Industrial Production of Post-industrial Products: How Interactive Visualizations Miss Their Potential as a Journalistic Form of Knowledge

Journalistic interactive visualizations (JIVs)–such as scrollytellings, interactive infographics, and clickable data visualizations–have an epistemic potential to efficiently and intricately mediate rich journalistic knowledge. In practice, however, they usually mediate and oversimplify limited knowledge. To understand why and where, across the production line, JIVs lose their epistemic potential, we map the production process of JIVs in three leading Israeli news organizations based on a combination of in-depth and reconstruction interviews with 22 JIV producers. Findings point to nine prominent bifurcations, where the production course can shape JIVs so that they mediate rich and intricate or limited and simplistic knowledge. Overall, these findings reflect a misfit between an “industrial” production process and a “post-industrial” news product.