Julia Wolfe, Reuters, will speak about bringing Datawrapper to a newsroom

We’re excited to announce that Julia Wolfe from Reuters will speak at our Unwrapped conference about “Bringing Datawrapper to your newsroom.” From a small newsroom getting the tool for the first time, to a global one with rolling onboarding around the world, she has plenty of experience helping journalists love the tool. 

Julia is the editor of the Americas graphics team at Reuters. Before that, she was the senior data visualization editor at FiveThirtyEight, where she retired the internal charting tool for Datawrapper. Previously, she’s worked at The Wall Street Journal, The Globe and Mail, and the Toronto Star.  

Time to ask her some questions:

Why/how did you start using Datawrapper?

I started using Datawrapper as a teacher at CUNY’s journalism school. I was awestruck by how easy the tool was for beginners, and how it really lowered the barrier to entry.  

What’s the Datawrapper chart you’re most proud of?

Honestly, I think it’s the first Datawrapper chart we published at FiveThirtyEight, appearing in the story We Built A WNBA Prediction Model For The 2021 Season. It was a lot of iterating with the very patient team at Datawrapper to get our styles just right, and it was so exciting to publish a chart that looked like our bespoke style while being completely built in the tool:

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

The more complex or strange the chart, the clearer the takeaway should be. You can get away with some wild stuff if there's a real "aha" moment for the reader. 

And what's your favorite Datawrapper feature?

Small multiple line charts! A new one that's a real game changer.  

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We're looking forward to Julia's talk at Unwrapped! Until then, you can find more about her on LinkedIn , X, and Bluesky. To sign up for Unwrapped and hear Julia and other great speakers, visit our conference website.