How The Hindu Data Team learnt to make graphics-driven videos

(This article forms a part of the Data Point newsletter curated by The Hindu’s Data team. To get the newsletter in your inbox, subscribe here.)

While print journalism has evolved significantly in recent years to include a variety of new offerings beyond traditional news and opinion, such as data journalism and explanatory journalism, an overarching concern that afflicts the minds of print journalists is whether their clientele – readers – prefer to get their news fix from videos. 

This is more or less true with a lot of youth, especially those in or barely out of their teens. The ubiquitousness and accessibilty of videos on the Internet have allowed for an almost addictive patronisation of video journalism. With services at their beck, call and literally their fingertips on smartphones, younger news consumers seem to prefer video mediums more and in a way treat text as an anachronism. 

This makes it imperative for print journalists to adapt to the environment and enhance their offerings via video. 

We, in The Hindu Data Team aren’t new to videos. We have been producing “The Hindu Data Point” videos to supplement our print and digital “Data Point” offering – which features a detailed look at subjects using data and expertise. But we always wanted to do more with the medium – how can we show interactive graphs on video while analysing findings and explaining them? We had to do these without using expensive graphics editing software used by television channels. We had to find ways of showing the graphics in an intelligible and visually elegant manner on the screen that is appreciated by those viewing the content on mobile phones, a smart TV, or a tablet. 

This was a bit of a challenge for us. Merely taking on interactive graphics and adding a voice-over was an easy solution in terms of presentation, but it was also edit-intensive – a task that increases work hours for the print journalist. Depending upon the digital team to do that is also not optimal, as they too have their hands chock full of editing work.

Therefore, the optimal solution was to use interactive graphics on a smart TV and have an anchor explain the trends on the graphs and come up with conclusions. But this wasn’t entirely easy – interactive graphics for videos are provided by proprietary software that doesn’t come in cheap. We had to find out open-source and innovative alternatives.

We zeroed in on D3.js – the “magical” data visualisation library that renders graphics on web browsers and can be used for a web application. The trouble is using a javascript library as a relative non-coder (journalists aren’t typically trained to code, after all) isn’t easy. There is a steep learning curve that has to be mastered regularly by writing frequent code to effectively produce visualisations using javascript libraries.

But something that happened in the last year has made this process much easier for the non-coding journalist. Gen AI provides ample means to create code through prompts based on knowledge of functionality and a little bit of algorithmic thinking. ChatGPT’s 4.0 model, Google’s Gemini, DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen – we used a bit of all these different LLMs to narrow down ways to write efficient code. Be it in javascript, in plain HTML, adding style sheets or using Python programming – it is much easier to do these tasks with natural language prompting than learning these languages and functionalities from scratch.

For example, it took merely 3 hours to write the code for the entire visualisation that was presented in the video, “Why are southern States resisting Hindi more than others”  published in “The Hindu Data Point” series on thehindu.com and YouTube. 

To read the story, click here.

We wrote a simple web application with visualisations based on Census Data and ensured that they were rendered on a dark screen – suitable for being shown on a smart TV and being recorded on video. We utilised the services of open source software such as “OBS” (Open Broadcaster Software) and presentation software such as Canva and we could approximate the work of premier (but costly) software that drove graphics for television journalism to produce the video. 

Voila, we could crack the puzzle of how to present interactive graphics in video form.

We intend to do more such presentations, better their production, and try out different ways to do such video stories live (through streaming). Keep watching the space. 

Here are some important News in Numbers from last week:

US trade deficit in January

$131.4 billion

The US trade deficit surged to a new record in January, government data showed Thursday, as imports spiked while tariff worries flared in the month of President Donald Trump’s inauguration. The overall trade gap of the world’s biggest economy ballooned 34 percent to $131.4 billion, on the back of a 10 percent jump in imports for the month, said the Commerce Department.

Number of refunds made for faulty toll collection on NH in 2024

12.55 lakhs

The government on Thursday said 12.55 lakh refunds were made in 2024 for faulty toll collections on National Highways. In a written reply to the Lok Sabha, Union Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari said penalties of more than Rs 2 crore have been levied so far on the user fee collecting agencies for incorrect user fee deduction cases.

Share of employees experiencing burnout due to poor work-life balance: Survey

52%

The survey, which was conducted by the New York-based business process management player Vertex Group, gathered insights from over 1,500 working individuals across five states: Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Punjab, and Andhra Pradesh. It also revealed that over 23% of employees work beyond the regular working hours.

J&K’s infant mortality rate

16.3

This marks a drop of 16.1 points, according to the Economic Survey Report for 2024-25 tabled by the Jammu and Kashmir government in the Assembly. The neonatal mortality rate (NMR) has reached single digit at 9.8 per 1,000 live births in Jammu and Kashmir, recording a 13.3-point decrease, while the sex ratio at birth has recorded significant improvement from 923 to 976, official data showed. Jammu and Kashmir has moved forward from the category of ‘performers’ to ‘front-runners’, as per the SDG India Index 2023-24 released by the NITI Aayog, with the score of the health sector increasing from 70 to 78.