[Rant] The Houston Chronicle is not a good newspaper

Very true. I think NYT is most guilty of this. Their text is too small and the layout does in many ways resemble an actual newspaper (which is probably why I really only read the Upshot).

I think that between the NYT, WaPo, and the Dallas Morning News, Dallas has maybe the cleanest layout.

 

Houston needs to be a data literate society. The consequences of not becoming such could be devastating for future prosperity.

I'll use the Sunnyside article mentioned in the OP as an example of what the HC could do to improve upon its reporting.

In the article, the HC decided to go with a column chart showing raw economic data, as seen here:



What strikes me first is that the y-axis scale is too large to properly view the data not associated with the "Population" and "Households" categories. Those two categories should be brought into their own separate panel, and the other categories (which are subcategoreis of "Population" and "Households") should receive their own y-axis scale.

"Population" could be changed to "Residents", and I also think that "Income below $25,000" could be changed to "Income above $25,000". That way negative declines correspond to a negative consequence, rather than the other way around. The same could be said of "Households with no car" and "Households below poverty".

So here is my take on what this data could look like:



I think this kind of chart (slope chart) captures the trends in the raw data in a more immediate fashion than a bar chart. However, this is still displaying the raw data. Using a percent change from 2010 to 2015 may be a better route, so here is another idea:



I could have brought the bottom chart's x-axis text up to the top - in order to avoid confusion as to whether incomes above $25,000 have decline by more than 50% since 2010. However, I still think this is an improvement over the visual in the article.

To keep this rant going, I noticed that the data table itself has an inappropriately named column - "Month" is definitely a headscratcher of a column name.



I hope I did JCDenton proud here today.