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)