Q&A with Industry Dive data + visuals director Greg Linch
This is a Q&A with Industry Dive data + visuals director Greg Linch. Linch leads a team of news graphics developers and visual editors who are focused on data- and visually-driven journalism.
About Industry Dive: We keep business leaders up-to-date with the latest trends in their industry. Over 12M business leaders across 28 industries read our 31 publications. We also help marketers tell stories that create connections, enhance trust and drive leads.
In 2021, you became the first director of the Data + Visuals team within the Industry Dive newsroom. What is the mission of your group? What do you all do?
Industry Dive’s newsroom comprises 30+ publications – e.g. Marketing Dive, Retail Dive, etc. The Data + Visuals group partners with those teams as early and often as possible to expand and enhance their data journalism and visual storytelling. On the reader-facing end, we create data-driven and visually engaging pieces for our niche audiences of business leaders.
We also strive to make Industry Dive’s use of data and graphics — whether created by our team or by one of our publications — help readers understand the key insights or context in a story.
For visuals, we’ve shifted to emphasize photojournalism whenever possible — either from third-party sources or original commissions. At the same time, we’ve moved toward using custom illustrations for capturing thematic or abstract concepts.
As much as possible, we try to make sure folks across the newsroom feel empowered. Specifically, we want to help boost their skills and knowledge as much as they are interested in learning other methods of storytelling. To do this, we sometimes act as in-house advisers or coaches when a reporter or editor has the necessary skills to create their own charts or capture their own photos. We might help brainstorm, train or provide feedback on the best tools and techniques for telling stories in non-text-based ways.
In the past, data and visuals might have started near the end of the process and focused more on presentation or illustration. “Let’s make the story pop” or “let’s jazz it up” don’t capture the possibility of fundamentally improving a story through original analysis, photography or other means. After we formed as a team in summer 2021, we’ve been focusing more on partnerships from start to finish — trying to shape and elevate the story itself and work side-by-side at each step.
What are the various roles on the Data + Visuals team? What kind of responsibilities do people have?
We’re a cross-disciplinary team with three main roles at the moment: news graphics developer, visuals editor and director. News graphics developers work on everything from acquiring, cleaning, analyzing and visualizing data to writing code for custom graphics or special project presentations.
The visuals editor works on both strategic initiatives — like improving training, tools and image sources — and a mix of feature or enterprise stories — finding, creating or commissioning imagery and art directing the final piece.
We also work on custom story formats, such as this Super Bowl by-the-numbers piece. Jasmine Ye Han, a news graphics developer, partnered with Marketing Dive to present these key highlights and insights from this year’s big game.
Sometimes we work fairly independently. Other times we might all work together on the same project. We all lead training sessions, create documentation and answer questions from the wider newsroom.
Everyone is responsible for making sure we meet the goals of a specific project. We have a service mindset but don’t operate as a service desk to simply fulfill requests as submitted. Instead, we partner with our publications to help shape a story from the outset. We ask reporters and editors to come to us with what the story is (or what questions they want to answer), who the audience is, and why it’s important so we can decide together how best to tell the story. The best pitches sound like, “We want to explain how different states compare on a certain issue,” and then we collectively decide what the best way to display and compare them is — instead of, “We want to make a map.”
What is your personal story? How did you end up as the director of Data + Visuals at Industry Dive?
I’ve had a bit of a winding career. I started out in journalism by working on my high school newspaper because I wanted to be a writer. During college, I shifted more toward the digital side of journalism and eventually started learning basic front-end development.
After graduating I was fortunate to have the time outside my job to learn back-end skills to the point where I could incorporate these abilities into my work. For example, I created small tools on my personal hosting account to help others (and me) focus more on the core work and less time on manual, repetitive tasks. Specifically, these were simple PHP-based templates or forms to add text and generate HTML. I did this at my first job with a journalism-tech startup and then at my second job, The Washington Post.
These efforts helped me pitch an internal “fellowship” to spend 6 months on the Post’s newsroom development team. That helped me level up my skills and — although at the time I didn’t want to become a developer full-time — gave me the foundation to continue learning before eventually becoming a data developer at McClatchy a few years later.
After a couple of years building and managing tools for McClatchy, I joined Industry Dive’s engineering team and spent more than 3 years working on the CMS, newsletters, ad tech, and other areas. When the newsroom initially posted a Graphics Director role, it sparked some interest, but graphics hadn’t been my area of focus. Fortunately, the job description evolved to include more data journalism as a Director of Data & Graphics (and then later Data + Visuals after we added a Visuals Editor). That data aspect better matched my background. It worked out well, in terms of timing, because I was increasingly feeling like I wanted to return to a newsroom role. The exact moment I knew I should apply came after I helped a reporter review and edit a FOIA request. That reminded me of how much I missed those kinds of close collaborations and opportunities to focus on storytelling as a journalist.
Can you share some examples of projects completed by the Data + Visuals team?
The full Data + Visuals team collaborated with Healthcare Dive on a piece about the increase of personal record breaches over time. Jasmine Ye Han analyzed and visualized the data, plus created the custom presentation. Julia Himmel helped with custom presentation and Shaun Lucas commissioned the custom header illustration. As a whole, this piece zooms out to identify a trend while zooming into specific insights and engaging the reader throughout.
A three-part recent series with Construction Dive focuses on accountability related to worksite safety: how construction death rates haven’t budged in 10 years, how industry safety numbers make it hard to measure improvement and how one large contractor had the most OSHA violations among contractors during the past decade. These pieces also demonstrate how powerful data can be when it’s the heart of a story and not simply an add-on or afterthought. Julia Himmel, a news graphics developer, worked as a full-spectrum data journalist for this series and was integral at every stage of the process.
With the addition of a visuals editor, we’re able to use original photojournalism to help draw in readers as well as humanize important topics, such as the impact of abortion bans on fertility treatments and how access and cost affect ALS patients. Shaun Lucas commissioned and laid out both of these pieces — another example of how our work, our publications and most importantly our readers are all served best through start-to-finish partnerships.
Another collaborative win came earlier this year when the Supply Chain Dive team reached out with an idea for a year in pictures. This example shows how photo research can really take a story to the next level.
In all of these, we strive to serve and inform the reader in the most interesting and effective ways possible through collaboration and strong storytelling.
All of the Data + Visuals team members work remotely. How do you all coordinate on projects? Any remote work tips?
Our team meets daily for a 15-minute standup call to discuss any questions, roadblocks or feedback requests. We also hold a once-a-week video call to discuss more strategic, team-wide topics. Otherwise, we mostly chat via Slack messages, Slack huddles or video calls to discuss specific projects or stories.
The publication teams submit requests and we manage projects via Jira. Generally, every story pitched has its own ticket with high-level details. Then, after outlining the nature and scope of the project, we’ll create subtasks for specific parts each person needs to complete — whether that’s the reporter, news graphics developer or visuals editor. Each project also has its own Slack channel where we can ask questions or share updates. We use tickets for sharing key decisions or making sure the status of different tasks are updated.
To make working remotely easier, we all share “about me” slides whenever someone new starts. This is really helpful to learn about everyone’s work styles, communication and feedback preferences, what energizes them or what drains them, and any other information they want to share.
As a manager, what are some ways in which you seek to support your team members?
Supporting the team is my primary responsibility, so I make sure to always start by listening and making sure I have the time necessary to help them. That might be answering questions, removing roadblocks or sharing feedback. Another part of that is collaborating with everyone on clear shared goals, milestones and deadlines for projects to keep everything on track. Similarly, we try to minimize context switching and the number of different projects happening at the same time.
To help keep communications open and allow opportunities to regularly step back for a bigger picture perspective, I meet with everyone individually every other week (or once a week for new hires until they feel acclimated). At those meetings, we talk about how they are feeling, what’s on their mind, what their recent wins have been, what they need more of (or less of) from me or in general and finally to-dos we each have based on that conversation.
We also look for opportunities to advise and train reporters and editors. This is a secondary part of my role, but crucial to ensuring our team mainly focuses on work where they can add value or be challenged and grow in the ways they want. The more we can help the newsroom overall improve their data and visual storytelling skills, the more it allows our team to expand their own skills and broaden our storytelling capabilities as a team.
Related to that last point, I also work with the editorial operations, product management, product design and engineering teams to find ways to save our team and the whole newsroom time and effort. Building tools and templates into the CMS allows everyone to focus on journalism more than manual, repetitive technical work. With my experience as a developer and specifically having worked on the engineering side at Industry Dive, I can help translate between teams and bridge gaps in understanding. After we have new tools, we’ll create or update documentation for our team or the entire newsroom.
What is your vision for the future of the Data & Visuals team?
Our biggest initial goal as a team has been to develop and strengthen relationships across the rest of the newsroom. That way we can join projects as early as possible to help shape or elevate stories through data and visuals. Getting involved at the outset also helps us collaborate most effectively as partners throughout the process. We want our work to be as tightly integrated as possible because our work is also journalism — not merely illustration or decoration.
Sometimes the data or visuals will help drive the stories, but other times they might complement it. Either way, our goal is to better serve our readers.
In the near and longer term, we want to continue improving the newsroom’s data and visual journalism literacy and skills. That way they can be central to the storytelling and not simply add-ons.
Building a data journalism culture in the newsroom is one way Julia Himmel, one of our news graphics developers, describes some of this work. I think that captures a key part of our vision for the team and the newsroom overall. And we’re in the early stages of building a culture for visual journalism. As both the newsroom and our team continue to grow, we’ll keep pushing ourselves and others to do more insightful and engaging journalism.