journalism in the age of data

I thought the documentary was very interesting.  I think data visualization is fun to look at and in most cases is more helpful to see than actually read about.  It’s interesting to see the evolution of data visualization, from simple charts and table to highly interactive and complex examples that are used today.  It is one thing to read about a lot of numbers and statistics , but to see the idea and things that are happening through advanced infographics is something entirely different.  One of the examples was showing how planes go through the sky.  We can be told that 140,000 planes are in the air, but we can get a very different perspective with seeing the data visualization of planes taking off and landing, position in the sky, etc.  Last year much was made about the top 1% of wealth in the country.  Many  news reports and newspaper articles discussed the topic and numbers and statistics were thrown around.  However, I saw a data visualization of the statistics and it had a huge impact over anything that I read. The main point of doing this is to make the topic interesting and elicit curiosity about the story. I think it works.