The infographic was among man’s earliest means of communication (think petroglyph), yet after millennia of evolution, this marriage of text and images is only now realizing its full potential as a journalistic tool. The proliferation of data, the ease of access to that data, and the emergence of new ways to carve it up and serve it to overburdened readers have turned yesterday’s static, often redundant graphics into animated, interactive, and dynamic efforts that are one of our most promising strategies for making complex stories digestible.

Much of the experimentation and development of infographic techniques is happening at universities. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Senseable City Laboratory, for example, created Real Time Rome, which uses cell-phone signals to chart the movement of the city’s population throughout the day. UCLA statistician Mark Hansen turned digital technology into art in the lobby of the new New York Times building, through a system that culls the most-used phrases in the news-media databases and flashes them on rows of screens.

Making a cool infographic is one thing. But making one that serves a journalistic purpose requires a pairing of the ability to visualize statistical information with a reporter’s sense of news judgment. Hannah Fairfield, a graphics editor at the Times, is one of this new breed of infographic journalists. Last spring, as the subprime story was blowing up, Fairfield created an infographic that illustrated and explained the concentrations of subprime mortgages and foreclosures around the country. She collected data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and other sources, and separated the numbers into two sets—one that showed subprime mortgages as a percentage of all mortgages in counties throughout the U.S., and another that showed subprime mortgage foreclosures as a percentage of all subprime mortgages in metropolitan areas. She then imported...

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