The infography in the press

Since the press was born in the eighteenth century, many media had already included some maps in their daily editions, mostly made with little knowledge of cartography, but they served as geographically oriented readers, during a time when few knew what a map was. At the beginning, infography was a derivation of what Hodgson (1977) called "Pictorial Journalism" that was only the use of pictures enclosed to information.

This concept was used until the twentieth century: the infographics would be considered as drawings or illustrations that adorn the information and their creators as artists. This stigma has been the main problem why, even today, many infographists are considered as sketchers instead of communicators or visual journalists.

Despite all the progress and changes that has had the use of infographics in the media in recent years, there still are some newspapers that continue using infographics as a way to illustrate and plug holes in their pages.  And do not believe that these newspapers are in the third world or lost in some Pacific island, they are very close to us.


The emergence of modern infography

The big leap of infography in editorials was thanks to one of the most innovative media: “USA Today”, the first American newspaper of national circulation, inspired by the eighties readers, that already had been informed by television, which increasingly had less time to browse quietly a newspaper and the one who already had saw and understood his reality in colors and not in black and white.

The “USA Today” marked the difference because of its informative architecture with short and concise texts, quick reading, and by provides inputs to information: highlights, nested texts, support and many others that nowadays are frequently found in the current press. The way to direct their body texts or notebooks, well defined by a specific color and printed independently, was also very important.

But what revolutionized and captivated the reader was the mime that was delivered to the visual information.  Great expressive photographs that were telling stories and above all transmitting emotions... daily infographics and in each body!

The famous statistical charts, that used to be published daily on the front page of the newspapers and on the cover of every one of his notebooks, called Snapshots, were used in an intelligent way to compare, show differences and give an opportunity to the reader to draw his own conclusions. The weather page, using color as a language to report temperatures, revolutioned and gave more importance to weather data in newspapers.

The Gulf War in 1990

The milestone of the Gulf War, the first war live broadcasted to the whole world (CNN), unleashed a barrage of graphics in a peculiar battle in which there weren't journalists and the few that were covering from the firing line were subordinate to control and censorship of the U.S. military.

During the daily confrontation, “El Sol” published every day a double full color page (an extra effort imposed by publishers without much reason, because reports did not reveal much).  It was a period of great experimentation that allowed the development of infography all over the world, especially in Spain that after the war suffered another major world-class event.

The Barcelona Olympic Games and Seville Universal Expo boosted quality infographics and turned Spain into a world reference in this specialty in just two years, a fact that still holds.  However the trend is to increase the total number of graphics, but shrink them.


Today's infography

The current trend in infography is more analytic than illustrative. We are looking for infographics that not only have a significant visual impact but also transmit and compare information trough their graphics and outlines, and data that allow the reader to navigate in the graph. The visual summary and analysis of information are the bases of these graphics, less artistic but richer in content and data.

Why infographics catch the reader?