Connected China was a Reuters data journalism initiative in anticipation of Xi Jinping rising to power in 2012. The resulting tablet app drew data from a year’s worth of deep investigative reporting by the Reuters team and offered an entry point and context for the political events leading up to that day. The app wove together a series of interconnected data visualizations to help readers explore how social, political, and military power interacted to produce a new world leader.
Challenges
- Help Western readers understand the political landscape as Xi Jinping rose to power
- Activate a dense dataset compiled over a year by 20+ Reuters journalists
- Build a data-rich interactive story for early iPad hardware with limited time-zone overlap
Approach
- Prototyped in live code, reviewed with the journalism team, and iterated repeatedly
- Used daily standups to coordinate design, development, content, and editorial decisions
- Led design and project management across a distributed team of designers, developers, and writers
Outcomes
- Won the Data Journalism Award and Deadline Club Award
- Earned recognition from Fast Company, SABEW, and Best American Infographics
- Created an interactive form for making opaque political power structures easier to explore
Our process
Fathom collaborated with Reuters to find an interactive form for the dataset the China news desk had been amassing for over a year. I served as lead designer as well as project manager for the 3–5 additional designers, developers, and content writers working together to make it a reality.
The final app
Further reading
Project links
- Fathom Connected China
- Reuters Connected China video archives
Press
- “Reuters bets big on context, structure and dataviz to understand power in China,” Neiman Lab
- “Connecting China, visually,” Columbia Journalism Review
- “Reconnecting China,” Medium
Awards
- 2013 Data Journalism Award
- 2013 Innovation by Design Awards (finalist)
- 2013 Best in Business Competition, News Agencies General Excellence Category, Reuters
- 2014 Deadline Club Award
- 2014 Best American Infographics
”Reuters excelled in a tough field with an entry that showed strength in core business-news reporting and exceptional enterprise journalism that displayed courage, ambition and mastery of new storytelling techniques. Where Reuters clearly excelled was with its two enterprise pieces—Assets of the Ayatollah, and Connected China. Both pieces shed light on stories about two of the most important—and opaque—nations on Earth: Iran and China. Great journalism married with great design.”