By Stephanie Zucarelli
Media Party X is all about designing communication strategies that enhance the creative presentation of information. This approach promotes the engaging distribution of relevant statistics that might otherwise be difficult to convey to a general audience. One way to achieve this was built by Ana Rivas, Visual Journalist at The Wall Street Journal, through a methodology she developed to innovate traditional print journalism.
Rivas holds a BA in Literature from the University of Buenos Aires, a Master’s in Journalism from Torcuato Di Tella University, and a Master’s in Journalism and Communication from Boston University. She began her career as a political reporter at La Nación, worked as an Editor at The Boston Phoenix, and became a digital news producer there through academic training via a Fulbright scholarship.
In 2007, the journalist continued her journey of transforming statistical comparison stories into visual narratives by producing infographics and visual analytics. As a Visual Journalist at The Wall Street Journal, she works across a wide range of topics—from international news to science and health coverage—always driven by creating alternative storytelling that successfully engages audiences.
Her early projects faced the limitations of early digital formats, where traditional media was still trying to emulate the feel of print on paper. As a pioneer in digital infographic management, she took on the challenge of building her first interactive presentation covering the 2008 U.S. Primary Elections. From this project onward, she began exploring intuitive presentation methods, using pop-up data graphics and giving the audience the ability to explore information interactively.
Today, Ana Rivas continues her exploration of alternative narratives when analyzing data, actively researching how to adapt different types of interactivity across digital media and mobile platforms.
One of the key things to consider as members of traditional media is to go where the readers are and analyze cross-platform reach. They might not open the main webpage where the article lives; instead, they might come from a Tweet, WhatsApp, or even TikTok. That’s why we must be very conscious of the platforms and formats where we publish our work, because it doesn’t end with just a nice chart,” she shared during the Infovis webinar: “Women and Data.”
To attend Ana Rivas’s keynote, sign up at MediaParty.info.
