In case you wondered why the FT creates so few clickable graphics, now there is an explanation, and it comes from Martin Stabe, interactive editor who is in charge of interactive graphics.
In a recent piece, Stabe writes:
I am the FT editor responsible for producing interactive forms of storytelling — but I spend much of my time keeping interactive elements in our graphics to a minimum.
Cool visuals are seductive, but they can lead to confusion
Interactivity is what makes online publishing different. It distinguishes digital media from old, passively consumed formats such as printed pages or video.Displaying data using the latest technology and novel interfaces grabs attention — so inevitably news organizations want to create interactive charts and graphics. The promise of cool, whizzy visuals is seductive, but they can often turn out to be an expensive mistake that does little to improve communication.
Stabe adds that today, online graphics must be responsive, designed to work on any device, with a screen of any size or shape. "Producing an interactive visualisation that works flawlessly across all devices means writing and testing custom code — a slow and expensive undertaking. Because of this, we try to exhaust all other options before resorting to custom-built interactivity," he said.
This echoes the sentiment of the New York Times' Archie Tse, Deputy Graphics Editor, who said this during a presentation titled Why We Are Doing Fewer Interactives
"Some things we used to do more frequently were stteppers, tabs and fixies and sliders but readers weren’t getting to all of the content," he said. "Why? Readers just want to scroll."
He added:
1. If you make the reader click or do anything other than scroll, something spectacular has to happen.
2. If you make a tooltip or rollover, assume no one will ever see it. If content is important for readers to see, don’t hide it.
3. When deciding whether to make some- thing interactive, remember that getting it to work on all platforms is expensive.
And there was another big change in how we do things ...Fewer small graphics embedded
in articles. More stand-alone visual stories.
Tse says that today the Times does fewer small graphics embedded in articles. Instead, the Times now includes more stand-alone visual stories.


"How has this changed us? We are writing and editing a lot more text," he said

" We still do interactives, but the bar is now VERY high."

