5 takeaways:

➀ If you can use a spreadsheet, you can use Datawrapper. If you haven’t already created a Datawrapper account, you should sign up now, said Adam Marton, who leads the Capital News Service Digital Bureau for the University of Maryland. The free version is intuitive and walks you through each screen, offering different ways to upload your data in small data sets. Datawrapper ingests that data and provides many visualization options. Whether you want bars or maps, columns or color codes, the ability to customize your information is at your fingertips.

➁ Data visualizations have transformed the way newsrooms operate. When Marton was working for the Baltimore Sun newspaper, he said that half of his job was just producing bar charts and locator maps for stories—and it took a long time. But with tools like Datawrapper and Flourish, newsrooms, such as The Los Angeles Times, have created a whole new workflow. “For the first time, you can really make these high-quality, professional-looking graphics and data visualizations with this sort of off-the-shelf tool. You can customize them for your publication and they’re print-ready,” Marton said.

➂ Good reporting communicates more than just raw numbers. In using COVID-19 data, Marton cautioned that numbers of cases and deaths are not the best way to convey the true impact of the virus. “In a lot of cases, when you just look at raw numbers, what you’re going to see is the biggest states always come out on top, like for everything, right? The most people die in California and Texas, the most people are arrested in California and Texas because they’re the biggest states, right? But once we normalize numbers, we see things a lot different,” Marton said. Calculating the rate of death per hundreds or thousands yields a better snapshot of overall impact.

➃ Think of your data as more descriptive text—but don’t forget the explainers. Once you’ve created the perfect graphic, Marton said you still need to embellish it for the most impact. “We want to describe exactly what people are looking at, right? We don’t want there to be any question about what this is showing. And we also want to help tell our story a little bit. So it’s really helpful if we’re not just like, ‘Here are some numbers, here’s a graphic, figure it out yourself,’ right? This is an opportunity for us to help people interpret the data and help tell our story a bit.” Audiences need context.

➄ Never, ever publish a news graphic that doesn’t have a data source. Marton described developing a graphic based on data collected by the New York Times. “But if I look at The Times data, they have a source on their data, too. So I’m going to take their source as well. So I got it from The Times, and they got it from state and local health departments and hospitals. And then I got the population data from the Census. So I’m just going to be as thorough as I can.” Many news outlets share their data in a methodology section at the bottom of the story, sometimes linking to the data on Github.

Speaker: 

Adam Marton, Director, Capital News Service Digital Bureau, University of Maryland

This program was funded by the Evelyn Y. Davis Foundation. NPF is solely responsible for the content.