Visual journalism is more than photos and video, explains CNN’s Anna Brand

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📊 Reporting the news through graphics and data

Picture this: A news story is unfolding about a major airline canceling nearly all of its flights during a blast of winter weather over the holidays. As the storm clears, more flights are canceled. Video and photos show long lines of frustrated customers. News articles reveal the latest statements from officials on when flights could resume.

What’s needed is an explanation of how all airlines were impacted. That’s where Anna Brand and her Data and Graphics team come in.

A chart created by CNN's Data and Graphics team in December.

Their work helps to put context around a wide variety of topics, whether it’s the Southwest Airlines flight cancellations debacle, a decade of political change in China or climate impacts in the Western United States.

We asked Brand to help us better understand the importance of data and graphics to a global news organization like CNN. Here’s what she told us:

You are the managing editor for Data and Graphics at CNN Digital. Tell us what you and your team do.

I oversee a global team of visual journalists focused on news-driven data reporting and visualization. These are presented to the audience in standalone interactives, illustrations and in-depth mapping within news articles, as well as immersive storytelling from breaking news to features. We also experiment with creative, audience-focused formats for articles or in promoting our content across platforms, whether it’s an animated map or a live tracker.

We partner with others across the CNN Digital newsroom to pitch and execute story ideas, from daily graphics to original data projects. If you’re a reader of CNN on the website or app, you likely come across our work on a daily basis in one form or another.

Why are data and graphics so important for online news consumers?

People want to understand the news in the quickest and most efficient way possible, and many times a visual element offers a direct, comprehensive explanation. It can either complement a complicated breaking-news development — like when we visualized a heart attack versus a cardiac arrest during the Damar Hamlin story — or help distill a complex topic, such as the visual explainer we put together on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, including its history, control and key updates. We are always asking ourselves, “What’s the best way to tell this story?” and often the answer is with visuals.

Other times, we can use data visualization, or “dataviz,” to connect the news directly to our audience, no matter where they are. For example, when we analyzed how redistricting has changed the country after the 2020 US census, based on how the residents voted for president in 2020, we added an interactive component that allowed readers to zoom in on what was happening where they lived. We had a similar approach for a different story when we mapped out the gaps in where electric vehicle charging stations were installed.

Anna Brand presents a visual story about Lake Mead drought levels during CNN Digital’s morning editorial meeting.

Tell us about the most impactful news story you’ve worked on.

A few come to mind. This timeline and detailed catalog of what we know about key figures connected to the Uvalde massacre response was one of the first projects I worked on after joining CNN last year. It was a big cross-team collaboration — and our deliberate visual and interactive approach made 4,700 words accessible to readers.

Our teamwork with the politics and elections unit allowed us to do exceptional work, from tracking the swing from 2018 in gubernatorial races to our data dive into the record number of women in Congress. The explanatory visual piece we produced on how a deadly fire ignited dissent over China’s zero-Covid policy was also rewarding because we made great use of multimedia and mapping, with annotations, to explain the evolution of the dissent.

CNN is a journalism powerhouse: As a company, we tell the news of the moment in a compelling and urgent way — and also provide thoughtful, sharp analysis and enterprise reporting. Our team contributes to daily news coverage with up-to-the-moment graphics like timelines, maps and charts, as well as publishing original, data-driven reporting and visualization. Our visual and interactive storytelling is a core part of what sets us apart from our competition. In the digital space, strong visual journalism is essential for audience engagement and is often the first thing a reader encounters.

It’s exciting to see CNN Digital fully embrace the power of visual and data-driven storytelling across platforms.

👀 Check out more work from the Data and Graphic team below and on Twitter @CNNdatagraphics

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