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Episode #126: Alex Selby-Boothroyd & Marie Segger
219 Plays7 years ago
Alex Selby-Boothroyd joined The Economist as an interactive visual data journalist in 2015 and now runs the data journalism department. His team writes data-driven articles and creates all of the static and interactive charts and maps for the website, apps and weekly...
The post Episode #126: Alex Selby-Boothroyd & Marie Segger appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction to Economics, Data Visualization, and Journalism
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policyviz podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. On this week's episode, we are going to talk about the intersection between economics, data visualization, and data journalism or journalism, whatever you want to call it, which is really obviously close and near and dear to my heart because I intersect with at least two of those three circles. And so to help me talk about some of these issues, I'm very excited to have two folks from The Economist, Marie Seger and Alex Selby Boothroyd. Alex, Marie, welcome
Journeys to The Economist
00:00:40
Speaker
to the show.
00:00:40
Speaker
are you? Great to have you both on the show. I am excited to talk to you about everything that's happening at The Economist, both on the digital side and the print side and how the digital team there works, how the DataVis team works, and also about the new project that Marie is leading, this spotlight on data journalism.
00:00:58
Speaker
about the economist social media strategy. So before we get into all of that interesting content, I thought it would help folks to maybe learn a little bit about each of you. Maybe we can start with Marie. How did you end up at The Economist and what is it that you're doing over there? Sure. Well, I finished my master's last year. I went to Goldsmith and did a master's in digital journalism. That's half computing, half journalism.
00:01:27
Speaker
And then, um, I did the Google newsletter fellowship with Germany Spiegel. And now I'm at the economist and I'm a social media and data journalism fellow. So I have a ritual between two teams basically. Um, and it's really exciting and I love it. That's great. So you are on the database team, but part of your jobs is, is leading this spotlight project, right? Yes. Yes. Actually a very big part of my job is exactly that.
00:01:57
Speaker
That's great. So I want to dive into that because that's exciting. But I also want to let Alex dive in here a little bit.
Evolution of Data Journalism at The Economist
00:02:03
Speaker
Alex, what about you? How long have you been at The Economist and where did you come up with it? So I've been with The Economist Group for nearly 20 years. Yeah, I started as a temp at the EIU back in 1996 for a week and it turned into 17 years.
00:02:20
Speaker
And then when they were setting up a data team at The Economist, I applied for a role here as an interactive visual data journalist and got that. And then about a year later, I took over running the data journalism department. So you're like one of the original data journalists.
00:02:40
Speaker
I've been in the data game for a long time, but I don't really have the journalism background, but more the sort of data and the data vis side of things. I see. Interesting. Well, maybe then you might be the right person to maybe kick off this discussion about
00:02:58
Speaker
the current organization of the newsroom there, especially the data and the data journalism and the developer desk, and how that sort of evolved over time, since you've pretty much seen it evolve from the beginnings. Yes, and it's still evolving. It was set up with five or six data journalists, five or six visual data journalists, and two, in fact, one, that was me, interactive data journalists,
00:03:26
Speaker
with the idea that we've always done a lot of numerous stuff in the paper, but we wanted a team that could focus really on writing quantity or data-driven stories for the paper pretty much every week, as well as for our blog graphic detail. So we have a daily chart every day. We have various apps and we provide all the charts for those and the data-driven
00:03:55
Speaker
content for those as well.
Creating High-Quality Daily Charts
00:03:58
Speaker
So before I ask you a couple more questions about the data desk, I want to ask about the daily chart. So there's a lot of places that do a chart of the day or a daily chart, and they're not always great. But I noticed that the economists, I would say like 99 days out of 100, they are some interesting chart. So how do you keep that up? And how do you maintain the high quality, both in terms of the data that you're showing and also the visualization itself, the aspect of the visual?
00:04:27
Speaker
I guess the nice thing is the data journalists who generally come up with the ideas are very tuned into lots of kind of quirky data sources. We get some really interesting stuff from Reddit or just something you see on someone's Twitter feed. And they also obviously get all the research papers and surveys and indexes that come out. And then our data visualizers are just very good at very quickly coming up with the best way to present the data. So
00:04:54
Speaker
We don't really have these 10 or 20 iterations of a chart, only one or two maybe, or usually just one. But it's only because they've been doing it for so long.
Tools for Digital and Print Charts
00:05:03
Speaker
One of our teams has been there like 30 years, which makes me seem like a newcomer. And they're just fast and good. And nowadays it's a pretty well-oiled machine.
00:05:13
Speaker
Can you talk a little bit about the tools that the team is using both for the digital side, the interactive side, and the print side, and also the daily charts? Yes. We have a tool that was built by one of our developers 25 years ago. He did a good job. It's still going. That basically lets us turn numbers into an illustrator chart. That will create
00:05:41
Speaker
probably 80% of our vanilla chart output. For the rest, we're using anything that comes to hand. So we use QGIS a lot. We might use data wrapper or something to very quickly come up with an SVG, which will then finish off in Illustrator. But our workflow is very much the chart gets finished in Illustrator if it's a static, and we obviously use D3 for our interactors.
00:06:10
Speaker
Now Marie, you have been around a little bit. You've worked with the Google News team and now at The Economist. What are your observations about The Economist newsroom and the data desk? Is it what you expected a data desk would work like? I mean, what have you seen over your time there, which seems to be not as quite as long as Alex's, but what have you seen there?
00:06:31
Speaker
Well, I'd like to make clear, I haven't worked with Google. I've worked with Spiegel because I did my Google News Lab Fellowship with them. I've never really worked with Google or the Google News Lab itself. I've just been paid by them. Yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. So I've worked with Spiegel online in Germany and with Trinity Mirrors Data Unit in Manchester in Britain.
00:06:59
Speaker
And I think they focus on different stories to the economists. So the team at Trapega is even smaller than the economists they to team might say, and they just focus on like really like a few huge stories and big interactives. And most of the time they'll be working on one story for a month or at least one month. So when I was there for the
00:07:28
Speaker
Generally, actually in Germany, we worked on several projects, but we worked on all those projects over the time period of two months, I'd say, some longer. And considering that the economist has such a small team, it's quite impressive how their turnaround is. So obviously, we have the graphic detail block, but then our visual journalists and also our data journalists actually
00:07:58
Speaker
work for stories that get published in the paper as well. So they write their own stories for, say, the finance section and they do the visualizations for them as well. So that's what really impressed me here, the high turnaround, really, how the team works together.
Weekly Workflow and Platform Integration
00:08:16
Speaker
I think that's quite unique.
00:08:18
Speaker
Yeah, I can imagine. Well, obviously, you know, the the just a fast turn on of news in general, but also that they have this daily chart and they have all these different social platforms that I want to talk about in a minute. Can you talk a little bit about the balance or the what the differences are between the digital side and the print side? It's interesting to me.
00:08:39
Speaker
talking to you because The Economist is more of a magazine as opposed to a daily newspaper like The Post or The Times or you know that comes out daily. So what are the differences? How do you think about the workflows? How does all that come together in a newsroom like The Economist? So we have a very strict weekly rotor for the paper. So everything gets sort of pitched on a Friday. People working over the weekend always start in earnest on a Monday.
00:09:08
Speaker
gear up to a Wednesday night when we sort of go to press very early on a Thursday morning and that sort of takes care of the 50 or so stories that appear in the paper and the 30 or so charts that go with them.
00:09:23
Speaker
At the same time, we don't really react to news events immediately. We might do a very quick piece on something very, very major. We tend to do more analysis. So we publish stuff pretty much every day onto our website that doesn't go in the paper. And then we'll, of course, supply charts and maps for those as well.
Branding with The Economist's Blue Charts
00:09:43
Speaker
And they kind of work together quite nicely. Sometimes we'll do a daily chart. So we did one on Monday for the birth.
00:09:51
Speaker
Prince Louis, I think it's called. And it was just a nice quick take on the cost of giving birth in various countries. And then that's going into the paper this week too, because it's just a really nice data angle on it. Other times we might take a really good map from the paper and run that as a daily chart. So it's quite a symbiotic relationship.
00:10:11
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting. The economist itself, especially the printed paper is interesting. The branding is really is unique and it stands out. There's a fact that you have that unique branding. Does that make your life easier or harder? Yeah, that's a really good question. We've been wondering about that. So we have these blue charts that appear in print and we don't use that for our online content.
00:10:38
Speaker
And we thought that we can very easily write a script in Illustrator that strips off the blue background on anything that goes online. But we're kind of still wondering whether that's the right thing to do or whether people actually recognize us for our blue chance with a little tag in the corner.
Balancing Aesthetic and Informative Visuals
00:10:53
Speaker
So it's both a blessing and a curse in a way. Obviously, it restricts our palette a bit if we've got a blue background.
00:11:02
Speaker
It's also quite nice when I'm skimming through Twitter feed or Google images, I can see one of our charts immediately. Yeah. I think the template, the data team and the social team have come up with is actually quite good with like small print chart on one side and then a quote from the article on the other, what we use for social media. Yeah.
00:11:27
Speaker
So something that we tweaked quite early on is Twitter on the mobile is not square and most of our charts are square. So so we did come up with this idea of just taking this sort of the chart body and putting it on the right hand two thirds and then having the takeaway.
00:11:44
Speaker
in the left-hand third. And that seems to work pretty well. At least you can see the whole thing. There's nothing more frustrating, I find, than a chart getting cropped to the top and the bottom. Because the only thing I do is come up with a chart title. And if that gets left off, then I've done nothing for the day. So we kind of rejig the content of the chart to fit the format. And that works for Twitter and Facebook. They'll no doubt change
00:12:12
Speaker
they do as soon as we've got everything just smoothly running. So we'll just have to be ready for that. Right. There is an economist graph that I use when I teach. And it's on, I think, diseases in Africa. There's a story on Ebola, I think,
00:12:28
Speaker
And it basically was like five bubbles, five circles, and each one is just scaled to the number of deaths, I think, at the time of the Ebola outbreak a couple of years ago. When I talk to folks about using circles that we have a hard time figuring out the exact quantity, I show them that visualization and I blur out the numbers except for one. I ask them to guess the values of the others, and it's really hard to do. And I show it as a bar chart, and it's much easier to see it. And then I step back and say, but the bar chart's
00:12:58
Speaker
It's not boring, but everybody's seen a million bar charts. And so there's this little graph. It's a few circles. It's essentially just a table, but it's standing there and it's blue. You know, the background is blue. It stands out on the page where I'm going with that is, I guess, how do you think about best practices? And I put that in quotes, really? How do you think about best practices?
00:13:17
Speaker
and then engaging readers in the paper or online. Some folks in the Data Vis field would say, you know, never ever use circles or bubbles or something like that. And other people would say, yeah, but it's, you know, it's just a little bit different. It's a little more, it draws you in a little bit of a different way. So how do you think about those different approaches or that dichotomy, I guess, of best practice versus something that's different and stands out a little bit more?
00:13:44
Speaker
Yeah, it's a balance. And we, I think we'll use circles if we can also get the values. And so your lowering of the numbers is, it's kind of telling that you have to take the numbers off to not get anything from that. I kind of hope that we don't ever really just have circles and unless there's hundreds of them, in which case, it's the overall kind of impression you get. It's tricky, you want people to engage with the chart, you want them to get as much information as possible.
00:14:13
Speaker
but you won't necessarily get that as you say with just straight bars and also it fits onto the map better and it gives you a sort of geographical impression of where the really dangerous areas are. So it is a balance and we do our best. We think
Data Visualization in Social Media Strategy
00:14:31
Speaker
about social, you know, it's really really important to capture people's interest in a matter of seconds often and I think a method
00:14:41
Speaker
obviously a lot more visually engaging than, say, a bar chart, for example. So it's root formats. Yeah, I think it also depends on the platform.
00:14:58
Speaker
Right. Let's talk about social media. So a few maybe a couple of months ago now, you had this post on the spotlight on data journalism project that you're going to, you know, I guess publicly a little bit talk about the social media strategy. So Marie, can you sort of talk about the existing strategy and where you're going with the project? And then I think we can just talk about generally about data visualization on social media and how it differs or maybe it doesn't differ on social media platforms versus other types of platforms.
00:15:28
Speaker
Yeah, sounds good. Where do I start? I think we've already talked about the charts we do for social media with a small print chart and a key takeaway on the other side. The social team and the data team have always tried to think about working together or how to make our data journalism work better on social media.
00:15:56
Speaker
But then they decided last year that we should probably focus on that a bit more, because I think I outlined in the blog post that we get a lot of traffic from the Daily Charts blog. Some of the most-read stories on economics.com are part of the graphic detail blog. So it seems sensible to focus on
00:16:24
Speaker
on that and work more with the visualisations. Because, I mean, visualisations are meant to be engaging. So I think, you know, it's only natural that you want to take those visualisations to social media or, you know, on social platforms. And so that's my job, basically.
00:16:47
Speaker
It sounds great to me. So when someone at the data desk is creating a graphic either for an online piece or a print piece, how do you then talk to them or work with them to create something that worked for social? What's the discussion like? What are the decisions that go into that? And also, how does it differ from platform to platform? So the way it works is that I look out for a chart that I think is really interesting or a story that's really engaging.
00:17:15
Speaker
And that thing can be great on social media. And then I try to think of a way to use that or adapt it for social media, which so far has often been in the form of gifts. That approach is especially helpful with interactive. So if you want to pull out one narrative from an interactive chart, and it also gives you a way to tell a story from different angles again and again, if you want to.
00:17:45
Speaker
That's what I do most of the time. Alex had mentioned earlier taking a graph and then resizing it for the platform. Twitter, for example, you're better off wider rather than taller. Does that dictate in some ways what the actual graph would be? I wonder, for example,
00:18:03
Speaker
A bar chart might be a great chart type. If you have a lot of bars, for example, it might be a really good chart type, but it's going to be taller rather than wider. Do you think about having to remake graphs, especially for social? We don't have time, really. We get to a point on a Thursday morning around 11.30, where everything's published, and we then think, okay, now how are we going to promote a lot of this stuff?
00:18:31
Speaker
And at that point, we decide kind of the best way of doing it. And if we need to rejig it or resize it or change the format, then we'll do it then. But I think what the area where Maria has been especially helpful is for our interactives, where we would have one or two developers that make an interactive
00:18:54
Speaker
We'd publish it, and then we'd go straight on to the next thing. And we just wouldn't even have time to consider how that could work on social media. And that's kind of the area where there's so much cool things you can do with animated GIFs, et cetera. So Marie starts thinking about that at the very beginning. And it's just meant that everything that we're promoting for interactives is just a million times better than it used
Spotlight on Social Media Projects and Future Goals
00:19:17
Speaker
to be.
00:19:17
Speaker
And Marie, how do you think about the timing of social media tweets, Facebook, your global organization, you know, a tweet you put out at noon, London Time is, you know, what, like 7am here. So how do you think about the timing of these different things? Well, unfortunately, that's a really boring answer to this. We have a tool that optimizes the timings for us and
00:19:46
Speaker
We don't just tweet a story once, we tweet it several times usually and we try to optimize for different time periods basically.
00:19:55
Speaker
Well, there's one exception. Our daily chart last week on the cannabis industry on the 20th of April, we did tweet that deliberately at 4.20 PM. Nobody noticed. Nobody picked up on it. No, no, wait. Someone noticed. There's one person. There's a fun Venn diagram there somewhere. People who are reading The Economist and hewed into 4.20 on the...
00:20:21
Speaker
So Marie, can you talk about the spotlight project? So what are your goals with that project in terms of what you're going to let us in the public see and learn about in the social media strategy when it comes to database?
Upcoming Projects and Innovations
00:20:36
Speaker
Yeah, so there's actually a lot more to the project than just creating gifts. So at the end of the Medium blog post, I think I address the data survey. So I have a survey about a data roundup from the Economist. So the social media site is one pillar of my project, so to say, and then there are other things that I work on. So
00:21:04
Speaker
For example, the data roundup. But then the other projects that we try to drive forward in the data team. So for example, we want to work a lot more on being transparent about our data and our data sources in the future. That's one of our future goals. Yeah.
00:21:24
Speaker
That is really interesting. I think it's one of those things that people keep playing around with it. In some ways, it's a playground to figure out the best way to get content in front of people. Looking forward to the rest of 2018, what other exciting projects or innovations do both of you have in store for us? One of the things we are going to be doing this year is re-launching our Big Mac Index.
00:21:54
Speaker
This has been going for i think 30 years or so it's a dashboard of some quite complex data people seem to love it and it really gives us this way of understanding person parity and.
00:22:10
Speaker
But we need to redesign it. We need to make it mobile friendly for a start. So we've been running a survey asking people what they use it for, how many times they've used it. A lot of people come back again and again and asking for ways to improve it.
00:22:26
Speaker
So it'll be launching that in the next few months. So Alex, so before you go on, so I know about the Big Mac index and I'll link to it on the show notes page, but for those who haven't seen it, can you just explain what it is and maybe what people are using it for? Yeah. So we collect the price of a Big Mac in, I think 31, maybe even 40 countries.
00:22:48
Speaker
And then use that as a kind of equivalent of the PPP basket of goods to see whether currencies are over or undervalued. And sort of rank them, put them on a map, and get a bit sort of crunchier with it and show you how they changed over time. So before the euro was launched, for example, we sort of gathered up all the prices of the euro countries and showed that I think the euro was not really at the right level when it launched.
00:23:17
Speaker
That's an example. It's a nice visual tool. It's got some fairly robust economics underneath it, but at heart, it is the price of a Big Mac in many countries. It's a fun index. So anyway, you had some other fun things coming up.
00:23:32
Speaker
Yeah, so one of them is the data roundup. We don't really know what format it's going to come in, whether it's going to be an email newsletter or a blog post or a medium letter. But yeah, lots of people responded to our survey and lots of people are hardly interested in a data newsletter or data roundup from the economists. So that's really exciting. And I'm looking forward to that. We had some really cool responses.
00:24:00
Speaker
Yeah, that's great. And I'm looking forward to it. And I'll put the link, of course, to your Medium article. People can connect with you to get on that list because I'm sure it'll be a great project. Alex, Marie, this has been fascinating. I really appreciate you both coming on the show. And I'm looking forward to seeing what comes out over the next few weeks and months. Great. Thank you very much for having us, Joan. Yeah, thanks for having us.
00:24:23
Speaker
And thanks to everyone for tuning into this week's episode. Be sure to check out Marie's blog post on the spotlight on data journalism. Also, be sure to check out The Economist's Twitter feeds, especially the one on the daily charts. I'll put links to all those in the show notes. And then I do recommend you sign up. Then I'm a note so that you can get it on the list for this new newsletter that'll come out shortly. So if you have other comments or questions, please do feel free to get in touch either on the website or on Twitter. So until next time, this has been the Policy This podcast.
00:24:53
Speaker
Thanks so much for listening.