Comments on: Adventures in information design, WSJ edition

By: MitchW

MitchW — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 15:47:22 +0000

Of course, this would be MUCH better if they simply showed the growth rate of overseas revenues and the growth rate of US revenues.

By: glenngulia

glenngulia — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 14:29:57 +0000

And the bold black line doesn’t represent anything? Huh?

That’s X-axis, no? Bars going down from it have negative projected revenue (Verizon, B of A). Bars going up from it have positive projected revenue (the other 8).

By: glenngulia

glenngulia — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 14:22:15 +0000

Never been a fan of scatter charts. At least yours wasn’t one of those especially horrid ones when each plot is a different-sized circle (usually based on market share or something).

Not the biggest fan of the WSJ’s chart, but I like it better than the scatter chart.

By: Citoyen

Citoyen — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 13:41:32 +0000

Are you kidding? Your scatter chart is incomprehensible, while the Journal’s chart struck me as an elegant way to show how greater sales abroad correlates to revenue growth. Your observation that “the chart claims to be ‘an analysis of the 30 companies in the Dow’, but it only features 10 stocks” only goes to show how little thought you put into this. The chart clearly states that it focused on the five companies of the 30 Dow members with the largest share and the five companies with the smallest share of overseas revenue.

By: tyler7

tyler7 — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 05:39:47 +0000

Good article Felix, although I think you’re going light on the WSJ. Most long time WSJ readers know the answer to your first question (Did Lahart know that a clear chart would somewhat undercut his headline talking about a “two-track economy”, and therefore contrive something messier instead?) is in all likelihood a yes.

A rational story mentioning that for the next 12 months international growth prospects appear greater than domestic growth prospects, illustrated by your scatter chart, of course would be more informative than some story declaring there is now an economic schism with two growth tracks, but it’s not sensationalist enough for the new paper.

An even better approach would be to use your dataset and duplicate the results for the last ten years to see if anything has even changed. I suspect that for much of the last ten years foreign growth prospects have been higher than domestic growth and there’s really nothing new here despite a full above the fold story/graph package in the WSJ with giant bold headline fonts historically reserved for the outbreak of a world war.

It’s too bad, but particularly in the last 12 months the WSJ has accelerated its move from from a sober, trustworthy, business voice of record to a rabble-rousing, picture heavy, sensationalizing/political paper – as you and many others have pointed out.