The Why Axis

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Why I left the Washington Post
thewhyaxis.substack.com

Why I left the Washington Post

Let's make data fun again

Christopher Ingraham
Jun 24, 2021
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Winston, a Very Good Boy, takes in northwest Minnesota’s Pembina Trail this summer

My last day as a Washington Post reporter was June 1. It’s a place I still love and I had seven great years there — most of them writing for Wonkblog, the Post’s policy/data/chart blog, which shuttered in 2018. But by 2021, having spent the past year hunkered down at home, trying to help manage three unruly kids while fretting over the dual existential threats of the pandemic and an attempted authoritarian takeover of the government, I was exhausted. It was time for a change.

I wanted to get back to my roots, to doing the kind of stuff the Post had hired me for in the first place — daily, visual explorations of unusual data that helps you look at the world in a different light. One thing that about data that’s often overlooked, but which Wonkblog captured very well: data can be fun! While I was there I had a mandate to quantify interesting and offbeat things like the amount of frosting on leading shredded wheat brands, or the most calorie-efficient way to get hammered, or the ugliest places in the U.S., or the shittiest celebrity pitches at major league baseball games.

Twitter avatar for @_cingrahamChristopher Ingraham @_cingraham
An analysis of frosting coverage on Kellogg's Frosted Mini-Wheats and two generic competitors.
washingtonpost.com/business/2018/…
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August 17th 2018

72 Retweets317 Likes

Of course, you can do more serious stuff with data, too — dig up policy solutions for certain social problems, or indicate who to blame for certain social ills, or suggest, say, that one of the two major American political parties is on the fast track to authoritarian fascism.

Twitter avatar for @_cingrahamChristopher Ingraham @_cingraham
“If Trump wins this election in November, democracy is gone,” the founder of one of the projects told me. “It’s really time to wake up before it’s too late.”
washingtonpost.com/business/2020/…
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September 18th 2020

418 Retweets799 Likes

One thing those two types of data — the fun stuff and the serious stuff — have in common: they don’t really fit nicely into a traditional journalism model. For a while, at the Post, they had a home in Wonkblog. But without that freewheeling, bloggy context it can be hard to do that kind of work in a newsroom. The fun stuff tends to be as far from the daily news cycle as you can get, and the serious stuff can be a challenge to do well due to the longstanding view-from-nowhere, ‘both sides’ biases at work in traditional news coverage.

That’s why I came here, to Substack: because fitting my brain into the context of mainstream journalism increasingly felt like a square peg/round hole problem.

Twitter avatar for @_cingrahamChristopher Ingraham @_cingraham
In October 1911 Roald Amundsen set out for the South Pole with four other men and 52 sled dogs. All five men returned. Only 11 of the dogs did. This is their story in visual form.
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December 7th 2019

70 Retweets170 Likes

Substance aside, one of the things I miss about the heyday of the newsblog era is the ability to talk and think out loud, to explore a topic knowing that I won’t get all the answers, to have the freedom to be wrong about something in public and change my mind about it. I hope to recapture some of that here.

I don’t want to have to hide from my readers how I think about a topic, for fear that some idiot online is going to twist it into a narrative of Bias At The Post (frankly, I’m sure my former editors are relieved to be free of this burden too). I feel like I owe it to you guys to be up front and honest about where I’m coming from, even in cases where the place I’m coming from turns out to be “gee I wonder why Ryder hardly ever calls on Zuma in Paw Patrol.”

Twitter avatar for @_cingrahamChristopher Ingraham @_cingraham
Something about Paw Patrol was bothering the heck out of me and as it turns out there's an obsessively-maintained Wiki, so I crunched some numbers and, well,
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August 13th 2019

652 Retweets3,035 Likes

So that’s what I’m trying to anchor this newsletter in: honesty, curiosity, and the perspective of a lifelong generalist who still clings to the corny belief that good data can help us understand the world around us. I hope most of what I do here will be fun. I hope some of it will alarm you. And I hope all of it will help you learn something unexpected.

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Notan E. Moprog
Apr 17

Oh look, another absolutely worthless Democrat Party Media Arm's stinky little pinky :) You failed even at being a WaPo churnalist lmao

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Teri Koreny
Jun 25, 2021

This is great!! Can’t wait!!

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