(Part 3) Newsroom Transformation 101: Interview with Sam Joiner, FT Visual Stories and Investigations Editor

This is part three of a three-part series about the building blocks of newsroom transformation. In the first part, we looked at why ‘Bridge Roles’ are having a resurgence, and how they help unlock newsroom’s innovative thinking which in turn lifts the ability to grow revenue and subscriptions. In the second one, we heard from Hannah Sarney, former Head of Audience Engagement at the FT and, starting this year, FT Editorial Product Director, to understand in practice what a Bridge Role is and does.

In this third part, we are interviewing Sam Joiner. He is the FT’s Visual Stories and Investigations Editor, a multi-disciplined editorial team that is helping to push the boundaries of how a story can be told.

Thank you for having me. My career in visual journalism really took off when I started at the Times a decade ago. In my role as an interactive journalist (a visual and data journalist in today’s parlance!), I focused on how we could enhance stories online, working with reporters to analyse large or unwieldy datasets and then turn them into visualisations. In many respects, my job is not that dissimilar today.

By the time I left the Times, I was editor of the data and digital storytelling team. We had far more resources and agency by that point, coming up with our own ideas for visual explainers and regularly appearing on the front page with data-driven stories and investigations.

In the summer of 2022 I moved to the FT to build the visual stories team — an interdisciplinary group of journalists using computational tools and traditional reporting to produce explainers, investigations and deep dives in visual formats. Last October we added a visual investigations unit, formalising our work in that area and significantly bolstering our ability to set the agenda with original reporting.

While both investigations and stories utilise visual formats, they require a slightly different lens. Investigations tend to be more microscopic — we’re looking for the needle in the haystack — whereas our visual stories set out to contextualise and explain complex or underreported topics.

Take the recent attacks in the Red Sea. A visual story might show how Houthi militants have upended global trade, forcing ships to reroute to avoid the Suez Canal. A visual investigation might forensically analyse one incident and reveal something new about the tactics or weapons used.

The team is made up of three reporters, Alex Heal, Alison Killing and Lucy Rodgers, three graphic journalists, Peter Andringa, Dan Clark, and Sam Learner, and two designers, Irene de la Torre Arenas and Chris Campbell. Caroline Nevitt, Our Head of Design and UX, also works closely with the team.

Everyone has strong reporting skills and instincts and we have a fabulous array of computational, data and design skills.This mix enables us to take charge of the entire storytelling process. We build tools to find stories, design innovative ways to tell them and pick up the phone to sources too. The investigations team has added a wealth of specialist knowledge, contacts and experience.

We are also part of the wider visual and data team, which gives us access to an incredible array of skills. Some projects need technical illustrators, others require cartographers or graphic artists who can create 3D renders. Each story is different and we build project teams to reflect that.

While we have subject matter expertise in the team, we are primarily specialists in how to tell stories. That means we move between topics and work with a wide range of our beat reporters. We can’t be across everything and regularly checking in with specialists across the newsroom is key to our success.

Stories we take on usually transcend the daily news cycle so that we have time to get our teeth into them. That doesn’t always mean we need months, but if a story is likely to be overtaken by events in a few days it won’t be one for us. The range of topics we cover requires a lot of context switching, sometimes within the same day, but doing so ensures our work is both varied and relevant.

We also look for stories that underpin big breaking moments. When the Turkey earthquake happened last year, the immediate response from our graphics team focused on showing the speed, scale and impact. But we wanted to understand why so many buildings had collapsed. Thousands of people were crushed in modern apartments less than 20 years old — built under a rulebook that was supposed to leave them standing tall. Our visual investigation, published a month after the quake, highlighted one striking example.

Pushing the boundaries with new formats is a key part of our remit. We want to experiment and then feed insights to the product and tech team, whether that’s trialling new layouts for autoplaying videos or new storytelling formats like narrative accordions. But we also want readers’ experiences to be frictionless. It’s a success if comments focus on the visuals and reporting, rather than the way a story has been told.

Matt Vella, the FT’s magazine editor, has said cover stories need to be driven by a character. That could be an individual, a company or the reporter telling the story. As well as a smart way of describing what they do, this vision means everyone at the FT understands how a cover story should be structured. In many ways I think of the visual storytelling team as a magazine desk, but for us it’s the visuals driving the narrative.

To do this successfully, we need to be involved in a story as early as possible. Most desks commission a piece and then work out where data and visuals can add value. An earnings chart might contextualise; a map could situate readers geographically. We want to get into story mode with a reporter before a word has been written: if we start with a blank canvas, what is the most compelling way to tell this story?

We tend to both have a lot of things going on and a good idea of what we’ll publish over the next couple of months. It’s rare that we sit down and say “what's next?”. But if something big happens, like October 7, we’ll drop everything and react to the news.

Open source intelligence, satellite analysis, web scraping, machine learning and generative AI, custom tooling and traditional reporting can all play a role. It depends on the problem we’re trying to solve, the question we’re trying to answer or the event we’re trying to interrogate or debunk.

For some stories, like our investigation revealing the extent of Beijing’s suppression of Islamic culture, web scraping and custom tools allow us to assess whether local incidents reflect a national trend. For others, like our deep dive into the hidden cost of supermarket salmon, shipping data and on-the-ground reporting enable us to visualise and interrogate global supply chains. In our investigation exposing how Russian businessmen are profiting from the shambolic rebuilding of Mariupol, interviews with residents humanise the details discovered in corporate contracts.

It depends on the topic. The subscribers reading a story on quantum computing might be different to those reading a story on the Ukrainian counter-offensive. But across all of our projects, the most important metrics are page views and dwell time — that and positive sentiment in the comments.

Our stories naturally lend themselves to visually driven platforms like Instagram and TikTok, so we try to loop in the audience engagement team as early as possible. If you spend three months on a story and two days on promotion, you can’t be disappointed when it doesn’t take off. Our visual investigation on the attack on one kibbutz in Israel was repackaged brilliantly on Instagram, for example, and became one of the best performing reels published last year.