Budget audience reveals appetite for data

The provincial government unveiled its 2012-13 budget, complete with 5,300-word speech from Finance Minister Doug Horner and $1.97-billion deficit. The resulting flow of articles and columns topped the week’s traffic on edmontonjournal.com.

But the two most clicked-upon components of the March 7 budget coverage were also virtually impossible to fully reproduce in a newspaper format.

The first is easy enough to explain: a collection of infographics that compared and contrasted previous budget numbers, revenues, deficits and expenditures. These provided some historical context to the numbers found throughout the rest of the budget stories. (Not to mention how the coloured charts helped brighten up a subject that was, by design, very heavy on text and numbers.)

What’s more, the data was collected and made available in JavaScript object notation format by data journalism editor Lucas Timmons.

In English? The data used to create the infographics is downloadable in a simple format from the Journal’s website, perfect for any coder, hacker or designer wanting to make their own graphics.

These interactive data visualizations were enormously well-received online, collectively gathering more than 37,000 page views on March 7 alone.

To the average Internet dweller, information-packed images and graphs are practically a currency. It’s not surprising readers analyzing the budget would flock to them.

What is surprising is the popularity of a second piece of content that at first seems the polar opposite infographics: the aforementioned budget speech from Horner.

The speech was made available to the media early on budget day. As soon as the media embargo was lifted, shortly after 3 p.m., Timmons uploaded the full text to a Journal blog.

That afternoon, Journal readers spent a collective 33,740 minutes reading this speech. (That’s more than three straight weeks, all in less than nine hours.) The average reader spent five minutes and 11 seconds perusing the document; most articles don’t even break two minutes. At peak traffic, nearly 600 people were reading the document simultaneously. And it had more than 450 shares on Facebook and Twitter.

Brevity is often the watchword online, but as the enormous popularity of this post proved, it’s not the only approach. Journal subscribers are willing to read 5,300 words if they are interested in the subject.

Both of these elements were only part of the wave of coverage that contributed to the Journal’s biggest day of the week: more than 640,000 page views on website, mobile and blog platforms.

Ultimately, both the infographics and the posted speech took advantage of information that might ordinarily be considered background research. Perhaps used for cross-checking exact phrasing of a budget promise, or calculating a statistic over the course of a few years.

In the past, they would never be fully reproducible in the paper, given the limitations and constraints of print.

But the limitless space of the Internet allows the Journal to cater to an audience that asks to see both the raw data and the ingredients that are used to compose a finished story.

Judging by this week’s web traffic, that audience seems pretty insatiable.