How the Hindustan Times is introducing Indian readers to interactive stories
Over the last year, a young team of data journalists and coders at the Hindustan Times have been quietly reinventing the way stories are being told at the Indian paper.
Based in Delhi, the Hindustan Times’s data team includes a tight-knit group of three data journalists and two experienced programmers. Together, they’ve produced outstanding infographics and interactive data visualizations that have pushed the envelope of data journalism in India, publishing stories like an analysis of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech and an interactive tracking levels of air pollution in Indian states. And the team’s been rewarded for their efforts. Last March, they won three awards at the 25th Malofiej International Infographics Awards.
Storybench spoke with Gurman Bhatia and Samarth Bansal, data journalists at HT, to learn more about the data visualizations they’ve produced, the challenges of doing data journalism in India, and their readers’ response to this new form of storytelling.
Bhatia: It all started last year. It was the vision and initiative of Nic Dawes, [formerly] chief content officer of the HT, to kind of think of newer ways of storytelling. It started with the air quality map which first kicked off in late 2015. After that, they did the story “At Death’s Door – An investigation into capital punishment in India“ in March 2016. And with a few successes, they thought this was something we should do more.
So, we started doing data interactive process in full swing sometime in January last year. January 2016 was also when Harry Stevens, one of the three data journalists on the team, joined HT and that’s when we started doing things on the web.So, you could say management efforts and some early [project] successes led to the beginning of it.
Bhatia: One of the biggest challenges you face is finding reliable data. For example, for the story “Every Hindi film song by Lata Mangeshkar, in one graphic,” there was no cohesive database of Indian music available. Nobody had a database on that subject and finding the data alone took me 14 days. Same goes for the story: “How toxic are your favourite firecrackers?“
Data sources are a big challenge. Even with sources that are readily available, there’s a lot that can be done but is not being done. For example, historical election data in India is good and HT has done some cool stories with it.
Bansal: In general, when it comes to public policy or politics, you will find different data sources tell you a very different story. Therefore, you need to be very careful not just in choosing the data or interpreting it but also in explaining how the data is generated. That is what I find particularly challenging.
Another challenge is data literacy among readers. For instance, there are several charts we kill daily because we create a chart and then realize perhaps our readers won’t understand it. If a story has a bar chart or line chart, many readers intuitively understand it but if you try to do something innovative, the purpose of which is to tell the story but it’s an interactive dataviz or design, you don’t know whether people will understand it. So, whether the data visualizations will convey the story or not is another big challenge.
Bhatia: Also, designing for the phone. That’s another big challenge. There are all these amazing visualizations we can create but don’t because there’s no way that they could work on a phone. That happens all the time.
Designing for phone and loading time – these are a few things that you need to consider.
