From my first locator map, traced painstakingly in MacPaint while I was at Nashville Business Journal a while back, I’ve been interested in data visualization.
That’s also because I’ve always been interested in data and how it can reveal problems in society or add context to a story.
While working at USA TODAY, I eagerly experimented with Infogram, an online interactive map and chart maker, because Adobe Illustrator, a great but complex program, was taking me too much time. After all, my main job was editing words, but I wanted the best presentation possible for readers and the reporters whose work I was sprucing up.
I had become pretty adept at national, state-by-state charts in Infogram, finally figuring out the not-so-intuitive way to get material to present the way I envisioned. But since I started earlier this month at WUSA-TV, Washington, as a freelance digital producer, I’ve been wanting to see what I can do with county-level material.
My curiosity about the Washington metro area and the station’s market area, which in some ways is bigger but in others constrained because of a CBS affiliate in Baltimore, led me to create this map. It is in WUSA9’s official colors.
Bonus: Now that I’ve zeroed in on the counties from a big map of the United States, I can copy and reuse this map for other purposes.
WUSA-TV’s parent company is TEGNA, which split from Gannett and USA TODAY at the end of June 2015. Since then, it has bought a few more TV stations and is poised to purchase 11 more when the sale of Tribune Media to Nexstar is completed — it’s still under regulatory review — in the fourth quarter of 2019.
Wondering about exactly where the new stations are located gave me the chance to experiment with locating points in Infogram. This version of the company’s maps also is supposed to be more responsive to varying devices.