“How reporters around the world risk their lives for the truth”
As the Internet speeds up the spread of information, the world becomes more transparent. However, the journalists, who share the information with us, shoulder more of the danger.
Created by Luke Shuman, the visualization shows the number of journalists killed in 10 countries between 2000 and 2015. The goal is to draw the attention of media workers as well as the government. The authors want the reader to notice the dangerous situation of journalists and protect those journalists. Their target audience appears to be media workers and the government.
The authors use a world map as a base panel to show the number of casualties and add four more analysis based on the other data source. At the bottom of the picture, the authors examine the relationship between casualties and the media type, between casualties and press freedom index, between casualties and reporters’ employment status. Most important, the authors point out that the impunity rate is extremely high. Interestingly, there is a special sentence lies on the bottom, saying that “Data courtesy of Freedom House and the Community to Protect Journalists”. Apparently, the authors want the United Nations to help solve the crisis.
This is an effective visualization because it presents the “dead journalists” topic to the target audience and would successfully draw their attention. The important data is marked by red color, which stands out with the black base map. Furthermore, the high impunity rate stands out at the bottom and conveys the most important message to the audience: the global community must protect those who perform this vital service.
Although the visualization conveys the important message as the authors expect, some analysis seems unreasonable. For example, the conclusion that more news online means more dead internet journalists seems unreliable. As the internet grows fast, the number of internet journalists dramatically increases, which is obvious. We need to compare the ratio of death internet journalists and the ratio of print journalists to make a conclusion.
Source: https://www.good.is/infographics/issue-38-citizen-journalism#open