For a primarily audio-based journalistic outlet, WBUR uses a lot of visuals and graphics to explain different topics. For my blog this week, I decided to take a deep dive into their regularly updating COVID-19 case count page, which is displayed prominently on the WBUR website’s main landing when you visit it.
The first thing a viewer sees opening up the page for “Latest Mass. Map And Case Count: Breaking Down Coronavirus Here In Charts” is the simple graphic below, with an explanation in plain text right below it to go more in-depth into what the numbers mean. The graphic design across the whole page is relatively simplistic–there are a couple of other similar visualization boxes with statistics in them if you scroll down the page. The colors are mostly in black, white, and grey, and aren’t distracting–the point here is not to be particularly pretty, but to explain the information in as succinct a way as possible.
“The above numbers include the cases and deaths confirmed each day by the Department of Public Health (DPH). But because of a lag in reporting, a case could have been diagnosed or a person may have died earlier,” explains text below this graphic. Similar text is found around the site to explain lags in reporting, something that feels particularly endemic to the COVID-19 era–because of the limitations of getting information on testing and the scale of these operations, having explanations of that sort makes sense to clarify and especially to avoid misleading an audience for which this information is an essential public service.
The theme of “essential public service” continues, as you scroll down the page itself–the interactive map of counties in the state of Massachusetts is labeled “Your Community” and encourages viewers to click to see “the latest case count in your community.” It’s a very personal approach to present something that can seem impersonal–a data visualization of the entire state–and shows something about the purpose of data reporting like this. It’s not as much about breaking a unique or earth-shattering story–many other news outlets across mediums have a similar “COVID-19 statistics” page on their sites. It’s about making this info accessible to the public who may need it.
Similar clarifications on reporting can be seen as you scroll down and explore both positive test rates and confirmed cases over time. Both explain that “it often takes a few days for hospitals, labs and other facilities to report the data,” accounting for any discrepancies or drops that may occur as the date on the chart is closer to the present time. In a media environment where accusations of “fake news” and doubts of science reporting still run rampant even after the official inauguration of President Biden, it feels in a way that clarifications like these are even more common, because there can be an assumed sort of distrust for even straightforward statistics.
Some of the graphics the page uses are more sparse–this pie chart showing ICU bed capacity feels almost deceptively simple, but it gets the point across visually without being distracting.
The final graphic on the page is both simple and striking–a tally of all confirmed cases and all confirmed deaths so far in the state. The simplicity and reliance on numbers to visualize instead of, for instance, doing some sort of display with silhouettes or stick figures to represent these large numbers of people, has its strengths and weaknesses–this is a lot easier to grok at first glance, but like many COVID statistics, it can be hard to really fathom just how many people are contained within these numbers. At the same time, WBUR does a lot of other COVID coverage that goes more in depth into how individual people are affected, so it doesn’t seem like there’s a major gap in representing that part of the story.
Julia Maruca 
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