Here’s a reminder: In normal times, US-based publications normally don’t put much effort into visualizing foreign elections. Of course, with the presidency of Donald Trump, a British vote to leave the European Union, and a presidential election in France without either of the mainstream political parties qualifying, we don’t live in normal times.

As such, a number of English-language publications were ready to go with maps and dashboards earlier this month as results rolled in from France, a tacit admission of how important the presidential election was.

Unlike US presidential elections, in French elections, the winner is usually known before granular data is reported. So while a number of publications were ready to display the results live, there wasn’t much need to use them. They were stale before they got a single row of data—Macron had won.

Nonetheless, the follow-up efforts came from a number of different publications, from the New York Times and Bloomberg, to the Guardian, FT, Telegraph, and AFP (on France24).

(I’m just going to cover English-language press here, but if you’re interested in some of the coverage produced in French, check out Le Monde’s or Le Figaro’s.)

First Up

The order of elements in nearly all of the pieces was similar at the top: a headline, a sentence or two, a chart or listing of the head-to-head results, and then a map.

The only publication without a chart before the map is Bloomberg. Instead, it opted for photos of the candidates and big numbers.

Color Party

The colors representing the parties were all over the place. The European papers stuck to a traditional European red-for-left-blue-for-right format, despite Macron not being entirely a leftist. APF used gray for Le Pen and yellow for Macron.

Most strange is the New York Times, which was the only publication to ascribe blue to Macron.

Primarily a Graphic or Primarily an Article?

The FT and Telegraph took a more article-like format in their presentation, mixing graphics among longer passages of words.

The Guardian, AFP, and Bloomberg all used more traditional graphics formats, building their maps and charts into custom layouts then annotating or blurbing notable items. Along with the NYT (which did a little of both formats) these three were also the ones with interactive features.

Given that the results were known before the results map could be populated, I tended to prefer the items that had more analysis.

Bloomberg’s had none, but ended up publishing another piece that did.

Big Tippers and Little Tippers

The AFP was the only one to provide more interactivity than a tooltip.

It allowed for searching of locations and the ability to explore different geographic aggregations of the results, from regions to departments to communes. But the interface is slow and clunky, possibly the result of being required to produce an embeddable item.

Those tooltips were also varied. The most involved came from the Times, with both little bar charts as well as figures. The simplest tooltip was on the Guardian’s, with only a department’s name.

Data Depth

The level of detail in the data also ran the gamut. AFP provided interactive results down to the commune level. Bloomberg and the NYT showed the commune results but only allowed the exploration of department results.

👀   Results displayed

👆   Results explorable

Side by Side

A couple of publications did some not-quite-small multiples to show some analysis. While I found the words interesting, trying to see the correlation visually was tough for me.

The Times compared Le Pen’s support to the unemployment rate. The Guardian used them to show other election metrics like turnout and change in support. The FT stripped out the candidate dichotomy and made small maps of support for each individual candidate, which I found to be the clearest expression of the geography of the election.

Annotations

As mentioned before, the level and type of analysis varied between publications. But the annotations used by the NYT should be noted. There are arrows and blurbs at desktop size:

At mobile size, the annotations reformat into numbered points and a list of text. Bloomberg did the same thing on its election analysis piece, and it’s a wonderful way to design around the space constraints of small screens.

Worth Noting

The best I can tell, the Wall Street Journal didn’t have any overtly visual coverage, though its live blog format was informative, straightforward, and no frills.

Bylines / Credit

• The New York Times: Gregor Aisch, Matthew Bloch, K.K. Rebecca Lai and Benoît Morenne
• The Guardian: Seán Clarke and Josh Holder
• The Financial Times: John Burn-Murdoch, Billy Ehrenberg-Shannon, Aleksandra Wisniewska and Aendrew Rininsland; maps by Steven Bernard
• Telegraph: Ashley Kirk and Patrick Scott
• Bloomberg: Anne Swardson, Ben Sills, Geraldine Amiel and Adam Blenford / Jeremy Scott Diamond, Cedric Sam and Hayley Warren
• AFP: Fred Bourgeais and Clément Procureur

Did I miss the thing about the French election that you made? Notice something else interesting about the way these publications made them?

Let me know by shooting an email to david.on.source@yerit.com.

Catch you next time.

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