How do Data Journalists Design Maps to Tell Stories?

TL;DR

This study explores how data journalists design maps for storytelling by analyzing a large corpus of journalistic maps and interviewing practitioners to understand their design rationales and challenges.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive design space for journalistic maps based on empirical analysis and interviews, addressing a gap in understanding the design process in news media.

Findings

Identified eight key dimensions of journalistic map design.

Revealed common rationales and challenges faced by data journalists.

Validated the design space with practitioner feedback.

Abstract

Maps are essential to news media as they provide a familiar way to convey spatial context and present engaging narratives. However, the design of journalistic maps may be challenging, as editorial teams need to balance multiple aspects, such as aesthetics, the audience's expected data literacy, tight publication deadlines, and the team's technical skills. Data journalists often come from multiple areas and lack a cartography, data visualization, and data science background, limiting their competence in creating maps. While previous studies have examined spatial visualizations in data stories, this research seeks to gain a deeper understanding of the map design process employed by news outlets. To achieve this, we strive to answer two specific research questions: what is the design space of journalistic maps? and how do editorial teams produce journalistic map articles? To answer the first one, we collected and analyzed a large corpus of 462 journalistic maps used in news articles from five major news outlets published over three months. As a result, we created a design space comprised of eight dimensions that involved both properties describing the articles' aspects and the visual/interactive features of maps. We approach the second research question via semi-structured interviews with four data journalists who create data-driven articles daily. Through these interviews, we identified the most common design rationales made by editorial teams and potential gaps in current practices. We also collected the practitioners' feedback on our design space to externally validate it. With these results, we aim to provide researchers and journalists with empirical data to design and study journalistic maps.