ABSTRACT
Infographics offer news media a means of establishing a more lasting impact on their audiences than text alone. Infographic design and development is the work of various specialisms, as reflected in the wide variety of job titles that now exist in the newsroom, including: interactive news developer, programmer/data specialist, software developer, data scientist, multimedia producer, and interactive producer. In the practitioner literature, definitions tend to separate infographics according to those that serve decorative and informational ends with the use of informational, or sign systems seen as the key distinction between 'illustrations' and 'graphics'. The chapter presents four discourses that may be detected amongst the guides and text books that shape debate about infographics: functionalist-idealist, pragmatist-realist, expressionist-aesthete, and didactic-persuasive. In 2014, the Guardian merged its visual journalism, data journalism, and audience development teams, inspired by examples from native digital start-ups, in order to enhance its digital output.
