Jon McClure & Ben Welsh, Reuters, will speak about automating hundreds of charts each week

We’re excited to announce that Jon McClure and Ben Welsh from Reuters will speak at our Unwrapped conference about “Bare Facts First – how the reporters, editors and computer programmers at Reuters use Datawrapper to create, automate and disseminate hundreds of charts each week.”

Jon McClure is the EMEA editor for graphics at Reuters in London. He’s also the minder of Reuter’s custom-built pipelines that publish hundreds of Datawrapper charts every week to media clients around the world and to the global readership of Reuters dotcom. He’d rather be bagging a peak somewhere outside the city, but for a day job, it’s not bad work.

Ben Welsh is an Iowan living in New York City. At Reuters he led the creation of a new software system for automating charts via the Datawrapper API. In a previous job at the Los Angeles Times, he partnered with Datawrapper to completely overhaul how the newspaper produces graphics for print and the web.

Time to ask them some questions:

Jon, Ben, how do you use Datawrapper at Reuters?

Jon: On our graphics team, Datawrapper may not always be the tool that produces our most ambitious published work, but chances are it is the first tool we touched along the way. It’s an invaluable prototyping platform in our reporting process, helping us test out initial ideas and explore data. But when the news gets hot, Datawrapper — especially its fabulous and ever expanding mapping capabilities — is the break-glass option to get vital information to our readers and clients at the speed of our reporting.

How has it been integrating Datawrapper into your organization’s workflow?

Jon: What’s been most exciting is how Datawrapper has opened up avenues to evangelize graphics and data-first journalism across our newsroom. Having a tool with an easy user interface that we can collaborate on with reporters and editors has given us uncountable opportunities to spread The Knowledge™ and has fundamentally changed the idea of what any journalist’s core skills are, regardless of what they’re reporting on.

What’s your guiding principle when working on data visualizations?

Ben: Every chart should tell a story. Even if that story is as stoopid simple as “number go up.” 

What’s your favorite Datawrapper feature?

Ben: Currently my favorite feature is the Datawrapper API, which is at the heart of the automation framework we’ll reveal for the first time at your conference. Once you learn how to use it, almost anything you can achieve with a your mouse and the browser can be automated your code and the API.

---

We’re looking forward to Jon and Ben’s talk at Unwrapped! Until then, you can find Jon on X, LinkedIn, and see his work on his Reuters page. To learn more about Ben, visit his website, X, or LinkedIn account.

To sign up for Unwrapped and hear Jon, Ben, and other great speakers, visit our conference website.