Abstract

The proliferation of data journalism in recent years has led to a democratization of data exploration and analysis on an unprecedented scale. Yet even as data journalism has become ever more important, cheaper and easier for news organizations to produce, one of the genre’s most compelling and engaging affordances – user interaction –has increasingly become sidelined as a luxury feature reserved for major data projects at even the most innovative digital news organizations. Some of the pioneering publishers in the field of interactive data journalism, such as The New York Times and Quartz, have begun to supplement, and in some cases, replace interactive news apps with static, image-based data graphics. This paper seeks first to understand and explain the growing external and internal forces pushing publishers to reverse course and cut back on interactive data journalism. Second – by way of synthesizing existing research in the fields of Human Computer Interaction (HCI), Information Visualization and Media Studies – it seeks to construct a cost-benefit analysis for assessing when to produce static and when to produce interactive visualizations. Finally, it proposes a broader adoption of a range of new open-source, code-free data visualization tools and techniques that would allow publishers and the general public alike to employ user interactivity in data storytelling projects without requiring significant additional financial or human capital, and while still adhering to the at times draconian standards of distribution platforms and the mobile web. (Abstract)