How It Works

Reporters are likely to find that visualizing data is a useful part of the reporting process. Readers, meanwhile, love to see those quick sketches. At The Wall Street Journal, fast, reporter-generated posts like, “The June Jobs Report in 10 Charts” are a hit.

Having less bureaucracy helps speed publication, too. At Quartz, all of the charts in coverage of financial markets are reporter-generated. The team isn’t relying on anyone else to get its stories published.

Economically speaking, reporters making charts saves organizations money. The alternative, of course, is designating a person with specialized skills—who likely gets paid at a higher rate—to make boilerplate graphics as a service to those who can’t, as many times a day as they can muster.

How to Make It Happen

Given the right tool set up with the proper constraints and a little bit of training, a reporter can make a chart that matches all of the finer points of an organization’s visual style with little effort. Of course, this may mean that editors will need to become familiar with some aspects of the visual style guide, just as they are with the AP style guide.

This is not a daunting task—assuming that your visual style guide includes visualization. Design aspects such as color, size, typography, and layout can be made immutable, given the right tool, allowing an editor to all but ignore them. Editing a simple chart should not take any effort to review its design, just as editing a simple article should not take any effort to review its layout. At this level, content and design are separate concerns.

Titles, labels, units, and annotations must be matched to style—but those are just, you know, words. Training editors and reporters to exercise good judgement in selecting a type of visualization for their data is no more complex a task than training them to exercise any other type of good news judgement. We trust them not to screw that up.

When reporters and editors can start becoming self-sufficient with their charts, the poor soul who was once the newsroom chart monkey will have more time to work on more complex projects, better suited to her specialized skills. If need be, she can act in an advisory role to the newly minted chartist-reporters, guiding them to make better and better charts and at the same time reducing their own dependence on her.

Tools to allow reporters to make charts with minimal training have been built at many organizations, from the largest papers such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post to smaller organizations like Quartz and KPCC. (Though, access to them is not always universal.)

There are publicly available managed options that will customize your charts and provide access to a chart making tools for a fee such as Datawrapper and Plotly. There are also free and open source tools—such as Quartz’s Chartbuilder—which can be implemented by an in-house development team. All of these tools are being used by news organizations of all kinds and sizes.

What’s your excuse?