02/05/2010

A bomb in Times Square and just some little locators. Is that a victory or a defeat for infographics?

Yestarday evening (US time), police evacuated Times Square and some streets nearby. A bomb car was found. It was late night in Spain, so there was no time to react. That, and the fact that I haven't found US newspapers here, makes me take a just-online approach of the infographics published.
We at lainformacion.com have a little locator map with the place where the car was found and the evacuated streets, inside an article with photo and links to video form the frontpage.



The New York Times, just some streets away from where the car was parked, focus its multimedia content at this moment in videos, audios, photos and this little locator map.


Washington Post
has something like The New York Times, USA Today, nothing.
ELPAIS.com also show a little mapand video and photo. elmundo.es, also, but with a static map instead an interactive one based on Google Maps.

Time ago I would have expected big animated reconstructions. That was not what I found today, I maybe wrong and in just some hours we can see a lot of big infographics showing how the car was parked, the t-shirt vendor saw the smoke and the police arrived and deactivated the bomb.
But, personally, I'm glad to found just these locators. Why? In this kind of reconstructions (terrorist attacks, accidents...) are usually full of details that we just 'guess' and usually make huge mistakes. We try to explain things with a high level of details when we still don't know them. And little details can be big ones when you found time after how everything really happened.
Should we use graphics just because they're a 'funnier' way to show information? No, we should use graphics when it's the best way to explain the information. When we have to 'guess' part of the information showed, we're not really helping the reader and damaging the image of our media.
When editors consider infographics a minor discipline, something that just decorate the text, they don't ask for the same rigor when we are comunicating visually. But when media really think that infographics are information, as texts are, we must show just the details we know for sure.
These locators can be less spectacular, but we are telling the readers that, when they'll see an infographic, it will tell you exactly what happening, and that's not something 'we're guessing'. We can't accept something I've heard somewhere I won't name: "People know than in grpahics we're guessing, we have to suppose something; if we just tell what we know for sure we won't be able to publish nothing at all"




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