XCITY / Features
Visualising a pandemic John-Burn Murdoch speaks to Matt Reed and Chiara Wilkinson about his whirlwind year documenting the data behind COVID-19
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graphic comparing various countries’ case numbers for Staton’s article, before tweeting the image the following day. The chart triggered a torrent of online engagement, generating over 10,000 likes and retweets to date, praising his work while also speculating as to why such valuable public health journalism was locked behind a paywall. “At the time, I was making what I thought was just a throwaway chart that gets used once,” admits Burn-Murdoch. “But the combination of that reaction, and the general sense around all of us, was this is something that people really want to see.” Twelve days after that initial post, on March 23, the page was brought out from behind the paywall to an even greater clamour. With larger audiences came greater pressures. On top of his usual working hours, Burn-Murdoch updated the chart late into the evenings while explaining the FT’s data collection and presentation methods via his accompanying Twitter thread (alongside a routine snap of his dinner). Burn-Murdoch believes that sustained engagement with its audience gave the FT primacy over other outlets’ coverage. “A really well-established data team, with a big group of developers and designers, would have probably built an interactive version on day one and walked away from it,” Burn-Murdoch explains. “That would still have been a useful tool, but I think it was the fact that we were actually posting every day, creating a little conversation around it and responding to the many questions that people had,” he says. “I think that was a big part of our success.” By the end of April, Burn-Murdoch had tweeted an updated graphic every day. His follower count had increased from around 30,000 to over 300,000, while the FT’s coronavirus dashboard had become their most visited page ever. “The first few days it was probably all going to my head a bit, but now it’s certainly a new normal,” he says.
Image: Naeblys via Getty
Image: Charlie Bibby/FT
wenty-twenty was the year that ‘the curve’ came into popular consciousness. To ‘flatten the curve’, social distancing, facemasks and quarantines became the new normal. Still, the curve prevailed and climbed to new peaks with immeasurable consequences. As information and headlines changed daily, one constant was clear: the COVID-19 pandemic is a story drawn by data. “I never thought I was going to become a sort of pandemic correspondent,” says 32-year-old John Burn-Murdoch, who joined the FT in 2013. It has been a whirlwind year for the paper’s senior datavisualisation journalist since he published his earliest articles detailing coronavirus’ growing impact. It was early spring: the global stock markets were reeling from the largest single-week declines since the 2008 financial crisis and the FT data team were charting the economic fallout. “I’d look around at 7:00pm and there would be a lot of us still in, simply because of the number of things that had come our way that day,” he recalls. “It was just getting a sense that this was a huge data story, with more stories than we were capable of.” The work was soon to intensify: one data visualisation and accompanying Twitter thread would set the course for BurnMurdoch’s next year of work. The day after Italy was placed in a national lockdown on March 10, his colleague, Bethan Staton, asked him for data to compare the UK’s coronavirus situation to the growing case numbers in Italy. At the time, the UK had a reported 258 new daily cases, compared to Italy’s 977. BurnMurdoch made up a “rough and ready”
For Burn-Murdoch, making charts which his audience can understand takes precedence over creating shiny, awardchasing graphics. “I find that by making a bar chart or a line chart, it will not just be seen, but it will be understood by far more people than making something really cool and fancy, and I think that’s really important.” On May 4, the FT’s interactive trajectory tracker went live, relieving Burn-Murdoch of his nightly graph-induced Twitter storms. However, efficient workflows haven’t made mapping coronavirus any easier. “A lot of countries just don’t have the data,” Burn-Murdoch says. “Our correspondent over in Ecuador was writing a story about coffins piling up in the streets, with vultures circling overhead – all at a time when the data coming out of Ecuador was saying cases and death figures were pretty low.” Another pitfall is becoming disoriented by abstract coronavirus charts and forgetting the human stories at its heart. How does someone who lives and breathes data humanise the statistics he’s analysing everyday? “To be honest, I don’t know how possible that is,” Burn-Murdoch says.