The 'mistake' and the rectification

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The image you can see above is a screen capture from as.com. They're apologising for a 'mistake' . They erased an Athletic Club defender on an infographic showing Alves in 'offside' in a play that finished with a goal. One more data: the newspaper As uses to support Real Madrid against Barcelona, so this mistake goes with their interests.

Those of you who have done these kid of infographics know that these mistakes are not usual, so clean, without traces of the brush. If there's a mistake, they've been very lucky...

Many of you working with sports graphics may have been in a situation with a writer asking to 'erase a player', draw a line that is not preceissely wit the correct perspective, or moving some things.  And these ideas barely never come from the infographics department. So, what they call a ' mistake in the graphic' could be a very different situation. I don't know how things happened exactly in this particular case. And I don't wanna to put the blame exclusively on the writer and plead 'non guilty' for the infographics department.

At least, in this case they rectificate. Via Ramón Salaverría I remember another similar thing in As too.

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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Being the fastest is not enough

Yesterday, the terrosrist group ETA killed another person in Spain. In this cases, as most of the cases, internet media have the initative. The first idea is to place the new. Shw where it took place. But the problem is that in this kind of news all the information is changing all the time during the first hour, and the data are not accurate. Yesterday, we only knew that Ignacio Uria was killed while he was going to his favourite restaurant, Kiruri. We didn't even knew if he came form his house or form his job.

These are screenshots from some spanish websites two hours after the agencies gave the new:

ELPAIS.com


elmundo.es


El Correo


Público.es


ADN.es


Each has the location on a different place. If we don't know the exact place, we shouldn't publish anything. I really prefer this idea:

20minutos


ABC.es


They located Azpeitia, the village were everything happened, and not a very known place in Spain. And they were right. They told exactly what they really knew. Better than say something false. Somebody could say that journalism is for braves, but I prefer to think that in journalism we must be trusted. Losing credibility is very very easy. To recover it is very very hard.

None of those that placed the killing on a exact place were right.



Some rectified later, others didn't even change it. Being the fastest can't go before telling the truth. On reconstructions many editors use to say that "the reader know this is not exactly the truth, that we're just guessing". I don't want the reader to not trust us. I prefer to have a reader who really think that when we say something we know it and we're not guessing.

Fucking scale! (II)

A moment any spanish infographics jornalist fear is teh day that the OJD data (office that controls the newspapers diffusion) is released.
We all have to explain with a graphic that our newspaper has the best data, doen't matter what is actually happening. All the big bosses have something to say about this graphic, so it becomes more a bussiness matter than a journalistic one.
Yesterday we have some sort of that on Marca, the leading spanish sports newspaper.
You can see the difference of space that 83.000 issues need if it is the total issues by one newspaper or the difference between the ours and the second one.



Thanks to Álvaro for the clue.

Lipstick on a pig

Some days ago, Innovations in newspapers talked about this frontpage of South Florida Sun Sentinel.



Juan Antonio Giner used this example to talk about how, on this apparently terrible print crisis, some media are directing their efforts on cosmetic solutions, and not journalism. He compared this actions like putting lipstick on a pig, when industry really needs heart surgery.

I absolutely agree with the idea. People read newspapers because of the journalism. If they want to see pretty things they can go to a museum, or to see beautiful landscapes. Better than a photoshoppy frontpage.

But this problem is an old one on the infographics departments (and not just becasue of the infographics journalists, who most of the times are the firsts again this practices).

Infographics to fill gaps, to make a page look beautiful, because we have no data (what a paradox!), because we have no photographs, because we don't want to write more, because people expects a graphic on these cases although we don't have any data, because teh big boss loves graphics...

At the end this is not the solution. Because it's trying to fool the reader, our real chief. We're not giving them journaism, but patches. And people get tired of it. They don't want to observe a double spread graphic to realize that it says nothing or just the same than the written article.
A graphic is a journalistic product and must inform, not decorate.
It's not that graphics should be ugly, but sthetics without infrmation is useless.
It's forensic makeup. Or as Juan Antonio Giner said, lipstick on a pig.

Ethics on graphics about assasinations

Yesterday ETA, the terrorist group, assasinated again. The victim has been Isaías Carrasco, former socialist politic on a basque village, who decided to not have bodyguard. He left his home, and once inside the car, the terrorist(s) shot him from outside and escaped. He got out of the car and his wife and daughter run out of his home to find him on the street, bleeding. A while after, he died in the hospital. All this information can be seen on this photo



His home was the one on the center. His car the one wth bullet-holes on the front. His blood, the spot on the asphalt. Mark this information on the photo is enogh for me. But not always, not for everybody.

With this kind of terrorists attacks, on newsroom looks like logical and usual to have a graphic. Always. And people want to see it. But there are some 'complaints'
1. The information on how thngs happened change all over the day. And the day after, you can discover how all was other way. Your graphic is, most of the times, obsolete, and liar.
2. Other times, like this one. the important is WHAT happened, much more than HOW. If he was insido or outside the car, if there were 4 or 5 shots, or if he fell after or befre are irrelevant details on such cruelty. And there are just irrelevant details that we can tell on the graphic. And even worse. Irrelevenat details that, most of them, we can't confirm, just suppouse. And we're not talking about a sport match. This have been an assasination.

We tell things we don't know for sure just because we think that people expect to see it. I think the best is just tell what we know for sure. We published at Público the photo from above, marking the spots with the information I told you first. Maybe there are better options, but this has been the 'agreement'.
There are always excerptions. There have been terrorists attacks where the HOW have explained WHY. And then HOW is the main thing, and deserves, (except if we don't have real information) a graphic.

As Javier Errea says, 'first rule is no rules'. Let's re-think all what we do just because we're used to it. And more on such delicate topics. What happened? Does a graphic explains it better than a text or a photo? Do we have information? Then, let's do it. No doubts. Always when it makes sense, but not because we're 'used to it'. But all this is just my opinion.

To sign or no to sign

One of teh comments of teh post "National Geographic hires in spanish or how success killed Spain" in the spanish edition of this blog talked about signing graphics.What thinking do we follow to sign some graphics with our name and the name of the publication on others?. The anonymous comment talked about some cases I don't agree, as signing if we're proud of the graphic and using the media name when we're not.
It would we interesting to know which are your prodcedures on these cases. Do you use always the same reasons or each infographics artists of the department decides when to sign?. To start the topic, these are my reasons to sign a graphic with my name:

A. When there is a personal responsability on the graphic. The graphci is that way because a particular infographic artist, and not other, have done it so. It's not just applying styles, like charts (most of the times)

B. We use the name of the publication when there's an "imposition" to do the graphic in a way we don't agree, but the "high spheres" decide to do that way.

C. We sign as infographics department when the graphic is a work of all (or almost all) the members of the department.

D. We don't sign with particular names when we use important pieces of the graphics coming from press dossiers (3d, or PDFs), avalaible for its use, but not produced by the department, completely or partially. Of course, the source appears in the graphic.
This is something that doesn't happen always,as in this graphic by EL PAIS, signed by an infographics artist. CLICK TO ENLARGE



Of course, I would have forgotten a lot of cases. But we always use the responsability as teh key to sign or not a graphic. For good and bad. Signing is not a prize, is not something to show that it was you who made that cool stuff, is pointing yourself as responsibel of the stuff.D It's not a problem of good and bad graphics, of big ones or small ones.
It would be interesting to know which cryteria do you use on your departments. Is sharing knowledge how we learn.

Gert Nielsen and the "gore" graphics

Gert Nielsen, webmaster of Visual Journalism e infographics artist in Ekstra Bladet, proposed in the last Malofiej shis theory about journalism, and the graphics within, which talked about that they have to focus on information, beyond the ethics (or something like that). In brief, he told that we don´t have to avoid drawing things just because they are scathological or politically incorrects. If you have to draw a rape, you draw it, without tabus. It was a must-talk topic this year at the Summit. Some said that he was right (the truth is that they were just a few) and others defended that you have to draw waht you have to, but the examples that Nielsen showed were too "yellow". They accused him of drawing a rape when was no need to do it, of being too "bloody" and not focus on information, but on the scathological. Here you are some examples so you could have your own ideas. They're not hi-res, these are photos taken by somebody at the conference and then published in Flickr, but I hope they'll be enough.