Behind the story idea: Sitters and Standers
How do you decide what projects to work on, when the commitment is so huge?
New post alert!
This week I published Sitters and Standers on the Pudding, with an accompanying video. Please read the story, share it with friends, and tell me what you think. These pieces are labors of love, and I enjoy hearing the conversation they spark among readers.
Also, I’ve made a big Bluesky list of data and visual journalists. If you belong on this list, let me know!
Where do story ideas come from?
Last weekend, I co-taught a data viz workshop at Columbia’s Brown Institute with Caitlyn Ralph. We led 30 students through the process of coming up with visual data stories, honing the concept, and then designing a one-chart data viz poster. But throughout the day, several students asked me: How do you decide which stories to work on?
This is a complicated question.
When I led the data and visuals team at Guardian US, this question constantly came up because data and visual work can be time intensive, but the team of journalists who work on these projects are usually quite small. My philosophy was: Say yes to the one-day projects, say no to the one-week projects, and make thoughtful decisions about which one-month projects we take on. I tried to make decisions based on whether the data and visual work would significantly advance the journalism.
As an individual journalist, working on my own stories, I have a slightly different approach. So I’ll write through my process and explain how Sitters and Standers came to be.
It starts with my super secret document of ideas
I keep a big document of ideas that I might want to tackle one day. What is the bar for what stories make it on this list? There is no bar. The list if full of bad ideas. But they tend to fall into a few categories:
Completely developed story ideas: These are concepts that are fully fleshed out. I know what the data is, what the story will look like, who I need to talk to, and what it will take to build it. But they’re usually sitting in the ideas document because I’m not very excited to work on them. The word that comes to mind for these ideas is “dutiful.”
Topics I’m curious about: These are topics that I want to dig into one day, just to see if there’s an important story there. For example, that was the origin of my story about the pessimistic evolution of sci-fi.
Offshoots of stories I’ve covered before: When you work in a newsroom, there are always stories that you think you’ll get to one day. But quite often, there’s not time or resources. So they end up on this list.
Cool datasets: Sometimes I find a dataset that would be fun to work with. So I stash it in this document. Usually these are datasets that measure something hidden in our mundane day-to-day lives.
Storytelling methods I want to try: For example, I want to make another game-based story in the near future. (I made this game at Vox. The site redesign ruined the experience, so play it here instead.) A lot of times these ideas come after experiences something super satisfying on the internet.
Personal experiences or memory I want to explore further: For years, I had “Grandma’s kimchi” on this list. It turned into this story.
One tiny portion of a potential story: I often read a phrase in a news story or hear something during a conversation that would make for a great data analysis and/or data viz. It’s like coming up with a great twist for a novel, but not knowing how the narrative arc will build up to that twist. So, until I know the larger story, I stash it here.
Random words I can’t decipher: I’m looking at this document now, and I’m not quite sure what some of the ideas mean. Anyone have any idea why I wrote “Donuts” in this ideas document?
How I parsed through this list in mainstream newsrooms
At places like the Guardian or Vox, the primary driver of what stories I worked on was: Is it newsworthy? The definition of newsworthiness varies quite a lot, but in most newsrooms the answer is: Does it further an existing story?
This probably came from my training as a beat reporter, since that’s pretty much the job. But for huge projects, I think this is a terrible way to start a story ideation process, which is one reason why big projects often fall flat.
At the Pudding, I’ve been able to explore ideas that aren’t traditionally “newsworthy.” Instead, I’ve been encouraged to look at topics that resonate with me—and, from there, the journalistic process has been about using data, research, and reporting to understand what that looks like on a larger scale.
The several ideas that coalesced into Sitters and Standers
I took several list items and combined them together for Sitters and Standers.
“Imaginary friend”
I spent my early childhood in the back of my parents’ dry-cleaning business. I played inside hanger boxes with my imaginary friend, a lawyer. But it’s weird to have a lawyer as an imaginary friend! So a few years ago, I put “imaginary friend” on my story idea list.
A week after I published my last story, I thought I wanted to pursue this idea. So I read a bunch of articles and academic research about why imaginary friends are who they are. Through that exploration, I realized my imaginary friend was a lawyer because my parents did physical labor for a living, and the idea that someone could sit at a desk in a suit and earn lots of money was so exotic.
I eventually put down this idea because there wasn’t great data. I may revisit it at some point. But it did lead to another idea.
“What we physically do for work”
I saw my parents doing physically demanding work as a kid. They also tried running a car stereo business and a vending machine business. But after those ventures, my dad went back to school and finished up his studies. He eventually got his PhD and became a well-respected engineer. So I had the unique opportunity to see a wide spectrum of work experiences: my parents dry-cleaning other people’s clothes; my parents lugging around Doritos boxes and refilling vending machines; and then my dad sitting in his own office, consulting on massive multinational construction projects.
That made me wonder: What is the full range of the physical requirements of jobs in America? I immediately thought of the Discovery Channel show, Dirty Jobs, but those were the extremes. I wanted to see the full spectrum.
“Occupational Requirements Survey”
Many years ago, I read about the federal government conducting something called the Occupational Requirements Survey. They planned to spend several years visiting tens of thousands of workplaces to ask about the physical requirements of work. Unfortunately when I first learned about this survey, the feds were still in the process of surveying workers. So I stuck it on my story idea list. To my delight, when I went back to it, they had released the data.
I spent a few days playing with this data, until I eventually did an analysis of workers who are required to stand at their job:
What I saw here was a “U” shape—lots of workers who are not required to stand, lots of workers who have to stand, and very few in between. I often say data stories start from one chart. For me, it was this one.
“American labor history”
During the pandemic, I worked on a Guardian story about the human cost of the meatpacking industry. As I dug into the history of meatpacking, factory work, and worker safety laws, I saw that the history of American labor is defined by the least privileged people doing the least desirable work. The core of this idea was to visualize every single worker in the history of America, in hopes of showing how many people did backbreaking work to build this country.
Thinking through research, reporting—and making things
Many of my stories started in one place and ended up in another. For example, my story on the loneliness epidemic was first pitched as “Happy Days”—as in, the idea was to chart out what the life of a happy person looks like. My story about childhood trauma started off as an idea about how college kids get so easily derailed.
Stories shift as your do more research and reporting. I think a big part of this is that you start off with a sharp thesis, but the research and reporting show how little you actually know about the topic so you have to build back up to the competency level that you thought you were at. These Dunning-Kruger charts capture the individual journey:
The chart below is a more accurate way to think about the Dunning-Kruger effect. (I don’t particularly like how rigid the term “objective IQ” is in this context. For my purposes, I’d replace IQ here with the term “knowledge.”)
When I reported on a handful of specific topics, I didn’t have to go through this journey every single time. But these days, I jump from topic to topic, so this journey is important. In fact, I think all of learning, regardless of how much of an expert you are in that subject area, is about going through this journey. Learning is about finding out the vastness of what you don’t know!
The editor in me thinks: How the hell would I manage a staff of people who can’t figure out what the hell they’re covering until they’ve already invested so much time into a project? After all, the time and resource shortage in 2024 newsrooms often means that many journalists no longer get to explore their curiosity. If you have an idea you want to explore, without a clear destination, it almost feels like you’re trying to steal away some time to figure out if there’s a story there before your editor finds out you’re not actively working on a story.
At the Pudding, I’ve been so grateful that I’m allowed to go through this process of learning and exploring. I’m allowed to take a resonant every-day experiences, learn a bunch about what that experience looks like from a macro scale, and find a story.
So the tl;dr of this entire post is:
I have a list of things I’m curious about.
I spend a bunch of time learning about it through research, data, and reporting.
A lot of times, I realize there isn’t a story there.
But that failure often points me in the direction of where there is a story.