How journalists help readers make sense of complex COVID-19 data
Data visualization articles on the pandemic are some of the most popular pieces of journalism online. The scale of the data and its constantly changing nature are unprecedented. Now journalists are looking for new ways to help readers make sense of it all.
“There’s an appetite for that sort of content,” said Joel Eastwood — a graphics editor at the Wall Street Journal and part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team last year that unpacked the hush-money payments made to two former lovers of U.S. President Donald Trump.
Eastwood, a graduate of Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication, spoke about pandemic-related data journalism during a panel discussion Thursday at the Journalism in the Time of Crisis conference, organized by his alma mater.
“I think that appetite is only increasing as audience members become more technologically savvy and more data literate,” he said.
The analytics back him up. According to the Washington Post, six of the seven most-visited stories in The Washington Post’s history have been graphics. The data visualization-driven article, “Why outbreaks like coronavirus spread exponentially, and how to flatten the curve,” by Harry Stevens, is now the most-viewed story in the Post’s history.
“It’s like information junk food,” Dr. Theresa Tam, a keynote speaker at the conference, said about the huge amount of information online that may or may not be credible.
Tam, the Chief Public Health Officer of Canada and the face of the federal government’s pandemic response, had joined the conference earlier on Thursday to deliver her spotlight address.
“People are curious, they’re using technology to make sense of the world around them, they’re eager actually for more in-depth understanding,” Tam said. People rely on journalists who do “very in-depth analysis in order to translate complex scientific information,” she added, underscoring the appetite for high-quality, data-driven journalism.
Collating and untangling data for readers
Nial Shiab, Montreal-based data journalist for Radio-Canada, addressed the challenge of working with data during an ongoing pandemic: “I realized that I needed to work with ever-changing data and I needed to publish projects that were built to last a very long time.”
Working with just two reporters on his team, Shiab used computer code to gather data automatically from each of the databases of provincial health authorities. After collecting all the data into a massive spreadsheet, he tried to help readers make sense of it all.
“That was also very complicated,” he said. “At first it wasn’t very clear for us — what was the data, and how to correctly inform the people with that.”
He realized that “maybe users want to do other kinds of charts” with his team’s data. So, he created an interactive dashboard where readers can “change the charts and download the data as they wish. They can create favourites.”
Shiab said the pandemic really changed the way he works; COVID-19 numbers made him realize that he can work on multiple projects based on the same dataset and inform people on a “very long timescale.”
How to present new graphic forms to readers
“There are certain types of data, certain types of phenomena, that cannot be displayed …through graphics that are traditionally underused in the news media,” said Alberto Cairo, chair of the visual journalism program at the University of Miami.
“It’s really not the total number of cases that’s important, but it’s also how fast that is expanding,” Cairo said about the importance of using logarithmic scales during events like a pandemic. But he also warned that not all readers might understand how they work.
If data in a story needs to be expressed with an uncommon graph, he encourages journalists to use it. At the same time, he also advises journalists to explain what the data means and tell readers how the graph works.
“Besides showing data, we should always try to …provide other means, other ways to see the data that may help you . . . understand the scope of the challenge.”
