15
Speaker
There's sometimes kind of a mix between whether you receive kind of the traditional byline alongside the writer, which in many cases you do, or this sort of print tradition of a contribution line at the bottom of the writing, which is based on some judgment call about the significance of the work that's been contributed. There's a lot of messiness in give and take and when that happens and how.
00:15:38
Speaker
To me, I think it's important that people receive their credit. It might be better if we had kind of stricter rules in a system that everyone was on the same page with. But these things are evolving all the time. And to me, it's just something we're consistently trying to sort out. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it seems like it's continued evolution. Oh, yeah.
00:15:56
Speaker
I wanna get your thoughts on what were your favorite stories from 2017. What pieces you all worked on that you thought were highlights, not necessarily, it may not have been the biggest page views, but which one sort of struck you as both the editor and as a reader?
00:16:14
Speaker
Sure. I mean, so there's a few local or California stories that might not have got all around the world that our team participated in that I think were real good. Let's see. So our first example might be Ryan Menezes on our team, who's sort of a actually a statistics person who has become a journalist on our team.
00:16:33
Speaker
I partnered with Ivan Penn on our business desk who's sort of a long time energy reporter to use data to help Ivan sort of raises ambitions and write a bigger series of stories about some phenomena. Did I get that right? You may have. I never know.
00:16:50
Speaker
Yeah, I'll have to look that one up. They probably both were wrong. But some stuff. Yeah, so Ivan's an energy reporter on the beat, right? Right. He knows lots of stuff. But sometimes in just covering things that happen out there in the world, you can't take a step back and kind of get at the bigger issues you want to get at with the kind of good enterprise. And that's where data can often help. And in this case, I think it did where he had sort of been hearing from people and kind of
00:17:15
Speaker
It's sort of developing the idea that, hey, maybe California just has too many power plants, just has too much power. And this is not something that was in any story anywhere or that had really been written about at all. It was just kind of this thesis that some people on the fringes were kind of putting out there. And he wanted to find out it was true and kind of evaluate that. And so we sort of teamed Ryan up with him and using a lot of data, some of it publicly available, some of it gathered through records requests and other means.
00:17:44
Speaker
were able to like really dig in and go at that question and the answer they found was that it's true that California actually has a gigantic and growing surplus of energy being generated by the power plants out there across the state and we continue to build more and that's actually one of the reasons why price continues to go up.
00:18:06
Speaker
And so we have this kind of broken supply and demand curve of demand is actually decreasing due to like energy efficiency, green alternatives, yada, yada, yada. So demand is flat and supply is increasing, which, you know, if you remember high school economics, that should result in lower prices, but it's not. Prices are growing up. And the system in some kind of fundamental way is broken. And they were able to really dig into that through data.
00:18:33
Speaker
We wrote kind of three big kind of stories through the year, which we tried to bring to life and make this boring, complicated concept relatable through illustrations and sort of a mobile first sort of like slider kind of concept that was separate from the main stories. And you know, I thought that stuff turned out real good. It's resulted in a power plant being canceled, which is pretty cool, you know, as far as impact goes.
00:18:59
Speaker
and was to me just a great case of how statistics and data can help you kind of find and tell and prove out stories that otherwise would not be told. And to me, that's one of the things I get a real kick out of in data journalism. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's having a huge impact. Were there any others that struck a chord with you this year?
00:19:22
Speaker
So Ivan's on our business desk, and I am kind of proud this year that we partnered with our business desk more than we have in past years. And this is kind of, you know, part of that evolutionary process is you have sort of allies that you gradually develop within the organization. And then you seek to expand that network, you know, and draw in new people and new sections of the paper to kind of, you know, the approach we're trying to take. And so this year, we did a bunch of stories with business that I thought turned out okay, there was the ones with Ivan.
00:19:46
Speaker
And then there was another set we did with two reporters, Natalie Kitroff and Jeff Mohan about California's agricultural industry and how that has really changed in the last couple of years and how some of sort of the received wisdom and potted history of sort of how that industry works has is outdated.
00:20:04
Speaker
And a lot of things are changing. So like, for instance, due to increased border enforcement, there's actually tons and tons of people coming in through legal visa programs for temporary farm workers. And this is something that's just dramatically exploded in the last couple of years. And we were able to write about that and kind of dig into that issue. Problems with housing for the workers we were able to get at, I thought real well.
00:20:27
Speaker
And then also kind of an interesting economic story about another result of increased border enforcement, which is there are in fact wages that are going up for people who work in some industries like grape picking. But even though the wages are going up, they still aren't unable to attract Americans to take the jobs. And so this was another case where using data and kind of traditional on the ground reporting, we were able to do kind of a much stronger story than we could have done without it.
00:20:57
Speaker
Right. Well, it sounds great. I'm a huge fan. I actually have a couple of what are now probably older graphs that your team did that I use in every class I teach because I think one of the things that I love most about what your team produces is the annotation on the graphs. They're all just, I think, uniquely and expertly done to explain
00:21:19
Speaker
concepts that people may not have any idea about or even graphs that they may not be familiar with. And I think your team just does an extraordinary job of that. So thanks so much for that, for giving me enough material to teach. So anything you're looking forward to in 2018, I know we got a lot of news coming up, but any things in general that you see in the newsroom that you're looking
Technological Upgrades and Future Outlook
00:21:40
Speaker
forward to?
00:21:40
Speaker
Well, this is again kind of maybe boring to people who don't work at the LA Times, but we're changing over to a new content management system, the Washington Post's sort of ARC system. And that's going to be sort of a kind of big behind the scenes challenge to be pulled off, you know, primarily by the product people who will be responsible for, you know, 99% of the content that will be published out that system. But then it's also going to be new opportunities for our team that does special work
00:22:08
Speaker
to try to better integrate things with our homepage and section fronts, to try to more closely integrate how we publish custom outside the CMS work with the CMS, which is kind of one of these challenges I think kind of everybody faces, which is, you know,
00:22:24
Speaker
You don't want stuff so far outside that copy editors, regular editors, junior developers can't really participate without really ramping up their technical skills. But you don't want stuff so inside the CMS that it really limits what you can do. And so this new system is going to allow an opportunity for us to rebalance how that workflow works and how those tools work.
00:22:48
Speaker
And that's going to be kind of a challenge for us to sort out in the coming years, which I think there's definitely some good potential for to improve the status quo.
Conclusion and Engagement Encouragement
00:22:57
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Well, Ben, thanks so much for coming on the show and great work in 2017. And I'm looking forward to see what you all come up with in 2018.
00:23:05
Speaker
Of course, thank you for having me. And thanks to everyone for tuning into this week's episode. I will, of course, post links to all the stories that Ben talked about. I hope you'll take some time to check out the LA Times stories. If you're on the East Coast, we tend to sometimes neglect those folks working all the way out three hours behind us. But I'm a big fan and I'm sure you will be too if you take a look at it. So do get in touch if you have comments or questions or suggestions for other guests. So until next time, this has been the Policy Vis Podcast. Thanks so much for listening.