Commonplace Pages

The split is roughly 70% tidying up the data, 30% doing the fun stuff of visualising and presenting it.

For some people, the “fun stuff” would include “tidying up the data.” Investigating, editing and surfacing the issue IS the journalism.

As Luke Williams wrote in Atlantic Life’s “The Key to Design Insights: See the World Differently” »

Insights are the sudden realizations in which you interpret the observations and discover patterns.

… every single resident of New York City decided to evacuate the famed metropolis, having realized it was nothing more than a massive, trash-ridden hellhole that slowly sucks the life out of every one of its inhabitants.

It’s funny how many times Laura have made similar observations including:

• “…the pressure of 20 million tons of concrete wasn’t constantly suffocating them.”
• “I don’t need to pay $2,000 a month to share a doghouse-sized apartment… I want to live like a goddamn human being.”
• “… the phrase “Only in New York” is actually just a defense mechanism used to convince themselves that seeing a ______ is somehow endearing, or part of some shared cultural experience.”
• “… the Brooklyn Bridge is great but it’s just a fucking bridge…”
• “… that nobody goes to the Met anyway…”
• “… and that living in a dingy, grime-caked apartment while exhaust fumes from an idling truck seep through your bedroom window.” (so true about our first apartment in the UWS)

On a more serious note… check out this pretty cool visualization of where New Yorkers have moved in the last decade: Map your moves.