Types of “users” of journalistic content built on Fluid – (1) Story writers: journalists, editors, in-house tech teams

[RaoOfPhysics]

From the perspective of journalistic content built using Fluid, we can foresee two broad types of “users”, as described below. Each is accompanied by a different set of assumptions in terms of, for example, technical proficiency/interest.

This discussion focuses on the “producers” of the stories. See #9 for the discussion on “consumers”.

Background

There is an expectation of a certain proficiency with technology as well as a willingness to use it, in order to produce data- and visualisation-driven narratives. Tech-minded journalists might already be familiar with some paradigms and workflows (see #4 and #5).

Examples

The Economist, in particular, has a large collection of GitHub projects used for data-driven storytelling:

• Covid-19 excess deaths · Repo
• Big Mac index · Repo
• Ukraine war-fire model – behind paywall · Repo
• HPV vaccines · Repo

The Economist’s repos are mostly in R, sometimes running in Jupyter, and the BBC team has released, among other tools, an R package for ggplot, called bbplot.

Questions for onboarding

• What are the incentives for journalists already actively using R to try Fluid?
• Should one of our examples (in addition to [Mini-article] VESRI article #1, [Article] Cambridge University Press publication #2 and [Mini-article] Cabot Institute article #3) re-present popular articles or dashboards from The Economist, since the data and code are available under open licences? For example, the Covid-19 excess deaths tracker and estimates demonstrate a fantastic degree of interactivity, with multiple plots “talking” with one another.
• What “translation” should we provide, by way of documentation and live examples, of doing similar things to R and Python in Fluid?

[RaoOfPhysics]

Admittedly the example articles from The Economist I referenced aren’t to do with climate science, and so may not necessarily be the right ones. But it may be a quick way of demonstrating some capabilities of Fluid.