Gert, did you mean “News” (as in the headline) or “Journalism” as a whole (as the rest of the article implies)?

I’m asking because I don’t see a lot of data visualization in the News. And that might be for good reasons. News are fast. Datavis (creation and reception) often takes time. We are glad when we find a good example for a bar chart depicting the month’s unemployment rates.

If you talk about journalism as a whole and you’re saying that data visualization won’t be a part of journalism in the future, then I think you have a very narrow understanding of journalism. Philipp Roberts mentioned it: Some have already begun to augment journalism by publishing complete data sets, with or without visualization. Making pictures out of it (be it still, animated or interactive) is only one way to make use of that data. In fact The Guardian leverages the growing willingness of the end users to engage in the storytelling and fact finding themselves. They – your customers – can reuse that data in purposes the journalists don’t necessarily think of.

I think that journalism has to change, and so it does. Journalists have to be more open about their sources, because end users want to check them. Publishing raw data in a digestible way is not storytelling, but it is part of a more transparent journalism.

‘Screaming titles’ are part of online journalism. And like all good journalism they have emotional impact. Curiosity / Desire / Disgust. I like it that way. And I’ll leave the ‘Silent titles’ for scientific papers.

“Dataviz is a means to an end – not an end in itself.”
I totally agree with this. Too often people think that once you have created a visualisation then that is the end of the story. This is not true, data visualisations need to be interpreted correctly, they are part of a story not the story itself.
I however would like to see more releases of the entire datasets so that others can use the data to create stories that the journalists/data creators had never thought of. The Guardian (UK) is leading the way in opening up the data that it uses in its stories for usage in the DataBlog, by releasing it on Google Docs or Fusion Tables.

DataViz is a tricky field. As some of the terms are in this field. So it’s an easy thing to comare DataViz with classical charts, that are data visualizations – just with small amounts of data. huh …

Wether DataVis tells a story or not, depends deeply on the literacy of the person looking at it. So an archaeologist can read a lot from some bones “lying around in an desert”. I cannot.

There was an excellent talk of Sean McNaughton from the NGM at Malofiej a few years ago about excactly how to rebuild a story from visual obstacles (http://www.flickr.com/photos/mstoll/2332956556/).

You are right, Gert, that DataViz – as we know it today – will be dead soon. As early forms in print infographics disappeared soon after their introduction. Just skim through early SND- or Malofiej-books.

But DataViz will develop further and as in real life too, not every story is presented to us on a silver tablet, but we rather have to interact, to look, to explore … to get it.

My concerns about todays DataViz are, that it takes an overproportional amount of attention in the news, because

1. it emerges from a very well researched field: statistics
2. there are more or less easy to use visualizaton-tools around
3. no in-depth drawing-skills are needed
4. the outcome often looks pretty

Alberto Cairo often states exploring (data) information to be important. For good reasons: Actively thinking about stuff (that is exploration) supports learning and knowledge.

So for me, the future of DataViz is, where we as users will get tools at hand, that enable us to explore data by adjusting the amount and granularity according to our capabilities, abilities and interests.

this is interesting gert – will there be a category for videography in next year’s show? there are some fantastic linear tellings of news – TV/video designers have been doing this for a while – while people were trying to save print with complexity, video graphics have been spreading throughout the web – ill do a post on this soon – but good points, well made