Tracking America’s Recovery through a Data Lens
Emily Jipson, Senior Director Product Management- CNN Business
While data insights have been critical inputs in the work of most digital functions internally for many years, the increasing external openness of data over the last few years is fostering new business models, thought leadership and insights as well as driving new forms of journalism. At CNN Business we are envisioning how to tell the story of the US Recession and Recovery in the time of Coronavirus through the lens of live, interactive data — with the objective to tell the macro economic story through a very personal lens.
The CNN Business “Tracking America’s Recovery” dashboard examines the economic situation’s real effects to Americans: “Your Job”, “Your Home”, “Your Investments”, “Your Money”, “Your Leisure” and “Your Travel” and data is brought to life in partnership with open data providers such as Zillow, LinkedIn, OpenTable, IMDB BoxOffice Mojo, Homebase, STR and open government data from the Department of Labor, TSA, US Energy Information Administration, Bureau of Economic Analysis, and Freddie Mac. These living data experiences show week-on-week the impact to unemployment and the job market, home sales, gas prices, air travel, small business closures, and even restaurant and hotel reservations and movie theater sales.
New data sets are continually being added to illustrate more deeply the societal and behavioral changes in Life in America — for instance remote jobs, mortgages, fitness classes and shopping trends are soon to be added. Check back often.
We also recognized that looking at all these data signals only told part of the story — and a “big picture” of how we’re trending as a country and as individual states was missing. Thus, in partnership with Moody’s Analytics we created the Back to Normal Index that aggregates over 37 different data points to track how life today compares to pre-pandemic life. And as we go through the “ups and downs” of the pandemic, recession and recovery this important index provides a way to track where we are at that is not just following the Dow or number of Covid cases — but captures many facets of our economic — and personal — lives.
The dashboard represents a collaboration between editorial and product operations to tell evolving, “check-in” stories through data journalism. By creating a focused cross-functional team of product, design, edit, and engineering we are able to collaborate in real-time on the rapidly evolving economic situation and prioritize the data sets that are most relevant now.
Daily, quick editorial insights combine with data as a tent pole to the dashboard strategy. Through simple inline editor tools, CNN Editors add curated news links and thoughts on a daily basis to connect data to the news and provide context to the shifts being seen in the data. For instance, every Thursday morning when unemployment data is released, the chart updates to show the trends, while the CNN Editors provide the voice overlay to the numbers. This dashboard has created a lean-in, check-back experience compared to a more lean-back article read.
The dashboard was built as a capability that will enable creation of many new dashboards across topics — fulfilling CNN Business’ strategic vision to engage users in data experiences across all financial aspects of our lives. As this dashboard continues to evolve, users will be able to personalize by drilling into the insights at their county and zip levels and save insights from any CNN Business dashboard or market data to their own personalized dashboard. Stay tuned, check-in often and share your thoughts! I’m at https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilyjipson/.
