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> If it's supposed to be investigative journalism. It is not. It's just an infographic with a basic level of interactivity. It doesn't claim to be an extensi

> If it's supposed to be investigative journalism. It is not. It's just an infographic with a basic level of interactivity. It doesn't claim to be an extensive or comprehensive report on the influence of PE in the US market and everyday life. Just a reductionist overview of the topic, nothing more nothing less.

JohnnyConatus 10y ago
I agree the piece doesn't represent itself as investigative journalism. However, this is below the quality level of journalism that I typically receive from the NYT, which typically makes some effort at covering multiple perspectives on an issue. This feels like it was made by BuzzFeed or something.
daveloyall 10y ago
Info graphics marry numerical data to imagery. For example: it's an info graphic if you show some number of cars unevenly distributed across two lanes on a road and explain that each car in lane A represents 10,000 rental cars and each car in lane B represent 10,000 driver-owned cars, and the sum of the infographic cars * 10,000 happens to equal the number of cars on USAmerican roads, assuming that the infographic specifies that its subject is rental-vs-ownership of cars on USAmerican roadways. See? An info graphic is a fancy chart or graph. Every rule from your highschool science textbook about charts and graphs applies to infographics. Pictures that don't adhere to those rules are just pictures.
SilasX 10y ago
>It's just an infographic with a basic level of interactivity. No, it's just a graphic. There's no info, and it's inflammatory. It tells you what X is by listing all the bad things X has done. That's like telling someone what the US is by saying "The US tried to purge the North American natives in the 19th century." It doesn't tell me what "the US" actually refers to, and it poisons the well against it. You are no better at implementing a classifier to distinguish "US" for "not US", and now you're armed with entirely negative things about the US. (I was originally going to do Germany there, but Godwin's Law and all.)
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > > It's just an infographic with a basic level of interactivity. > No, it's just a graphic. There's no info, and it's inflammatory. IME, "infographic" is a term in which the "info" portion relates to "information" in much the same way that "factoid" relates to "fact" (or "truthy" relates to "truthful".)
  - SilasX 10y ago
    Yeah but it made for a clever pun there, don't you think? Esp with the "graphic" double meaning!

JohnnyConatus 10y ago

I agree the piece doesn't represent itself as investigative journalism. However, this is below the quality level of journalism that I typically receive from the NYT, which typically makes some effort at covering multiple perspectives on an issue. This feels like it was made by BuzzFeed or something.

daveloyall 10y ago

Info graphics marry numerical data to imagery. For example: it's an info graphic if you show some number of cars unevenly distributed across two lanes on a road and explain that each car in lane A represents 10,000 rental cars and each car in lane B represent 10,000 driver-owned cars, and the sum of the infographic cars * 10,000 happens to equal the number of cars on USAmerican roads, assuming that the infographic specifies that its subject is rental-vs-ownership of cars on USAmerican roadways. See? An info graphic is a fancy chart or graph. Every rule from your highschool science textbook about charts and graphs applies to infographics. Pictures that don't adhere to those rules are just pictures.

SilasX 10y ago

>It's just an infographic with a basic level of interactivity. No, it's just a graphic. There's no info, and it's inflammatory. It tells you what X is by listing all the bad things X has done. That's like telling someone what the US is by saying "The US tried to purge the North American natives in the 19th century." It doesn't tell me what "the US" actually refers to, and it poisons the well against it. You are no better at implementing a classifier to distinguish "US" for "not US", and now you're armed with entirely negative things about the US. (I was originally going to do Germany there, but Godwin's Law and all.)

dragonwriter 10y ago
> > It's just an infographic with a basic level of interactivity. > No, it's just a graphic. There's no info, and it's inflammatory. IME, "infographic" is a term in which the "info" portion relates to "information" in much the same way that "factoid" relates to "fact" (or "truthy" relates to "truthful".)
- SilasX 10y ago
  Yeah but it made for a clever pun there, don't you think? Esp with the "graphic" double meaning!