Industrial Production of Post-industrial Products: How Interactive Visualizations Miss Their Potential as a Journalistic Form of Knowledge

ABSTRACT

Journalistic interactive visualizations (JIVs) – such as scrollytellings, interactive infographics, and clickable data visualizations – have an epistemic potential to efficiently and intricately mediate rich journalistic knowledge. In practice, however, they usually mediate and oversimplify limited knowledge. To understand why and where, across the production line, JIVs lose their epistemic potential, we map the production process of JIVs in three leading Israeli news organizations based on a combination of in-depth and reconstruction interviews with 22 JIV producers. Findings point to nine prominent bifurcations, where the production course can shape JIVs so that they mediate rich and intricate or limited and simplistic knowledge. Overall, these findings reflect a misfit between an “industrial” production process and a “post-industrial” news product.

KEYWORDS:

• Data visualization
• JIVs
• journalism epistemology
• news production
• infographics
• knowledge work

Acknowledgments

We thank the managers, editors, journalists, graphic designers, programmers, and other practitioners for their time and insights that enabled this paper.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Drucker (2020) distinguishes between representational and nonrepresentational visualizations. A representational visualization functions as a visual statement, as it stands ‘for preexisting, […] already formulated knowledge’ (p.11). A nonrepresentational visualization, on the other hand, ‘creates […] knowledge in a primary mode’, as the altercations to ‘the visual image produce something new’ (p.12).

2 We paraphrase Schudson’s original term, as by parajournalists he referred to ‘especially what journalists themselves call “sources”’ (Schudson 2003, 3).

3 Haaretz. A left-wing elitist broadsheet and news site (Tirosh 2018; Kampf 2011), part of the Shocken media group. The website has been paywalled since 2013 and ranked fourth among Israeli news sites (“Top Websites Ranking” 2022). Haaretz has been regularly producing JIVs since 2011. Although lacking a data department, Haaretz employs an interactive team of three programmers responsible for all interactive programming for journalistic and commercial content.

Calcalist. The most read financial newspaper and website (“Top Websites Ranking” 2022; ICE-Reporters 2020) is part of the Yedioth Ahronoth Group. Calcalist has been regularly producing JIVs since 2014, despite lacking a data department. As the study revealed, all its JIVs are produced by two senior graphic designers who use automated software (such as Adobe Muse, Webflow, Tableau, etc.)

Ynet. The leading news site in Israel (“Top Websites Ranking” 2022) and at Yedioth Ahronot Group, partially paywalled since 2019. Ynet has been regularly producing JIVs since 2015, either by using the in-house CRM system or by outsourcing larger projects to YIT, an IT and UX company also within the Yedioth Ahronot Group.