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Episode #36: Xaquín González Veira
140 Plays9 years ago
Welcome back to the PolicyViz Podcast! On this week’s episode, I chat with Xaquín González Veira who is the Editor of Visuals at the Guardian. Recorded live in Germany at the Dagstuhl Visual Storytelling conference, we talk about all the things...
The post Episode #36: Xaquín González Veira appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsor Message
00:00:00
Speaker
This episode of the PolicyViz podcast is brought to you by Juice Analytics. Juice is the company behind Juicebox, a new kind of platform for presenting data. It's a platform designed to deliver easy-to-read, interactive data applications and dashboards. Juicebox turns your valuable analyses into a story for everyday decision makers. For more information on Juicebox or to schedule a demo, visit juiceanalytics.com.
Meet the Guest: Shaqine Gonzalez-Viera
00:00:35
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policy Vis podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. I'm here with Shaqine Gonzalez-Viera, editor of Guardian Visuals, the Guardian newspaper. Yes. That's fair. Guardian newspaper in London. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Really happy to be here.
00:00:51
Speaker
I'm glad we were able to hang out. I've also found out this week that you're a good hugger. So that's good to know. It's good to know. Now I have all this personal information. This is good. So can we start by having you sort of describe, well, I think people know sort of what the Guardian Visuals
Guardian Visuals Team Structure and Strategy
00:01:05
Speaker
does, but maybe talk a little bit about, is there sort of a specific angle you try to take when it comes to telling the stories that you do and then what is the makeup of the team? How does that?
00:01:14
Speaker
Yeah. So I'll start with the makeup of the team. It's the easier part. So I think it was like August or so, 2014, Aaron was making the rounds in the US talking to newsrooms because he had been recently hired by the Guardian to be the executive editor for Digital. They wanted to emphasize the fact that they're digital first newspaper. Well, a digitally led newspaper, you can call it that.
00:01:41
Speaker
Well, he sent me a few emails when he wanted to know what my thoughts were on how to articulate a visual scene because he wanted to have something very peculiar for the Guardian. So in that conversation, we realized that the structure that NPR has
00:02:02
Speaker
where the graphics, interactives, and photo desks are under the same umbrella. And it was something that we thought that the New York Times needed to, like that visuals umbrella. And they're actually kind of going on to that direction. That organizational structure.
00:02:20
Speaker
I don't know if organizationally they're changing it like that, but for sure, the way they're thinking of their stories and of their projects, it follows the same logic. They think about the stories in a holistic way. With all the skill sets? Right, okay. So yeah, we thought that that was the way to go. So we merged, he was there, and we were managing when would I join in. And the first thing he did was basically say, look, interactives and graphics and photo.
00:02:48
Speaker
And we borrowed some people from multimedia, the people that were doing interactive documentaries, and people that were doing motion graphics, because it was like, yeah, it makes sense that you guys are here.
Content Creation for Print and Digital
00:03:00
Speaker
And we put them under that umbrella before I even... You were at the Times at that point. No, I was at Nat Geo.
00:03:07
Speaker
And then he announced that I was going to be the one leaving that team and it really is a dream job. And we were lucky to be able to hire a really interesting mix of skills and it's been fantastic so far.
00:03:26
Speaker
It's always so far. Yeah. So was it sort of poaching people from these other teams? There was a lot of poaching. It's a lot of poaching. To build sort of a new thing. Yeah. And so it may not be well-legged. Right, right. But the people who are left, left is maybe a harsh term, but the people who are in those groups
00:03:42
Speaker
Those are the groups that are doing the publication for print and for other pieces. Or when you took those people into your digital media, like the people that left over in photography, in the media, what is there?
Embracing a Mobile-First Approach
00:03:52
Speaker
No, no. So everyone from the photo that came over, and there's a bunch of people in the graphics desk that are the ones that are still produced to print. So we're across all platforms. Interesting. Now, we've talked a little bit earlier about the difference between the desktop
00:04:10
Speaker
production and mobile production. So can you talk a little bit about what you've seen over the last few years at the Guardian and what is the, does the process differ between creating for desktop, creating for mobile, how does all that? So it depends. And the, so what we're trying to do now is basically be actually be a mobile first operation. So in multiple projects, as I explained in one of the talks, like the build your own coalition, it was
00:04:38
Speaker
thought from the beginning as a thumb game. Right. A game for the phone. And there's a bunch of like the Mekong River interactive documentary was thought first as a mobile interactive documentary. Right. Which I think was like a first ever. Yeah. Yeah.
00:04:58
Speaker
in newspapers or news media. And when you say mobile first, are you thinking about the smallest phone that you can think of? Like you're thinking phone and not tablet. Small, like the smallest screen. Yes. Okay. Yes. We even thought of vertical video, which we had already done a couple of times before we thought of the
00:05:18
Speaker
The fielding thought of the card system that interactive documentary follows, the main story is vertical swiping. The add-ons to some parts are horizontal swiping. And the desktop was a, well, how to translate now this to the desktop. And Dan Louder, absolutely great interactive designer.
00:05:45
Speaker
very young from the Netherlands, that's in the team, came up with the layout for the desktop version. And it's pretty much like a scrawly telling sort of thing, sort of experience without a playing videos. And it's great, but it was thought of as a mobile first interactive document.
00:06:02
Speaker
So the mobile first, you can go vertically, and then when you get to certain points in the story, you can go horizontally.
User Behavior Insights: Mobile vs Desktop
00:06:06
Speaker
And then does it bring you back when you go to the end of the horizontal? You can go back by swiping when you move vertically, moves you to the first of the next. Right. Do you see different behaviors in people? I mean, it's a different, you now have sort of two different projects, so it's sort of hard to compare what people are doing. But what are you observing about people who are actually using the two different platforms?
00:06:26
Speaker
So on some projects, we've even seen that because the mobile was very thought through, we see that they spend more time on the phone than on desktop, which is kind of like insanely surprising. But if you think about them, I don't have the numbers off the top of my head. But I think that the coalition builder was a longer time spent
00:06:50
Speaker
on the phone than on desktop. But I cannot, you can't. Don't hold me. And what share of the, do you know the share of the total that's doing mobile versus desktop? So it's about 50-50 at the Guardian in general. And I think it bumps up to 70% sometimes over the weekend. Yeah.
00:07:09
Speaker
So we cannot take free votes, the fact that we need to move on to a mobile-first direction. Our CMS, the preview of our CMS, now is mobile-first, which changes completely the way sub-editors and editors think about what the reader is going to
00:07:29
Speaker
is going to get. The only way of going up to the desktop is saying, yeah, I've checked the, there's a tick mark that you need to tick and say, yes, I've checked the model. So, I mean, the workflow has clearly changed when you start thinking mobile first. I mean, are there major changes that you've seen when you start thinking mobile first instead of desktop first? We're still figuring it out.
00:07:51
Speaker
It is a change of, there are interactions that you think of as a given that don't exist on the phone. I was talking to John Stasko on the bus, and he was like, yeah, but you don't have hovers. And that's a very needed and used way of revealing more data. And yeah, you have to make some compromises. But yeah, it's a limitation of the medium, of the device.
Ethics in Data Journalism
00:08:20
Speaker
So we talked a little bit about ethics when it comes to data, when it comes to data journalism. What are the things that you think about most when it comes to being an organization that, you know, a sort of reputation is built on, you know, being responsible with the data? I'm very lucky of working with Helena Bexton, who is from whom I've learned a lot.
00:08:43
Speaker
about data journalism. And of course, Aaron Pilhofer as well. Helena is the one that is running the data team, the show. And it's really interesting to see how, of course, we take into account the representation of the data. Is it fair to what the data says? Will Franklin, who created the unaffordable country visualization, Apple, who are both very young,
00:09:12
Speaker
where we're very concerned. We weren't showing the wealth of data that we had. And we explained the editorial reasons why we weren't showing the 19 million records. But in the end, we found a compromise by showing distribution for each postcode. Yeah, so this is just for listeners who may haven't seen it, right? It's a story and a tool, really, that you can use to look at housing prices around the UK.
00:09:39
Speaker
Yeah, since 1995. The key is that it changed from having an average salary or median salary, sorry. Well, actually, I don't remember what it was, from being able to afford a very high percentage of the country to be able to afford just like 6% of the country. And it was a very powerful story.
00:10:00
Speaker
Right, right. What are the responsibilities you sort of feel when it comes to documenting the data work that you've done? Like researchers, right, have, you know, they go, they have a 30 page paper and they're documenting all the, all the methods and data journalism seems, you know, they have a data set, do some work, write the story and onto the next thing.
00:10:17
Speaker
We were pretty good at writing our methodology and Helena wrote the methodology for this piece and Will talked about some of the things he had done with the data because he was responsible for the cleaning and the mashing of certain, there were some either missing records or records that were clearly mistakes in the data and he was responsible for some of the refinement. But we had a methodology that we
00:10:47
Speaker
So, publish alongside for those who want. Have
Collaborating on Data-Driven Stories
00:10:50
Speaker
you teamed up with researchers or with other scholars who may be working with big data and you say, who? That would be an interesting story. I don't think it's been published, but we did work with a couple of teams on data about pollution around Kedrow.
00:11:06
Speaker
Okay. Yeah. And I don't know if it was because one of the Kaling bar in the data team knew those scientists or if someone else knew them or if they approached us, but it was, yeah, they were collecting that or they were collecting it or they had collected that data and came to us saying like. We have all this interesting stuff. This may be a story.
00:11:27
Speaker
So when you talk to researchers or even analysts who may not be journalists or storytellers by trade, is there a common thread that you see and trying to get them to like think about or tell stories? Or do you just say, hey, don't worry about it. We'll take the data and go from here. Well, lots of them are very protective of their data.
00:11:46
Speaker
Of course, it's their baby. And you have to be very careful not to give the wrong impression that you're going to just make a very narrow focus or make a very narrow interpretation of that data.
00:12:01
Speaker
But sometimes, if the point of the story is very narrow and you know that they're not going to be comfortable, you just tuck it to a point where they are actually comfortable. But it takes some time to get us to understand why, to put ourselves in their shoes and for them to understand that our mission is different than their mission.
00:12:22
Speaker
Yeah. And do they get nervous about you trying to find the story in the data? A bunch of times when I
Storytelling Projects: Scale and Enjoyment
00:12:30
Speaker
was at National Geographic, we've collaborated with them in the process of finding the story. And then do they go back and then have you talked to them sort of after that whole process and they go back and maybe they go back to their research with a different perspective and tell their stories and maybe a
00:12:45
Speaker
Yeah, it's fascinating what they, at National Geographic, have witnessed that it's a process that takes a long time and daily newspapers don't have the luxury of working for such a long period of time on this. But a magazine like National Geographic, which can be working for years on a story, can do it.
00:13:08
Speaker
So let's wrap up with another sort of bigger question, which is, what are the sort of levels of stories that you're telling? So you've got sort of like the short, maybe the short piece with a static graph all the way to like the Mekong River, which is sort of more immersive. Well, first question I guess is what's more fun for you?
00:13:23
Speaker
Usually the bigger undertakings are more fun because you want to bring a fresh perspective on either a topic that people have already touched or you're trying just to find an angle or visualization that gives people a different perspective on it or like makes them have that aha moment or that like, whoa, I hadn't thought about it this way.
00:13:46
Speaker
But some of the small daily charts have their fun as well. If you are willing to spend a little bit of extra time to give them the proper love.
00:14:00
Speaker
So, okay, so last question. So where do you see both Guardian going, you know, over the next year or two and within the larger data journalism
Future Trends in Data Journalism
00:14:10
Speaker
field? Do you see bigger shifts coming? I mean, we've seen over the last few years real big shifts in terms of data and data visualization. Are there any new changes in the types of medium that people are getting their news from or techniques that you use?
00:14:23
Speaker
I'm not sure. I'm like, we're now, I think we're going to start seeing more fun stuff doing with data collected with mobile devices or with wearables. I think we're going to start seeing a lot more interesting things along those lines. I cannot see super huge shifts in The Guardian, the way things look right now. Yeah. I mean, of course, there may be the industry is not like,
00:14:52
Speaker
It's moving and we will move with it. We won't reverse the way we operate. Do you still anticipate sort of an upward trend in the share of mobile users? Yeah, I'm seeing a drop in print users. We've been seeing it for decades. Yeah, I don't think that all of a sudden people are going to stop looking at their phones for
00:15:14
Speaker
Does the newer sort of laptops that are more touch screen, that's sort of like designing for the desktop. Does the touch screen on a bigger screen change the way you think about designing stories? They're so, yeah. I mean, they were so small as a percentage of what our stadiums asked. At the moment. Right, at the moment. If all of a sudden, in one year or two years,
00:15:36
Speaker
they are the thing that people use. Of course, you have to make a
Closing Remarks and Teasers
00:15:40
Speaker
shift, but it won't be a tough shift because we're already covering mobile, tablet, and desktop. And thinking mobile first. Interesting. Cool. Thanks for coming. Sure. It was nice talking to you. It was fun. And thanks everyone for listening. Appreciate it. Let me know if you have any questions or comments, and I will put all the links to these great projects from Guardian on the website. So until next time, this has been the PolicyBiz Podcast. Thanks a lot for listening.
Final Sponsor Message
00:16:16
Speaker
This episode of the PolicyViz podcast is brought to you by Juice Analytics. For 10 years, Juice has been helping clients like Aetna, the Virginia Chamber of Commerce, Notre Dame University, and US News and World Report create beautiful, easy to understand visualizations. Be sure to learn more about Juicebox, a new kind of platform for presenting data at juiceanalytics.com. And be sure to check out their book, Data Fluency, now available on Amazon.