A year at Reuters

It's been well over a year since my last post so I thought it was time for an update. As you may already know I am now Deputy Head of Graphics at ThomsonReuters. I'm based with the graphics team in Singapore, but also working closely with graphics desks in New York and London. In this role, I will focus on strengthening and growing Reuters’ global graphics service to media and financial clients. While I’ll be responsible for managing and directing some of the graphics, I'm still finding the time to work on some projects myself.

(All opinions and statements are my own)

First I'll just give some background to the role graphics play here at ThomsonReuters. We publish to a number of different platforms and in a number of formats. Below are some examples.

Thomson Reuters Eikon

Information graphics are used to accompany stories on ThomsonReuters Eikon, a platform delivering a powerful mix of news, analytics and financial content to desktop and mobile. Eikon has built in charting functions which allow the reader to view and analyse data on thousands of companies, indexes, commodities, currencies and more. See the short videos on charting and interactive mapping via the link here. Custom information graphics are also displayed with stories published through the news section of the platform. 

Media clients

Reuters News Graphics Service (RNGS) is a subscription or pay-per-use infographic service for news publications. Available in English, Spanish, French and Arabic, the service has been trusted and used by news publications around the world  for many years.

RNGS transmits around 5 to 15 graphics per day. Our goal is to produce quality graphics that use reliable data and charting, accurate mapping, clear diagrams and illustrations to cover a range of topics including breaking news, financial and company news, sports, environment, science, features and advance packages for major events. 

Some examples

Below are a few examples of different types of graphics we create. At present, all files transmitted to media clients are static, editable eps files (interactives to come in another post).

Breaking news

MH370

Even though it was a year ago, I couldn't touch on breaking news and not mention the missing Malaysia Airlines flight. This interactive is the easiest way to see what graphics we created during the disaster. All of the elements in here were also published to media as static maps and graphics as the news broke.

The department was kept as busy with internal mapping as it was publishing graphics. A lot of details such as distances to/from locations, directional headings, coordinates, navigational waypoints and remote islands were reported during unfolding developments. It was equally important for our own journalists and editors to understand this geography as it was the readers. We contributed to the reporting with a lot of geographical calculations and a lot of this work helped provide accurate detail and sometimes even shape stories.

Daily charts

Here are some examples of the kind of charts we create on a daily basis. The graphic below shows the size of China's' Yuan swap lines with central banks.

This chart shows the extreme temperatures that caused play to be suspended in the Australian Open earlier this year.

Here are some more charts from the department. 

Illustrated graphics

This Fukushima graphic accompanied an in-depth analysis on how the spent fuel will be removed from reactor no. 4. 

The graphic below accompanied a story on GM's ignition switch recall.

Sports

This simple but effective chart showed how Tiger Woods regained top spot as golf's no. 1... 

... and this is a similar interactive version we created afterwards.

We published the chart below when Gareth Bale broke the transfer record with a fee of 85 million pounds. We discovered that this was actually less than Ronaldo's fee in 2009 if adjusted for inflation.

We also issued a number of graphics before, during and after major events such as the Tour de France, World Cup and the Olympics but I'll come back to those in a later post.

Features and analysis

Sometimes we can provide background or analysis to an ongoing story such as the Israeli-palestinian conflict as shown below. The chart shows every documented fatality as a result of the conflict.

On a lighter note, this feature graphic (below) documents Marvel Studios' expanding film franchise after the release of Guardians of the Galaxy. It includes lifetime box-office earnings and budgets of films based on Marvel superheroes, including those in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Expect some more posts on work from myself as well as work from the rest of the team at  @reutersgraphics

Gold medal at Malofiej

Here is a look at the graphic I created last year which just won a gold medal at Malofiej 21. I'll write a more detailed post explaining the thinking, process and research behind the graphic in the next day or so (after celebrating in Pamplona).

Congratulations to the team at SCMP with 5 awards in total, two of which went to Senior Infographic Artist Adolfo Arranz. More details to come soon.

Asteroids

A 45-metre-wide asteroid came remarkably close to Earth on Friday, even closer than communication and weather satellites. It was be the nearest known close miss for an object of its size.   

When this story was first mentioned in the newsroom, a few days before the incident, it sparked debate. People were intrigued as to how close these objects come to Earth. How many pass by? And how fast or large are they? A perfect opportunity for an interesting graphic.    

As usual, NASA had every piece of information we needed. Their Near-Earth Object Program was established in 1998 to help coordinate, and provide a focal point for the study of comets and asteroids that can approach the Earth's orbit. They have data sets on all close approaches to Earth since 1900 and projected forward to 2200.    

The main part of the graphic shows all close approaches passing the Earth at a distance of one Lunar Distance (LD) or less. In other words, passing closer to Earth than the Moon. All 199 historical and projected passes are shown. All are arranged on the vertical axis by the distance they came to Earth. The axis represents the distance from the Earth to the Moon. Both of which are represented at each end, drawn to scale. The Length of each bar represents the speed at which the asteroid was traveling. White objects have already passed and orange are forecast.     

We also included two smaller diagrams. One showing 2012 DA14's orbit and how it will pass Earth and another showing its size compared to the Space Shuttle and the largest asteroid on the chart.    

The chart below did not make it on to the graphic.    

This shows all the asteroids over time. Every close approach recorded by NASA from the year 1900 to 2200 going out even further to 5 Lunar Distances or less. When we plotted it on this chart we noticed a strong trend. The last decade or so has seen a huge spike in the number of close approaches. Or has it? We figured this chart was too good to be true and assumed it may have something to do with recent technology and a greater ability to track these objects now. After speaking to NASA our suspicions were confirmed. It is harder to back track and accurately plot every close approach earlier in the 20th century and hard to predict as many in the distant future. After learning this we decided the chart was slightly misleading and decided to drop it.    

We decided the information we were showing was strong and simple enough to hold a full page and ran the graphic in Friday's newspaper as a back page.

Arteries of the city

I created this graphic back in October shortly after Hong Kong's Transport Department released their annual traffic census. The 182-page report was packed with statistics and useful information but the best data was a thorough breakdown of daily traffic on almost every stretch of road. The territory has hundreds of counting stations. We thought the chance to do something with these numbers was too good to miss so we pitched an analysis to the Editor who was keen to give it a good space.

The thickness of each line represents the average daily number of vehicles traveling on that stretch of road. The colour represents the percentage change on last year. This helps the reader to explore the data in two ways. You can clearly see that the main roads along the front of Hong Kong Island are still the busiest. But by the colour, the traffic has also mostly decreased compared to last year. You can also see that a lot of the roads in Kowloon have become busier. In particular the area up to the left, Tsuen Wan, the three tunnels north and the major highways to the east.

There is also a clear change in the cross-harbour tunnels. The Eastern and Western Harbour Tunnels have increased in traffic compared to the central tunnel which has decreased. But they still see less traffic.

The graphic is also a fun way for the reader to take a look around their neighbourhood or route to work.

Roadside pollution in Hong Kong hit a record high this year, on August 2 in Central, with the index reaching 212. As the year drew to a close, we took a look at how the air had fared in every hour in the year up to the publishing date.

Each day is represented by a row of 24 squares, one for each hour of the day. The shade of the square indicates the pollution reading at Central monitoring station.

The idea was to give the reader an overall glance at the year so they can see the worst and clearer periods, but also the opportunity to dig a little deeper into the hourly data. We also added some text pointers to explain some probable contributing factors to clearer air such as typhoons.

Hong Kong’s air pollution is often blamed on its proximity to mainland China’s industry. Wind direction each day is included as small arrows to the left of each row in order to gauge, if any, the relationship between northerly winds and bad air.

We wanted the reader to come to their own conclusion about the relationship with wind direction but it turns out a lot of the bad spells coincide with winds from the North (black arrows). See below.

The graphic was published as a full broadsheet back page near the end of December.

Messi v Muller

We published this information graphic when Lionel Messi broke Gerhard Muller's record of 85 goals in a calendar year. 

The chart shows every goal, plotted by date scored. The length of a bar represents the number of goals scored in that day’s match. 

We wanted to do more than simply compare the number of goals each player has scored. Presenting every goal on a timeline in this way allows us to study the data and draw our own conclusions as to which of the two goalscorer's records in most impressive. It lets us see busy scoring periods, drier seasons, big hauls in some games (often scoring 4 or 5 goals) and most importantly, how Muller continued his prolific scoring rate for many years after he set the record in 1972.

The data for Messi's goals and when he scored them was pretty easy to find from various reliable websites. Muller's was not so easy. So much so we had to commission a private sports data company in Germany to compile it for us. In the end we decided it was worth the extra expense in order to show the information this way and give the reader a different angle to other Messi infographics they may have seen recently.

As the government considers a revamp of electricity tariffs, we took a look at Hong Kong's power consumption. Who uses all the electricity in our city and what is it used on? This graphic was printed last week as a full broadsheet back page. Data set was provided by the government's Electrical and Mechanical Services Department.

This type of chart is known as a Sankey diagram. The thickness of each line reflects a value. In this case, an amount of electricity in terajoules. All of the lines add up to give subtotals and totals by users (grey) and end use (coloured).