What journalists need from a data visualization tool
Speed, honesty and mobile. In that order. A chart that takes a day is a chart that misses the news cycle. A chart with a truncated axis is a correction waiting to happen. A chart that doesn’t work on a phone is a chart most of your audience never sees.
Datastripes starts from those three. Charts render in the time it takes to pick them. Axes start at zero unless you decide otherwise, and readers can always see the raw table. Every layout is designed on a small screen first and then allowed to grow.
Scrollytelling without a developer
Scrollytelling is the format readers love and newsrooms rarely ship, because it usually means custom code. Here it’s a view, not a project. Write your paragraphs, place your charts between them, and the story mode handles the scrolling, the transitions and the mobile layout.
Live charts for elections, budgets and breaking news
Link a Google Sheet and the published charts follow it. Your colleague updates the numbers on election night, the embed in the live blog updates for every reader. No re-export, no re-upload, no “please refresh the page”.
A Datawrapper and Flourish alternative that starts earlier
Great chart makers exist, and many journalists love them. The difference is where the work begins. Those tools expect a clean, finished table. Datastripes expects the messy export from the ministry website, and helps you clean it, explore it and find the angle before you ever pick a chart. Then it gives you both a story and a dashboard from the same data.
