Five insights on design and media gleaned from building Blue Feed, Red Feed for WSJ
Before MSNBC had Jon Keegan on air to talk up his praise-worthy Blue Feed, Red Feed project, I had the opportunity to talk to him about the project and his career at the Wall Street Journal.
The full story (which we published over at Knight Lab and includes much more technical detail) is worth a read, but since Jon is fun and insightful, I wanted to highlight a few anecdotes and lessons he shared about his career and work that were buried or didn’t make it into that other piece. Here they are:
Old, white businessmen
Keegan: “My background is from art and design. I was an illustrator for a long time. So my first work for the Journal was as a freelance illustrator. I did a lot of drawings of old, white businessmen. … I’d always loved computers and mucking around with animation when I was in college so I couldn’t help myself from writing HTML and helping out with things at the Wall Street Journal right when the website was started.”
Liberals will un-friend you
“Liberals and conservatives react differently when they encounter counter- attitudinal content. Liberals are more likely to un-friend someone when they see something that challenges their view; conservatives are less likely to have those friends in the first place.” Source: Pew.
Maintain your design focus
“The one thing I’ve found in my projects, because I’m kind of a one man band, is that they’re most successful when I pick a singular idea and I resist all urges to add a lot of extra features to it.”
A little bit of knowledge can go a long way
“I’m a totally OK programmer. I’m no technical whiz. My web applications are usually very basic. This is a very simple project. There’s not really a lot of analysis here.”
What would you say you do here, “visual correspondent”?
“I’ve been in this new role of ‘visual correspondent’ for about a year now. And it’s kind of a dream job. I get to do research, writing, reporting, designing, writing code, including the database stuff. … The defining thing that ties it all together is finding patterns in tech and culture and trying to create some fantastic visuals to highlight some of that stuff. It’s been fun.”
