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PolicyViz Podcast Episode #17: Alyson Hurt
144 Plays9 years ago
Episode Number 17! This is the last episode for the summer, folks. Time to take a little break and recharge the batteries. I have a whole new slate of guests scheduled for the fall and I’ll also have a sponsor...
The post PolicyViz Podcast Episode #17: Alyson Hurt appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Season Finale & Future Plans
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome back to the PolicyViz podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. This is episode number 17. And incidentally, it will be the final episode for the summer. Don't get worried, it's not the final, final episode, but I am going to take a little vacation for the month of August. And I'm very excited because when I come back in September, I've got some great guests lined up to talk about.
00:00:29
Speaker
data and open data. I'm going to talk about data visualization, research, and process. So a lot of great folks coming on board in the fall. And I'm also excited I'll have my first sponsor coming up when I return in early September. So stay tuned for that, and I hope everyone has a great August. But for the very final episode of the summer, I'm very excited to have Allison Hurt from
Inside NPR Visuals with Allison Hurt
00:00:50
Speaker
NPR. Allison, welcome to the show.
00:00:52
Speaker
Hi, thanks for having me. Thanks for coming on. So Allison is a graphics editor at NPR. If you've never seen her presentations, you should take time out of your schedule to find follow her not a creepy way, but follow her and make it to one of the conferences she's presenting at because every time she presents, you will learn something new. It's it's great. So I want to talk about
00:01:14
Speaker
what you guys are doing at NPR, but specifically I know you're looking for a new member of your team. And so I thought we'd talk a little bit about the team as you have it now, the skill sets that you have and what you're looking for and how those have changed and you see them changing over the next few years. So maybe we could start, I could start by just asking you to sort of talk about the team of folks that you have on staff there.
00:01:37
Speaker
Okay. Well, we're, the Emperor Visuals is a team embedded in the newsroom at NPR. And we work on stories, kind of stories as they're coming through, supporting the newsroom, supporting reporters, telling our own stories. We're a kind of crazy hybrid team of photographers, designers, developers, photo editors,
00:02:03
Speaker
just kind of like a range of still sets, but all kind of aimed at kind of producing visual stories. And do you when you when you start looking for people, do you start looking for people who sort of can can do bits of all that or you focus on trying to find someone who's really good at being a photographer, really good at being an illustrator?
00:02:24
Speaker
I think we're kind of looking for, ideally everybody does a little bit of, we have specializations certainly, but there is to some degree a little bit of sort of jack of all trade-ness on the team. I mean, not necessarily that every photo editor is a coder or any of that, but there's certainly, especially among the designers and developers on the team, a lot of cross-pollination.
Balancing Daily Projects & Visual Stories
00:02:48
Speaker
Right. And are they coming out of, um, are, are most of the folks coming out of a previous experience in other, uh, journalism areas? Are they coming from all different sorts of fields and, and sort of getting engaged in journalism in a different way than that? Maybe they didn't in the past. Um, I think especially like among our, um, like for our, um, our fetters and, um, photographers, like they came from a more traditional background. Um, our developers are a little more, um,
00:03:18
Speaker
kind of a wide variety of experience. My boss, Brian, was a software developer and then did a grad program at Medill and then kind of made a shift in the journalism from there. So we're kind of a little bit all over the place, but definitely a strong commitment to telling stories and hopefully telling stories that matter.
00:03:46
Speaker
Right, and have you seen a shift in, I guess this is a two-part question really, have you seen a shift in the skill sets that people are bringing, the skill sets that you need and where folks are coming from over the last, I don't know, two to five years maybe? Or is that all sort of just like, you just need these sorts of skills to do this work and it's just, there's just more demand for it now than ever.
00:04:13
Speaker
A little bit of the latter, I mean, in terms of like the scale of things that we produce, I feel like we've shifted from a lot of kind of big standalone projects to doing a little bit more or a good bit more actually on the daily side or on the short turnaround side, daily picture editing.
00:04:36
Speaker
small-scale photos or kind of larger projects that are like embedded into stories themselves. And then we still do, we have this sort of Tumblr blog project called Look at This that are kind of more like larger scale visual projects. And those kind of get their own kind of full screen production. But we're not necessarily doing as much, we have the standalone blowout things.
00:05:02
Speaker
Uh-huh. And what's the balance on all these projects? What's the balance between the stuff that you're doing that's publicly going on the NPR website versus the stuff that you're doing internally either for research or for the folks who are on the radio? We do some limited amount of data analysis internally. We're trying to do, I think, a little bit more of that. We do some background research for projects.
Data Analysis & Public Sharing
00:05:27
Speaker
But most of what we do, I think, is for
00:05:30
Speaker
ultimately for the external audience, either for pairing the stories or software and tool development to share with a larger journalism and open community.
00:05:46
Speaker
And do you guys, do you guys, I mean, I noticed you guys put a lot, I mean, as far as I know, almost a lot of your stuff is, is out there in open source and on GitHub and all these other sites. Do you guys view that as part of your, of your mandate is, is putting as much as you can out in the public domain for others to use and further develop? Yes, absolutely. Kind of one of our team models is work in public. And we're public media, we should be kind of sharing the work that we do out there.
00:06:10
Speaker
And so as much as we can, we put out our code, the tools that we make for ourselves. We try to document as best we can and share our code, share our processes, share how we're kind of approaching things. Is there ever a time where you are working on a project and you've developed a tool or you've worked with a bunch of data sets and then you've pulled them all together, you've cleaned them in a particular way, you're sort of like,
00:06:34
Speaker
would really like to just have this be our thing and not release it out or do you sort of get to a point where you say okay we've done what we set out to do to create this tool or do this visual and it's time to now sort of let it out into the world like where's that where's that sort of cutoff point where you're like all right time to let everybody have a have a shot at it um I mean these um
00:06:58
Speaker
I mean, honestly, everything is out there is like, you know, the things that we could add are all like days and files and, you know, baked into pages. So it's not entirely obfuscated anyway. But I mean, we do, we, given the sort of the nature of our organization and all of our member stations, we're trying to do more station collaboration and things like that. So we've done a few projects involving, you know, sort of processing data to a certain degree, and we'll do sort of a national summary story. And then we put together
00:07:28
Speaker
and document the data that we have and send that out there to either just a member station or just before a publication deadline or before we're going to go live with it, we'll send it to stations to start out with so they can take a stab at it.
Importance of Coding & Data Literacy
00:07:43
Speaker
Or we'll just write a blog post, put it out there for anybody to take a look at. Right. Because I talk to a lot of organizations now where they're
00:07:52
Speaker
Most on the data side, they're sort of developing their own open data policy and practice. And sometimes they say, well, we've collected this, we've used this data set, even if it's a public data set already, but we've pulled it together with three other public data sets. And we've done this analysis, we've done all this cleaning.
00:08:09
Speaker
that's part of our business is to do that work. If we put that out there, then our competitors can use those data. But there's this tension, I think, because they're using public data and they want to be part of this community of releasing more open, you know, having data out there. But there's this tension between the two. Yeah. I mean, for I don't know, for
00:08:31
Speaker
We may not necessarily release it before we've done the story. We'll release it after, generally. But there's always follow-ups, right? I mean, a lot of these organizations that I hear from are like, well, we've done this project, but we could use this huge database we just created for another project in six months. We just don't know.
00:08:49
Speaker
I assume you guys have the same thing. You create a database of campaign finance spending or what have you. Yeah, but everybody else is doing that too. That's true. On the tools and the skill set side for the team, where do you see
00:09:06
Speaker
a change or an evolution in those skills in the next few years that the demands are going to be different, or is it just people are going to be, and your team is just going to evolve, everything's going to sort of evolve together? I mean, I think there's been sort of a general evolution, and I probably will continue, if not people having, the people on our team all having coding skills, at least kind of an awareness of
00:09:32
Speaker
how everything's put together, how it works, how the pieces are put together. And also, and this is something that I've been trying to do, kind of be better about, but reaching out to people in the newsroom and kind of being, not just like being an authority, but also teaching people, like training, internal training.
00:10:01
Speaker
And we've done a lot internally with, especially with respect to photography and how to photo edit and how to, our photo editors have done an amazing job in kind of like helping to train people up in that way. It's part of the hiring process really.
00:10:18
Speaker
So doing more of that in terms of data literacy and helping people as reporters level up their skills in that regard. Right. I assume that's sort of a short-term investment with a long-term return. As you give people skills to be able to pull down their own data, that's going to pay off in the long run. Hopefully, yeah. And also how to make good charts.
00:10:43
Speaker
Right. So what is the process for the agency as a whole in terms of getting, you know, someone's working on a story from getting, they want to make a graph from getting it from sort of concept in maybe the reporter's head all the way through your team and getting it out there onto the website? Currently, I mean, it varies quite a lot. Sometimes it's a discussion directly with the reporter. They have a thing in mind. Sometimes it's a discussion with the web editor that's working with that reporter to put it on the web.
00:11:12
Speaker
In any case, a conversation happens, and sometimes there's a known data set, and we can just, you know, unemployment data, let's grab what we need, put it up there, and it's pretty straightforward.
Engaging Audiences with Data Stories
00:11:23
Speaker
Other times, it's, you know, we had this data set of FBI crime clearance data. The reporter came to us with this, you know, wanted to put it all up in line, and so we had a startup, had almost like a product type discussion, you know, as if you were building almost like a software product.
00:11:42
Speaker
Okay, what is it that we have? What is the story we're trying to tell? Asking questions of the data, like finding out the weaknesses of the data, and then start to think about, okay, so what's the story we're trying to tell? What do we think our users want to know? And kind of use that kind of exercise to inform then what we build. So in the case of that, we did one of the
00:12:12
Speaker
one of the questions that comes up quite a lot that we used to frame is like, you know, kind of where am I in this? And so, you know, we, the crime clearance data project became just like a lookup. So look up your city, but also a little bit of an opportunity for sort of data literacy for users, like actually flagging like, okay, New York, like there's no way that there were no homicides or there's like no drive in this particular year. So, you know, buyer beware. It's like crowdsourcing the data errors identification.
00:12:43
Speaker
I mean, we weren't necessarily soliciting it, but we were definitely making it obvious to users that you might want to look at this carefully. Right, right. And as a media organization, I know you do a lot of storytelling with data, because you can combine the data and the data visualization and the analytics work with the reporting and the journalism piece.
00:13:06
Speaker
And obviously, as a media organization, that's crucially important. Do you feel or do you think that other organizations should be trying to do similar sort of things of pairing this exactly and talking about of, you know, make it relevant to the individual user and or talk to individuals, try to pair those stories together with the data? Um, yes, to some degree, like a lot of organizations are doing that already in terms of
00:13:32
Speaker
Well, I mean, there's, you know, oftentimes like, like the Republican project that went up earlier this week, you know, there's the larger project about surgeons and
00:13:42
Speaker
know, uh, complication rates and whatnot and specific stories and the larger trend. And then it's where am I in this? And what about my doctors and my, uh, you know, my hospitals in my, in my town or whatever. Yeah. Um, and certainly there was that, uh, New York times project, um, the spring where they used to your location and sort of like rewrote the story a little bit based on that. And we did something similar a little bit after that with, um,
00:14:06
Speaker
We had a story about graduation rates, high school graduation rates, and the top line number is graduation rates have increased, which should be awesome, except when you look at the story behind state by state, behind those numbers, it gets a little murkier. Some states are doing awesome, and some states are like...
00:14:29
Speaker
introducing maybe questionable practices to affect the numbers. And so we had a larger form of story about that and then a geo-located, here's what's going on in your state. But all those organizations, ProPublica, the Times, those are all media. So if you were to think of
00:14:50
Speaker
I don't know, a data analytics, I don't know, like your generic data analytics firm, right? They're doing some project. Let's say they're doing a project on education and they're doing some research report. Do you think that we are now in a place where more of the sort of traditional research needs to have more of the storytelling and needs to have more of these pieces that sort of get people to relate to the analysis in a personal way?
00:15:18
Speaker
I think it's hard to like kind of find empathy in the raw number. Um, so you, you, I think you need the stories or at the very least you need to find the kind of like a little bit of the like personal, maybe it's a little selfish, maybe a little bit of the personal, like where am I in this or how does this compare to me? How does this affect me? Um, and then use that to kind of build like, you know, well, there's larger effects, there's larger problems, there's larger issues involved in like kind of how all of those play together. Yeah.
Radio-Visual Team Collaboration
00:15:46
Speaker
And to tell those stories that people can relate to, right? Yeah. Not just sort of these, I mean, you see stories, I mean, I think the word stories and data are kind of thrown together a lot. And maybe they're not always personal or have that sort of personal effect that people are just sort of, they're in some ways disconnected from each other. I think with our team, that's kind of
00:16:10
Speaker
you know kind of at the sort of atomic ideal like that's kind of what we want to be we want to like you know kind of we're doing analysis we're telling stories and but we're like you know especially with our our visual side of our team you know we're both able to
00:16:27
Speaker
backup them, we have the numbers, we have the research, but we also like are kind of showing the personal stories and kind of trying to develop the empathy. Right, right. So before we sort of close up, I'm curious about the maybe organizational balance between the radio part, which is inherently not a visual medium, and then sort of stuff that you do. So are those two groups
00:16:54
Speaker
like completely separate? Are you able to inform each, I mean, clearly the reporters are informed, maybe inform what you're doing, but are you able to inform each other and, and try to combine the two ways of, of communicating information? Um, it varies. I mean, certainly the, the best projects are true collaborations where like all of that it's happening kind of, you know, to some degree at the same time. Um,
00:17:20
Speaker
And sometimes it's not, and it's not necessarily the ideal, but the best collaborations are the ones that were able to talk from the beginning and be able to shape both. Right. I feel like the Planet Money story from
00:17:34
Speaker
year or two ago on the t-shirt like I feel like that was I mean I for I personally sort of interact with that story in both in both mediums and so for that sort of story is it is it generated is just generated from someone has interest in a story and and bringing and bringing the various teams together um I mean I don't know I think planet the t-shirt project was a bit of a
00:18:00
Speaker
the biggest possible project because that one was like, I wasn't the work for years. It wasn't just a one person kind of bringing anything in. But yeah, I don't know, we're able to kind of talk to the report at the beginning and kind of
00:18:23
Speaker
can all come together and figure out what we're at. It really honestly depends on the story. I'm sorry, I'm kind of rambling a little bit. That's what we're doing.
Election Coverage & Focus Areas
00:18:31
Speaker
Okay, so what else did I miss? What else do you guys have? I'm guessing that in the next few months that the election is going to take up most of your time. Are there things around the election that sort of get you personally sort of more excited about other personal aspects of the next few months that get you more excited than others?
00:18:49
Speaker
Um, when the horse race, I think generally is like one of the things that we have to talk about in the report, but it's not necessarily as exciting. Um, I think, uh, there's a, I think an interest in talking a little bit about like how we got here in certain ways with certain issues. Um, um, you know, like say, like,
00:19:13
Speaker
Like, I don't know, campaign finance, like, you know, on their own, the individual, like, you know, filings and, oh, this person got a lot of money and all of that isn't necessarily as interesting as like, okay, well, who are the people behind them? And like, what do, just like kind of at a larger scale, like what do people expect when they give lots of money to a campaign? Or it is more of the sort of the wise and the howls and less of the like,
00:19:42
Speaker
you know, this person is matching a little bit of head and because I mean, we're so far out. Yeah. I mean, we have a still a long time to go. So yeah. All right. Well, I'll be interested to see what where you guys, you know, the various tools and the stories that you that you guys tell the next few
Closing Remarks & Listener Engagement
00:19:57
Speaker
months. So well, really interesting. Good luck on the on finding that magic person who can come in and fill all the needs. Well, Alison, thanks for coming on the show. It's it's been really interesting to chat with you. Thanks for having me.
00:20:12
Speaker
And thanks to everyone for listening. As I said, I'll be off for the month of August, so I'll be back in September. I hope everyone has a great summer vacation, if you're able to have one. But if you have questions or comments or suggestions for folks you'd like to hear from in the fall, please do let me know, send me an email or hit me up on Twitter or visit the site. And I'm John Schwabisch, and this has been the policy of his podcast. Thanks so much for listening.