Behind those giant dots on the front of Thursday’s Everett (Wash.) Herald
Katie Mayer of the Herald of Everett, Washington — circulation 50,272 — took a few minutes last night to walk us through how she produced Thursday’s interesting infographic-centric front page.
Here’s the page (click for a larger view):
Katie writes:
I should first mention that the work on the design was a joint effort with our presentation editor, Doug Parry.
Like many states, Washington has been wrestling with an immense budget shortfall for some time. The state made a round of deep cuts earlier in the year, but new revenue forecasts showed that those wouldn’t be enough — if it stuck to the current 2009-11 budget, the state would be at least $2 billion in the hole.
In discussions Monday about how we should approach our reporting on the subject, our city editor, Robert Frank, suggested creating a package built around a chart or graphic. Doug and I wanted to do something that would help make this huge figure more concrete for our readers. Recently, we’ve both seen and admired a number of infographics (notably, ones in the New York Times and on a graphics blog we both read) that used simple circles as a way of making numbers more comprehensible, and we both immediately thought that a similar approach would work well for this.
Our legislative reporter, Jerry Cornfield, spent much of Tuesday and Wednesday tracking down budget numbers. As you’d expect, we had a lot of numbers to choose from. We wanted, as concretely as possible, to show how some of the state’s spending compares to the scope of the deficit, to help people understand just how big $2 billion is. So we picked programs that would produce circles in a variety of sizes, and also ones that represent things that are most comprehensible in scope.
For instance, we chose the amount state spends on two branches of government and on its 34 community and technical colleges over vaguer, broader expenses such as mental health and disabilities services. It’s easy, if bizarre, to imagine not having a Legislature anymore; it’s difficult to imagine what it means for mental health services to disappear. Moreover, the circles make it simple to see that you could ax two branches of government for a year (something that would never happen), and you’re still nowhere near making up $2 billion.
Doug recovered his knowledge of 9th-grade math and calculated what the area of each circle should be based on the amount of money it represents relative to $2 billion. My favorite is the circle, just .03 inches wide, that represents a single lawmaker’s annual salary, $42,106.
I confess to some apprehension that a lot of giant circles would be enough to carry A1, but, in the end, I think it worked. I hope it worked for our readers, as well.
Oh, it works. It definitely works.
Normally, I’m not crazy about circle graphs. For most charts, we want the reader to compare the values of the data we’re presenting. And call them boring, but bar charts are still the simplest and best way of doing that.
But the genius behind this piece is that Katie and company didn’t try to include all the numbers. Nor did she try to build a clinical comparison of all the data points.
Basically, she and her team used this data as if it were an illustration. Her point wasn’t to make a precise comparison between this dot and that dot. Her point was to make the reader say: Oh, shit!
Mission accomplished, Katie. And how.
Find reporter Jerry Cornfield’s story — which ran inside — here.
Katie is a copy editor and page designer at the Herald.
And yes, that is the paper edited by Neal Pattison – one of the founding members of the Society for News Design and the society’s president in 1997.