Who goes to work thinking how to put himself out of work? The Wall Street Journal’s graphics editor Jovi Juan says that’s what gets him up every morning. Juan who oversees the graphics design team of the Wall Street Journal’s online edition says: “We are spending more time designing simple software for reporters to do graphics themselves instead of having us do it for them,” so that his team can be freed up to start build the next big thing: data aggregation.
But after three years on the job, Juan is nowhere closer to the goal.
The problem is not the technology. Over the years, the team has built an photo editor software called “cropper”, a simple gadget that lets reporters who want to post photos with their online posts crop the photos to a standardized size and pixel for the WSJ.com. Another software Chart Builder was created for reporters to build flash. “We've made it a lot easier to use, but a number of reporters do not want to learn it.”
He said it is the toughest part of moving forward: the old mindset. But majority of the reporting team would eventually have to move on. And only then can Jovi's 8-person team start to aggregate Dow Jones data and make it sharable.
Eventually, everyone will be able to access to the data and visualize it. The idea is to build WSJ's own Many Eye program, an online data visualization tool.
Two or three years down the road, there is a distinctive possibility to get paid through WSJ's data site, Juan says.
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