Over at Poynter.org, Steve Myers shares his interview with Sarah Cohen, database editor for The Washington Post’s investigative team. In the piece, they discuss how reporters can use interactive graphics for their exploratory reporting. [PDF]

Readers have come to rely on interactive presentations to understand complicated stories, using them to zoom in on periods of time and highlight areas of interest. More and more, some reporters are using data visualization tools to find the story hidden in the data. Those tools help them discover patterns and focus their reporting on particular places and times.

Ms. Cohen responds to questions via e-mail and describes how creating digital, visual, representations of data help reporters the same way that visualizations and graphics help readers cut through a lot of clutter and display dense information in an efficient way.

Some examples Ms. Cohen presented during the interview include:

Farm Crop Subsidy System

Cohen: “During a story on disaster payments in the farm subsidy system, we wanted to make sure that we went to places that had received the payments year after year after year. Using a database, we could find farms that had received multiple payments pretty easily. But looking at repeated images of density maps that I made of the payments, it was really obvious where to go — specific areas of North Dakota and Kansas.”

Cohen used density maps to figure out what areas of the country had received disaster payments year after year.

DC Condo Study

Cohen: “We were working last year on a story on practices used by landlords to empty their buildings, partly in order to avoid strict laws on condo conversions. By making an interactive map with a slider that showed the timing, we could see that it was moving into other areas of the city, especially in Southeast.”

Post reporters used a combination map/time line to see where condo conversions were moving.

Deaths in Detention Centers

Cohen: “Last year, when two reporters here were working on a story on deaths in detention centers, I made a simple Flash interactive that let them look at deaths on a map by age group, cause of death, year and a couple of other variables.”

This presentation shows the characteristics of people who died at detention centers. This view depicts the victims (each represented by a square) and their ages (each color represents 10 years). This map shows that people who died in the East were generally older than those in the West.

I encourage the use of these tactics for reporting purposes. Not only does it make it easier for the readers to understand the whole picture, but it obviously assists in the reporting process as well. Make sure to check out the entire interview if you’re interested.

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