Data Visualization Story Critique

What You Need to Know About the Ebola Outbreak (New York Times): http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/07/31/world/africa/ebola-virus-outbreak-qa.html

Given the nature of this assignment, I immediately started searching for articles and stories about the Ebola outbreak in Africa, as I figured that many of those pieces would include data about the ongoing epidemic. Once I found this one, I decided to use it because I think it perfectly represents a news write-up that effectively uses data visualization to enhance and help tell a story.

I really like the fact that this story includes several types of data visualization, ranging from maps to graphs to charts. The data was eye-catching, easy to read, and complimented the story well from start to finish. I also found the data to be incredibly interesting, which aided in my overall understanding of the article. In my opinion, one of the highlights of the data set was a graph in which scientists outlined the best- and worst-case scenarios for the outbreak by the numbers. In all honesty, I couldn't find many faults with this data visualization project, as it seemed to be accurate and well-designed throughout.

I certainly think that the data visualization within this article helped tell the story better than other means of multimedia journalism, as it was a story focused primarily on the facts and statistics of the Ebola outbreak. Such information can be cumbersome to work with in an audio/video/print environment simply because it's so dense, but data visualization made it very easy for the reader to follow along. The article was also more aesthetically pleasing because of the data visualization, which is critically important in terms of online newswriting.