Would you call your colleagues in the New York Times graphics department journalists? Yes. At the end of the day, we’re responsible for understanding what makes a great story and crafting the best way to tell it using a combination of the technical skills that we each have, such as cartography, programming, motion graphics or data visualization.
As reporters and editors, our job is also to curate: to look through all the data, visualize it and find the reason why the average reader should care. All in a way that feels like a value-added. With our popular piece “Snow Fall,” we had a ton of media: video interviews, data on avalanches, first-person accounts, audio and photography. There’s a part in “Snow Fall” explaining each path that different skiers took down the mountain. That’s a cumbersome thing to have words do on their own, and as a reader, you couldn’t hold this in your head. But we knew every passage that these skiers went down from our first-person accounts. We used this great data to draw these paths out for the reader, relieving the words of this task and making it easier for the reader to understand.
How is data uniquely able to tell those stories? Data can be a spreadsheet of numbers as most people probably picture it, but it can also be 3-D building data of architectural models or motion capture data for motion graphics. Data is just raw material that is used to provide evidence to sculpt into a story. For example, we have used animation and motion graphics to explain why Olympic athletes are great and to motion capture conductor Alan Gilbert.
One of my favorite pieces is “Inside the Quartet,” in which we explain the magic of how quartet playing works using a unique motion graphics approach. We recorded each musician as they played. Then, we animated the musicians as 3-D point clouds that appear and disappear with each player’s individual contribution to the music. This created a really mesmerizing, synesthesia-like experience.
Is the reporting that you do different from traditional journalism? There’s a specific kind of reporting that you need to do as a visual journalist that a words-specific journalist might not do. For instance, my colleagues and I worked on a review of the new Whitney Museum with the NYT architecture critic Michael Kimmelman. In “A New Whitney,” we needed to collect specific information about the structure of the building that would allow us to model it. This included knowing which technical questions to ask the architects as well as photographing specific textures on-site that we could then use in our graphic renderings.
Do you usually produce graphics from a written draft? What we try not to do is force media elements into an already finished piece. We are trying to create single, enhanced experiences—not multiple, redundant ones. More and more with a traditionally written piece, we will try to start as early as possible. We want to have the two ideas—the written piece and the graphics—develop together rather than compete.
For example, Kimmelman knew that we could enhance the way we experience architecture criticism with “A New Whitney.” Even before giving us a draft, Kimmelman gave our team a list of things that he was interested in mentioning, so we could simultaneously work on the best visual ways to further his ideas. It was very collaborative, and I think that piece was stronger for it. Kimmelman was able to focus his words on things that weren’t more appropriately shown by the graphics, and the graphics better served his points about the architecture.
Do you see the graphics department becoming more significant in the editorial world? As long as institutions give these departments the resources and influences to make them successful, such as increased budgets, autonomy, trust and respect as journalists, and fewer barriers to collaborate across desks. Delivering news on paper is still a fine way to distribute information, but it’s not the future. The future is digital. This means motion, interactivity, video and more immersive storytelling. I’d like to see us incorporate these new technologies to create more compelling and engaging connections for our readers.
What emerging technologies are you excited about? Virtual reality. Although I don’t think anyone has nailed it quite yet, it could be, on an order of magnitude, a more compelling and visceral way to tell stories than anything we’ve seen so far, especially as the technology rapidly improves. I’ve even found that you recall media differently through VR, that they’re remembered more as experiences rather than something you watched.
The implications of this are really interesting to me. This is all conjecture, because VR is so new, but I think that VR has the potential to make readers feel more empathy. What we’re trying to do in journalism is to transport people to places through whatever means we have—photography, powerful writing, video—to have a better understanding of what’s going on. VR can potentially influence a much closer experience of that thing or place, like giving someone the impression of being in a war zone or other places and situations that only publications like the NYT can access.
Look at the difference between when you read about racism in law enforcement versus when you watch a video of it. There are suddenly cellphones everywhere, so everything can be recorded. This has become such a huge story in part because something different comes across in that video than in a written first-person account. It ultimately comes down to empathy. If this can happen with low-quality cell phone video, then the implications for VR might be even more profound.
What advice would you give to a designer who is interested in breaking into your field? Look at the skills that are needed on job boards and become an expert in one of those. Become comfortable crafting stories. Become comfortable with the idea that being a designer is more than choosing fonts and colors: it’s using the power of visual communications to explain things more efficiently and accurately than words alone could do.
