Are you paying attention, mainstream media? You’re just not doing your job. You’re avoiding coverage of the news we need. And you’re not even trying to explain the meaning behind the headlines you do cover. That thin gruel you pass off as news is like the tasteless mounds of stuff masquerading as food at buffet-style, fast-food barns. There’s plenty of quantity but hardly any quality.

I’ve given up. My television screen’s gone dark. Now that I’ve completely turned off traditional news outlets, the question is how am I going to satisfy my cravings? Not knowing exactly where to turn, I composed an ad for Craig’s List soliciting for a more simpatico news partner. The ad looked something like this:

Starving news junkie seeks raw, unfiltered news. Desperately seeking smart reportage that will engage, enlighten, and energize. Eye for detail and keen sense of humor definitely a plus. News outlets peddling piffle need not apply.

Fortunately, this bit of silliness never got published because my twenty-something daughter came to the rescue and introduced me to a smorgasbord of youthful online news called Vice News.

Finally, here’s a news outlet suited to my Gemini personality: multi-faceted, ambiguous, sometimes uncomfortably complex, questioning, exploratory, curious about anything and everything. Vice video and print reporters put you right on the scene. They give you the real deal. They’re never lazy.  Not for them the easy clichés or sound bites that let you wrap yourself up in cozy familiarity. The intent is just the opposite. The diverse gang at Vice wants us to get really uncomfortable. They want us to squirm with the reality of what they’re showing us. How else, their reporting implies, can they encourage us to question our assumptions?

Although Vice targets a demographic I’m decades past, this is reporting I can relate to. The selection of topics wildly ricochets between the facile and the deadly serious. Some of the reporting takes on hot-button issues. Some is nothing more than dessert material. Story lines are quirky and idiosyncratic. At its best, the reporting can be downright revelatory.

An add-on value to Vice is that if you’ve ever found yourself waking up in the middle of the night wondering “what interests millennials right now?” this is the source that will give you the answer.

Founded in Montreal in 1994 as a government-sponsored community magazine, Vice Media (of which Vice News is just one division) is now headquartered in Brooklyn. Although Vice now has 35 offices in 18 countries, its roots in one of the world’s trendiest hipster destinations go deep. The company could easily display a byline declaring, Williamsburg Meets the World. And that world, if you’re willing to jump on the ride with Vice, turns out to be a fascinatingly complex, multicultural whirlwind.

Unlike old media, Vice News doesn’t spoon feed its audience. Visitors need to sort through the abundance of offerings based on personal taste. For the most part, the videos skip main-dish news.  Vice serves up the ingredients that make up the underbelly of the big news stories and offers a bit of garnish on the side. For example, are you curious to understand the emergent culture of wealth in China that’s being fed by American consumerism? Then a report on the burgeoning popularity of high-stakes pigeon racing among China’s newly wealthy will provide you with insights into the changing mores of China’s business class. America, take a good look, the piece implies. This is where your money’s going.

On the other extreme, a five-part series called “Renegade Jewish Settlers” may be the most insightful, on-the-ground reporting of the story of Israeli settlement building and annexation of Palestinian land I’ve ever seen. Reporter Simon Ostrovsky succeeds in opening a window onto the wrenching tragedy of the gulf between hard-line Jewish settlers who believe god and history have granted them the lands they’re taking and the anger and frustration of Palestinian farmers who for generations have lived and farmed those same plots of land.

Fascinating and powerful stuff is what Vice dishes up time and again. How about looking into the faces of children working in silver mines in Bolivia in a piece called “Child Workers of the World, Unite!” Would you be shocked, as I was, to learn that child workers have formed their own union called UNATSBO? The union advocates for passage of laws legalizing and regulating child labor. Going into the mines to interview these teen-agers, the reporter shows us that many of las cuartas (referring to child laborers who are paid one-quarter of what their labor is worth) are working underground not only to help support their impoverished families but also to save up for their own education. The Vice reporter challenges our first-world assumptions about child labor by asking, “Who suffers when children work? Who suffers when they don’t work?”

Vice’s headlines often intentionally grab you by the neck in order to shake you up a bit.  Check out “Military Police Are Killing the Cambodians Who Make Your Clothes,”  a print piece about clashes in which four protesters were killed and twenty-one injured when military units opened fire on garment workers demanding nothing more than a living wage at a factory in Cambodia.

Time and again, the reporting at Vice News delivers that kind of slap in the face. This is immersion journalism as crusade. The challenge embedded in the coverage is clear. It goes something like this: Okay, people, here’s what’s going on. Here are the ripple effects of your politics, your governing, your buying habits, your lifestyle. Here’s how your life intersects with the global community. So now that you know, what are you going to do about it?

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Infographics.  You may not know what to call them, but you’ve seen them. They’re those colorful visual representations of data, economic and demographic trends, or knowledge bases sprinkled liberally throughout print and online media.  If there’s a cache of data out there, a clever graphic designer will come up with a way to represent it as an infographic.  For the visually curious, infographics are a thought-provoking intersection of art and communication that may represent one of the purest realizations yet of Marshall McLuhan’s prescient sixties-era epiphany that “the medium is the message.”

As an adjunct to editorial content, infographics pack a hefty punch.  They perk up the black-and-white page and, at the same time, coddle readers’ computer-age impatience with lengthy narrative content. As news outlets search for ways to compete with one another more effectively and to retain an audience whose attention span is on a downward trend, an increasing number of infographics are being published.  A sampling of a few mass-market magazines demonstrates the trend.  In a single issue, Fortune Magazine had fifteen infographics. Money Magazine had twenty-five. Scientific American ten, and Time and Newsweek seven and five, respectively.

Unlike old-fashioned bar graphs, in which visual representations yield one-dimensional conclusions, infographics present data in a more engaging format and yield multi-dimensional insights. More importantly, the very process of data collection and design reveals interconnections that might otherwise remain opaque when described narratively. Like the tour guide standing in the piazza among throngs of tourists and holding aloft a flag to signal a group’s gathering spot, the infographic designer becomes the viewers’ guide, charting a coherent path through information overload and, along the way, providing insights that are often highly original.

Take a look, for example, at an interactive infographic by Moritz Stefaner called “How scientific ideas flow around the world,” tracking scientific collaboration across the globe.  Stefaner’s graphic demonstrates what is happening in scientific research in an era of ever-faster interconnectivity and efficient data sharing. What the design reveals is that scientists are actively sharing information with other scientists in complex, overlapping collaborations that yield discoveries and innovations across national borders and academic disciplines.

Look, too, at what might be this year’s most important infographic. It was recently published in the New York Times accompanying an editorial by columnist Charles Blow. The graphic presents comparative data gathered by Bertelsmann Stiftung that charts social-justice measurements for member countries of the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development.  For Americans, the portrait is anything but pretty. The conclusions pack a powerful punch straight to the core of American self-esteem.  Don’t bother looking at the top or even the middle of the chart. Scroll down to the bottom where the U.S. sits in the bottom five based on measures of poverty prevention, child poverty, senior-citizen poverty, income inequality, and health rating.  The only other countries with overall social-justice ratings below America’s are Greece, Chile, Mexico, and Turkey. The sobering implications make this one infographic that every American citizen and politician (especially in an election year) should closely examine.

These two examples of infographics demonstrate how effectively information can be condensed into easily understood, fact-driven visuals.  There is, however, a glitch. I call it the “Grande Odalisque” problem.  The phrase refers to the image of a courtesan painted by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres in 1814.  In the painting, the courtesan faces away from the observer, displaying her anatomically distorted back and pelvic area.  The painter, with an audacious flourish for the time, made visual through these intentional distortions an idealized form of the female body and of desire itself.

Ingres’ decision to distort the female form for symbolic reasons is the same choice that today’s visual designers face.  They too will need to ask themselves whether they choose fealty to reality or exaggeration to prove a point. And like the audience who first studied Ingres’ painting and struggled to comprehend its radical anatomical exaggerations, today’s viewers of infographics will find it necessary to discern what is fact and what is fiction.

For two graphic designers, Juan Antonio Giner of Britain and Alberto Cairo of Brazil, this issue came to the fore with the killing of Osama bin Laden and inaccuracies in infographics representing the events leading to his death.

What Giner and Cairo observed was that designers (responding to what were, admittedly, early, unverified reports) jazzed up their graphics in a way that confused fiction with verifiable fact. Giner and Cairo reasoned that if infographics purport to give the appearance of reporting factual information, then the standards for their accuracy should be as stringent as those for narrative journalism.  To that end, Giner and Cairo created a six-point checklist that was published on Harvard University’s Nieman Watchdog website (their tag line: “questions the press should ask”). Giner and Cairo reasoned further that graphic designers who produce infographics for news sources should be reclassified as visual journalists and be expected to design within the professional and ethical guidelines of this new designation.

Many graphic designers apparently agree with Giner and Cairo. As of May 2011, 106 of them, from 27 countries, have endorsed and signed onto the following statement of principles.

1. An infographic is, by definition, a visual display of facts and data.  Therefore, no infographic can be produced in the absence of reliable information.
2. No infographic should include elements that are not based on known facts and available information.
3. No infographic should be presented as being factual when it is fictional or based on unverified assumptions.
4. No infographic should be published without crediting its source(s) of information.
5. Information graphics professionals should refuse to produce any visual presentation that includes imaginary components designed to make it more “appealing” or “spectacular.”  Editors should refrain from asking for graphics that don’t stick to available evidence.
6. Infographics are neither illustrations nor “art.”  Infographics are visual journalism and must be governed by the same ethical standards that apply to other areas of the profession.

[Image credit: http://awesome.good.is/transparency/web/1105/pundits/flash.html ]

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