A chat with Michelle Pera-McGhee of The Pudding

Michelle makes cool visual interactive journalism projects that are distinct within the industry.

Heads-up that you may get 2 of these this week as I want to publicize the panel I hosted last Thursday, in conjunction with The Nutgraf, featuring three student journalists talking about their election coverage. Be on the lookout!

Meanwhile, last week’s episode features Michelle Pera-McGhee of The Pudding, the first person we’ve interviewed with the job title journalist-engineer. Michelle is a data journalist who conveys her ideas into visual and immersive experiences on subjects such as crossword puzzle inclusivity, the use of beats in music, baseball lineup construction, and national anthem singing deviations. These are fun passion projects that don’t fit a basic journalism description.

We hope you’ll like this excerpt and that it will inspire you to check out both the podcast and The Pudding.

How do you come up with the story ideas you work on?

The Pudding does stories on any and every topic from sports to music to experiments to comedy routines or whatever. We really value people pursuing projects based on their personal interest and these projects often take months to create. So, it's really important and valuable for the author to be really passionate about the subject matter and the project and the question that it's trying to answer.

So, we try to just nurture and understand what is naturally getting us excited and what we're thinking about and what we're talking to our friends about or what we're hearing a lot about. I think that talking to friends about it is often a source of ideas that come about. Maybe your friends are debating something or it's something that created a conversation that sustained for 10 minutes.

It's okay, that could be something that's interesting there. We have a meeting every week that we call story time where. If people have ideas or just beginnings of ideas that maybe is just ‘oh, we talked, my friends and I talked about this. What do we think?’ Or I saw this cool link. What do you think?

Then the whole team kind of piles onto it and riffs on it a bit. ‘This sort of reminds me of this. This reminds me of this. What if it did this? What if it did that?’ And that's a cool first step for me. Taking a very small nugget of an idea and just expanding it and brainstorming around it.

(examples of some of The Pudding’s recent stories)

Those are sort of some of the places where those nuggets begin. We also get pitches from people. We have a form on our website where people can pitch us ideas and we review them regularly and we do a lot of projects with contributors who have said ‘I have an idea to do this. Maybe I need help with certain aspects,’ and we want to partner with those people and be involved in the creation as well.

So often we will do a big chunk of the work, or we'll work completely together on it, or we'll just edit or guide them depending on who they are. A lot of ideas come from that. There are only seven of us at The Pudding, so we need more sources of ideas.

Let’s talk about one story you did about crossword puzzles and inclusivity. How did it go from idea to finished product?

I pitched this idea to The Pudding, and they partnered with me on it, so this is before I worked at The Pudding full time. I was one of the people filling out the pitch form.

The initial idea was inspired by a couple articles that were talking about a recent push for more inclusivity in crossword puzzles …Everyone has a different set of common knowledge. Everybody knows who George Washington is, but maybe everyone should know who Ava DuVernay is. It’s hard to describe what that common knowledge should be.

We might as well open that up. It makes for a more interesting puzzle. It makes for learning for people who don't know about those people. And it makes people feel seen if someone who is really big in their world is referenced in the puzzle and that's something that they can get. So, this project just attempted to quantify that trend and see if that was what was happening here.

Are the puzzles really super white and male? How has that changed over time? What publications are doing better or worse on that? We looked at five big crossword publications, Wall Street Journal, LA Times, New York Times. Universal, and USA Today, and we analyzed thousands and thousands of crossword clues or answers that involved people and then looked at the gender and race and ethnicity of those people and looked at who is being referenced in the crossword puzzle.

And the results were that, yes, the puzzle is super white and super male, as you would probably expect, but then it did turn out that USA Today was, actually overrepresenting these underrepresented groups, and just completely different than all these other publications.

I talked to the editor of USA Today, whose name is Erik Agard, and bringing more representation into the puzzle is something that he is actively doing and cares about and has done some interesting and creative things with how he's constructed his team and how he's, making crossword puzzles that end up representing more experiences.

What are the design things that you're thinking about as you're doing these?

Yeah, I think we want our pieces to be quiet, I mean, there are some that are simpler, and that's fine. It doesn't always have to be over-the-top and really, immersive, and crazy, but I think we for them to feel beautiful and artful and have the design reflect the subject matter in a way that's kind of delightful. Oh, there's this pencil and annotations because we're talking about crossword puzzles and oh, the charts. These waffle charts on the piece look like crossword puzzles and they have that vibe to them.

So, I think every piece has its own vibe based on the subject matter and the data and how we want to represent it. But, I think we lean into letting the piece have these little details that reflect the story and little Easter eggs that people can find because these are just labors of love that are about topics that we care about, and we want people who also love these topics to read them and to be poring over every word and finding the Easter egg.

Some people will never notice some of the efforts we put in in terms of those design things, but other people, if they find it, it’s really fun.

Is there a story you’re particularly proud of that we didn’t initially mention?

Earlier this year with my coworker Jan Diehm, we did this project about the National Anthem and how it's sung by different artists. This one was so fun because it was about music, which I've done a string of projects about, music that I've really enjoyed. I think that's a subject area that is particularly fun for me. And again, working with audio was cool.

And here we did a lot of work with audio because we were trying to take the audio of someone's performance and then quantify how different they performed it from a very basic version of the Star-Spangled Banner. We had more than 150 different performances at sporting events or inaugurations or big things that were from celebrities and then we're able to kind of rank them. We gave them all this score we called the diva score that was how much they deviated from a standard performance of the anthem. So, the piece goes through the song chronologically and highlights different artists that have noteworthy, beautiful, or hilarious or cringy performances of the song Deviations are very delightful.

How do you view your purpose as a journalist

I see my purpose is somewhere around the idea of making complex topics more approachable and understandable and visceral through visuals and interactivity,

I think that's sort of similar to the purpose of a teacher who is trying to take complex topics and make people feel empowered by the knowledge that they can have of them and not intimidated by them, but instead trying to bring people into it in a way is relatable or that's interesting or that's delightful and then having them leave thinking ‘Oh, I understand that more than I thought.

‘And this thing that I thought was really daunting is now more approachable to me.’

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