- Welcome back to the PolicyViz podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. Now we're into 2018. It's
- probably a good time to look ahead, but also to look back a little bit on what happened last year
- with data visualization, what happened in the last several years, and of course, what's going
- to happen in 2018. And to help me do that, I'm very excited to have Ben Welsh, who is the editor
- of the data desk at the LA Times to chat about what's going on over there on the west coast.
- Ben, how are you? Happy New Year. Thanks for coming on the show. Happy New Year, John. Thanks
- for having me. I'm excited to chat about all things LA Times because some of the great stuff
- that you guys do that tends to be west coast doesn't always make it over here to the east
- coast. You know, it's sort of like the little story about the wildfires. And then I get to go
- to the LA Times website, and really see some incredible stuff about wildfires or agriculture
- work that doesn't sort of make the front page over here. So why don't we start with having you talk
- a little bit about yourself and how long you've been at the times and the work that you all do
- there, and how that data desk works in relation to the rest of the newsroom? Yeah, sure, no problem.
- So I've been doing the kind of nerdy thing for, you know, gosh, I guess I have to count now. I
- guess probably about 15 years. And about the last 10 of those have been at the LA Times. And when I
- started in 2007, I was working for la times.com, which was in an entirely different part of the
- building and wasn't even in the editorial quote unquote section of the newspaper. And in the 10
- years since that's changed. And we've kind of gradually integrated and we have one newsroom now.
- And within that one newsroom at actually kind of the center of it physically is where our team,
- the data desk sits. And we're kind of a small squad of reporters and computer programmers who
- use our technical skills to get stuff done, to find and tell stories to solve problems to do
- research to make things happen on the internet. And there's really a lot of different shapes and
- sizes that takes I don't think any of it would really surprise you. You know, one observation I
- would kind of make about our industry is that the types of things people are doing are really
- quite similar from place to place. But the way in which they're done sort of within the organization
- or who does it can vary quite a bit, you know, kind of the mix of different tasks that are done by
- the mix of different teams in newsrooms can vary a bit. And even though our team is called the data
- desk, we do a little more than that, just because of the way things have evolved. And so in addition
- to the kind of, you know, old school computer assisted reporting type stuff where you're
- generating nutgrass from big hairy databases. We also do a lot of systems administration for
- newsroom tools that help us publish custom stuff, and fancy stories and things on the web, we do
- the design for a lot of the long form and fancy packages that come through each year.
- And we do some data visualization and other work as well. And it really can kind of vary
- depending on the project and the people involved and what needs to get done. So I tend to describe
- our team as kind of the nerd Swiss army knife, where we're trying to use our computer skills to
- solve problems and make stuff happen. Right. I mean, I assume there's a big culture shift having,
- you know, move the two newsrooms together. What was the transition like from going from a newsroom
- that was your I would guess a traditional shoe leather newsroom and a separate sort of dot com
- newsroom and then pushing those together? Was there a big culture change, a big effort to try
- to merge those two different I would guess cultures and skill sets together? Yeah, I mean,
- so when I started the la times.com was in a different part of the building with a different
- reporting structure, I was hired there and didn't even work, you know, I guess for the editorial
- department. And now you know, I'm I guess an editor within it and we're all employees under
- that umbrella. So like organizationally, it was all kind of moved under, which was done
- in kind of a big reorganization that went along with some pretty large layoffs. A number of years
- ago, and that was kind of, you know, a big moment for the LA times when all that happened. But,
- you know, just one change like that doesn't sort everything out. These types of changes are really
- long and complicated and evolutionary and uneven depending on, you know, where you are or what
- you're doing. And it's kind of really a struggle that everyone in the industry is facing. And we
- are to just try to, you know, get to where we need to be. I don't think there was ever one moment
- where suddenly, you know, the switch went on and things were different. But there's been milestones
- throughout, you know, that was a big one when the merger happened, like another big one that's very
- procedural that I'm proud our team was involved in was having all of our copy being written in the
- web CMS first and then exported to a print publishing platform, rather than vice versa,
- which might not sound too oppressive for people who work on websites and haven't worked in a print
- newsroom. But the reality is is actually the reverse most places where you're writing in a print CMS
- and then at some boring bureaucratic process has to play out before it is, you know, exported to
- the website. And just even reversing that last year to me was in its own way kind of a major
- milestone in the LA Times history. Yeah, were there certain stories over that time span that
- maybe drew people in even more engaged them to say, Oh, this is something that I can use in my
- reporting to, you know, connect with or communicate better to the audience? Like, were there milestone
- projects that you remember over that time as well? Well, there's definitely been a lot of big projects
- that you know, I'm proud of on our team. I don't know if we can necessarily take credit to having,
- you know, done the big story that that changed the whole thing. I don't know. I don't know if you
- could say there's one story that really flip things here. But I would say, you know, there's
- projects we've been involved on that were that were entirely kind of untraditional, that didn't
- involve creating, like a traditional print story at all. Things like we had a project, you know,
- eight or nine years ago, when I first started called California's war dead, where we compiled
- all the obituaries that had been written about Californians who died or Iraq and Afghanistan,
- made it into a database, then made that database into a website that had a page for each person,
- and then also powered a lot of enterprise pieces. And then on a going forward basis, after that,
- we were publishing to that application before we were even researching and writing the obituaries
- and sort of incrementally updating them as the work continued. And I think that that because the
- obituary writing process was a project that so many people in the newsroom were involved in,
- in the writing and research for, I think it was a way for us to expose a lot of people to doing
- things kind of a different way, and kind of conceiving of what you're creating in a more
- structured but also, you know, less conventional storytelling format. And so I guess in my time
- here, I think that's been a big one. Yeah. Now that you have the newsrooms together, and we've
- seen a big change in technology and the way people are receiving their news, can you talk a little
- bit about the balance between desktop and mobile and how you all think about that as you're creating
- either the small projects or even these big narrative features? Sure. I mean, everything
- has got to work on the phone. If it doesn't work on the phone, it doesn't work, you know. And
- increasingly, you know, a majority of readers are often seeing stories on the small screen. And so
- I think, you know, from the design standpoint, if not start with it, it has to be paramount or equal
- to the desktop. And that's just, you know, now fundamental to kind of the custom web development
- our team does. And I think probably every team like ours does. I think, you know, one symptom of
- that or one outcome of that is, you know, this won't surprise you, I'm sure is, you know, kind
- of a move to more static graphics over interactive graphics, in many cases, because they're oftentimes
- just better suited for mobile and sort of the recalculation of the cost benefit analysis of,
- you know, how much work you put into something. The increasing weight on mobile as an input,
- you know, makes the investment on the interactivity kind of often seem less worth it, you know. And
- so I think you're definitely would see a lot more static graphics at the LA Times and pretty much
- everywhere across the industry. I think that's probably only going to increase, you know, I think
- that trend is going to continue. And I think, you know, you know, really boring, nerdy stuff,
- like you got to make sure the page isn't too heavy, you know, and, and you have to think about also
- how you can maybe output stories from data in an automated way or things that maybe serve that
- mobile audience that maybe wouldn't serve a print or sort of a long reading audience that's putting
- more attention in little bits and bytes of information. Like an example I would give is a
- few years ago, one of my colleagues developed a bot that automatically writes and publishes
- stories about earthquakes within seconds of them happening by converting the sort of pulse of
- information that comes out of the government seismographs into a very simple post, which then
- is sent to the copy desk automatically who review it before sending it live. And that allows us
- almost literally within seconds to have a post with a basic map and a basic summary of the
- earthquake ready to ship. And then if it all worked out publish, and that allows us to get that little
- bit of information that people more often in a mobile space are trying to find kind of like
- immediately, hey, was that a big earthquake here in LA just seconds ago, right? And conceiving of
- kind of the audience's needs, from kind of the mobile point of view can lead you to like put an
- emphasis on creating more things like that. Yeah, that's really interesting. Everyone says mobile
- first, you just said mobile first, are you literally thinking about Oh, we're going to do
- this new story on, I don't know, wildfires, is it the development is literally mobile first? Or is
- it you know, we have an idea for how we want to tell this story. And now let's make sure that it
- works on mobile. So my question is really whether it's thinking initially in a small screen versus
- thinking sort of broader and then modifying elements of the story so that they work on a
- mobile screen. I mean, in the last couple years, our narrow team, the data desk has kind of evolved
- more to projects work, off breaking news work. And so on that particular example you gave hasn't
- come up for us. But you know, our graphics desk, which is, you know, just increasing in strength
- and does a great job on most of the kind of the breaking news work like that, they definitely are
- thinking that way and are taking that approach. When it comes to something more like a long term
- project or something that you that you want to have kind of be special. I don't know if we think
- mobile first, but we're kind of thinking like what you know, at its bare essence, what is the story
- we're trying to tell, right? And then what is the most powerful way to reach, you know, our audience
- as we conceive them, you know, with the tools we have. And I think, you know, as part of like that
- conception and that idea development process, you have to be thinking about people's phones,
- because that is, you know, this gigantic percentage of your audience. And so for me,
- when it comes to like the projects work, I think it really begins with what's the story and how do
- we best tell it? That's really interesting. You sent out this tweet in December about 30 of the
- most viewed pages in 2017 and nine were by apps or designers. Can you talk a little bit more about
- that expand about that? You know, what does that I guess really what does it mean to you as someone
- who has seen this transition to have about a third of the biggest hits be from your team or from the
- development team? To me, it's just a sign that what we're doing is connecting with our audience
- and is kind of at the core of what our newsroom is doing to try to change and survive like in the
- digital space. One of my sort of maybe secret motivations for writing a post like that is that
- one of my kind of pet peeves about particularly about data analysis projects or about sort of the
- card investigative work is sometimes there's an idea out there that you know, they don't draw a
- large audience, you know, or that they're sort of part of an outdated sort of prize winning process
- that happens in newsrooms or something. And I just think that that is at least in our case 100%
- untrue and that our team is contributing to and trying to really move the needle with reaching a
- digital audience and doing new things. And I think that I think that's almost certainly true,
- probably most other teams like ours. And I think it's just an idea that I want to kind of reinforce
- and spread because I don't often see it hammered as hard as I think it should because there's
- really good reasons to invest in the type of work we do that are, you know, to be frank, you know,
- commercial. And I think that's fine with me. You know what I mean? And so that, you know, that's,
- that's one reason I think that that's an important story to tell it to is I'm just really proud of
- the people who work on our team, because I feel like that's a sign of their hard work paying off.
- You know, if you were to look at those nine things, I didn't really elaborate on what they
- were, but you would find kind of a broader array of things than you might think of with our team
- being called the data desk. They're not all just like data stories. The number one most viewed
- thing at the LA Times, at least so far, this year was a series of editorials that our opinion page
- put out early in the year about President Donald Trump, and some problems they had with him. And
- in an effort to make a bigger splash out of the series of a half dozen editorials,
- Andrea Roberson, who's on our data desk team, designed using our data desk custom publishing
- tools, a series of pages outside the content management system that really kind of blew these
- up and made them look special, you know, and improve their presentation. And you know,
- I think obviously, you know, the primary reason that those editorials succeeded is the content
- and the writing and the people not on our team who, you know, did all that. But I do think a
- significant component of it was the excellent work she did in the design of it. And so that's why I
- think, you know, that that would be a case where our team kind of had a hand in in something that
- you might not think of as the narrow data work, but was really important. Right. You know, I've
- noticed over at the New York Times that they've started adding the developer names to the bylines
- of news articles. Have you all started to do that? And if not, is that something that you think,
- I think going in line with what you were just talking about of your team being a crucial part
- and a central part, is that something that your group is looking to do in 2018?
- Oh, totally. Yeah. I mean, it's something we've done for years. Okay, honest. It's something
- we've done for I can't even remember, but at least five years or more long time. You know,
- there's different ways it gets kind of handled depending on the context. And you could I'm sure
- finding consistencies and how it's been applied with zero exceptions, you know, if someone has
- done custom web development work that even if it's strictly cosmetic, they receive a production
- credit at the bottom of the page. If you know that production work is for like sort of a data
- graphic, like say election results, or some sort of standalone visualization, we do traditional
- bylines at the top of the page. And then, you know, in cases where it's like a long form narrative
- where we haven't done just cosmetic design, but we've also contributed data analysis. There's
- sometimes kind of a mix between whether you receive kind of the traditional byline alongside
- the writer, which in many cases you do, or, you know, this sort of print tradition of a
- contribution line at the bottom of the writing, which is based on some judgment call about, you
- know, the significance of the work that's been contributed. And, you know, there's a lot of,
- you know, messiness and give and take and when that happens and how, but, you know, to me,
- I think it's important that people receive their credit. I, you know, it might be better if we had
- kind of stricter rules in a system that everyone was on the same page with. But, you know, these
- things are evolving all the time. And to me, it's just something we're consistently trying to sort
- out. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it seems like continued evolution. Oh, yeah. I want to get your thoughts
- on what were your favorite stories from 2017? What pieces you all worked on that you thought
- were highlights, not necessarily that may not have been the biggest, you know, page views,
- but which one sort of struck you as both the editor and as a reader? Sure. I mean, so here
- there's a few local or California stories that might not have got all around the world that
- our team participated in that I think were real good. Let's see. So our first example might be
- Ryan Menezes on our team, who's sort of a actually a statistics person who has become
- a journalist on our team partnered with Ivan Penn on our business desk, who's sort of a long time
- energy reporter to use data to help Ivan sort of raises ambitions and write a bigger series of
- stories about some phenomena. Did I get that right? I never know. Yeah, I'll have to look that
- one up. They probably both were wrong. But some stuff. Yeah, so Ivan's an energy reporter on the
- beat, right? Right. He knows lots of stuff. But sometimes in just covering things that happen
- out there in the world, you can't take a step back and kind of get at the bigger issues you want to
- get at with the kind of good enterprise. And that's where data can often help. And in this case,
- I think it did where he had sort of been hearing from people and kind of sort of developing the
- idea that, Hey, maybe California just has too many power plants just has too much power. And
- this is not something that was in any story anywhere or that had really been written about
- at all. It was just kind of this thesis that some people on the fringes were kind of putting out
- there and he wanted to find out if was true and kind of evaluate that. And so we sort of teamed
- Ryan up with them and using a lot of data, some of it publicly available, some of it gathered,
- you know, through records requests and other means, were able to like really dig in and go at
- that question. And the answer they found was that it's true that California actually has a gigantic
- and growing surplus of energy being generated by the power plants out there across the state.
- And we continue to build more. And that's actually one of the reasons why price continues to go up.
- And so we have this kind of broken supply and demand curve of demand is actually decreasing
- due to like energy efficiency, green alternatives, yada, yada, yada. So demand is flat and supply is
- increasing, which, you know, if you remember high school economics, that should result in lower
- prices, but it's not prices are going up. And the system in some kind of fundamental way is broken.
- And they were able to really dig into that through data. We wrote kind of three big kind of stories
- through the year, which we tried to bring to life and take make this boring, complicated concept
- relatable through illustrations, and sort of a mobile first sort of like slider kind of concept
- that was separate from the main stories. And you know, I thought that stuff turned out real good.
- It's resulted in a power plant being canceled, which is pretty cool, you know, as far as impact
- goes. And was to me just a great case of how statistics and data can help you, you know,
- kind of find and tell and prove out stories that otherwise would not be told. And to me,
- that's one of the things I get a real kick out of in data journalism. Yeah, absolutely. I mean,
- having a huge impact. Were there any others that struck a chord with you this year?
- So Ivan's on our business desk, and I am kind of proud this year that we partnered with our
- business desk more than we have in past years. And this is kind of, you know, part of that
- evolutionary process is you have sort of allies that you gradually develop within the organization.
- And then you seek to expand that network, you know, and draw in new people and new sections of the
- paper to kind of, you know, the approach we're trying to take. And so this year, we did a bunch
- of stories with business that I thought turned out okay, there was the ones with Ivan. And then
- there was another set we did with two reporters, Natalie Kitroff and Jeff Mohan, about California's
- agricultural industry and how that has really changed in the last couple years, and how some of
- sort of the received wisdom and potted history of sort of how that industry works is outdated.
- And a lot of things are changing. So like, for instance, due to increased border enforcement,
- there's actually tons and tons of people coming in through legal visa programs for temporary farm
- workers. And this is something that's just just dramatically exploded in the last couple years.
- And we were able to write about that and kind of dig into that issue, problems with housing for the
- workers we were able to get at, I thought real well. And then also kind of an interesting economic
- story about another result of increased border enforcement, which is there are in fact wages
- are going up for people who work in some industries like grape picking. But that even though the wages
- are going up, they still aren't unable to attract Americans to take the jobs. And so, you know,
- this was another case where using data and kind of traditional on the ground reporting, we're able
- to do kind of a much stronger story than we could have done without it. Right, right. Well, it sounds
- great. I'm a huge fan. I actually have a couple of what are now probably older graphs that your team
- did that I use in every class I teach, because I think one of the things that I love most about
- what your team produces is the annotation on the graphs, they're all just, I think, uniquely and
- expertly done to explain, you know, concepts that people may not have any idea about, or even graphs
- that they may not be familiar with. And I think your team just does a, you know, extraordinary
- job of that. So thanks so much for that, for giving me enough material to teach. So anything
- you're looking forward to in 2018, I know we got a lot of news coming up, but any things in general
- that you see in the newsroom that you're looking forward to? Well, this is again, kind of, maybe
- boring to people who don't work at the LA Times, but we're changing over to a new content management
- system, the Washington Post's sort of arc system. And that's going to be sort of a kind of big
- behind the scenes challenge to be pulled off, you know, primarily by the product people who'll be
- responsible for, you know, 99% of the content that will be published out that system. But then it's
- also going to be new opportunities for our team that does special work to try to better integrate
- things with our homepage and section fronts to try to more closely integrate how we publish custom
- outside the CMS work with the CMS, which is kind of one of these challenges I think kind of everybody
- faces, which is, you know, you don't want stuff so far outside that copy editors, regular editors,
- junior developers can't really participate without like, you know, really ramping up their
- technical skills. But you don't want stuff so inside the CMS that it really, you know, limits
- what you can do. And so I this new system is going to allow an opportunity for us to kind of
- try to rebalance how that workflow works and how those tools work. And that's going to be kind of
- a challenge for us to sort out in the coming years, which I think there's definitely some good
- potential for to improve the status quo. Yeah, absolutely. Well, Ben, thanks so much
- for coming on the show and great work in 2017. And I'm looking forward to see what you all come
- up with in 2018. Of course, thank you for having me. And thanks to everyone for tuning into this
- week's episode, I will of course post links to all the stories that Ben talked about. I hope you'll
- take some time to check out the LA Times stories. If you're on the East Coast, we tend to sometimes
- neglect those folks working all the way out three hours behind us. But I'm a big fan. And I'm sure
- you will be too if you take a look at it. So do get in touch if you have comments or questions
- or suggestions for other guests. So until next time, this has been the policy of his podcast.
- Thanks so much for listening.
Episode #110: Ben Welsh
By Ben Welsh • • PolicyViz Podcast in Online
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