theeconomist

The New York Times and Graphical Maturity

2006-08-06
In Edward Tufte’s dry-sounding but classic book on data presentation, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (which is actually very readable), he draws up a table of the ‘Graphical Sophistication’ of 15 international news publications (see page 83). Der Spiegel and The Economist do well, as do two Japanese papers, Asahi and Akahata. The New York Times comes about half-way down the list. I was reminded of this earlier when I saw this graphic in the NYT, which accompanies a story on the decline of marriage amongst middle-aged men.