Zeit Online

2022 Shortlist

Country/area: Germany

Organisation: Zeit Online

Organisation size: Big

Cover letter:

Which mask should I wear? Have I contracted the coronavirus? Where are the infection numbers highest? In the year when the whole world was looking at something you can’t see, visualization is everything.

When the number of cases rises rapidly in the spring, it quickly becomes clear that it’s not just the absolute number of cases that’s important. It is the development that is crucial – and at the same time difficult to understand. Exponential growth, doubling times, the reproduction number R: How can we present all this as simply as possible for our readers?

The knowledge department immediately joined forces with the interactive and data departments and has been working closely together ever since. Not only are the known Sars-Cov-2 infections researched directly in the counties, but also complex scientific relationships are visualized as simply as possible. With graphics, maps, animations, interactive calculators or illustrations, the team tries to prepare all information in a way that is understandable for their readers.

Description of portfolio:

With the onset of the pandemic, our focus shifted – suddenly all editors, programmers, data journalists and designers were working on one topic and on how to best shape the coverage of a global emergency. Science journalism and the visualization of it faced a new challenge that had to be tackled together. ZEIT ONLINE pooled all its capacities for this purpose and accompanied the developments of the pandemic for a year in graphics, maps and illustrations.

The evaluation of complex data sets, their processing, presentation and explanation are among the important tasks in the global exceptional situation. Science and data journalists, as well as visualization experts, have a crucial role to play here, because they communicate the knowledge of researchers to society. They provide orientation in a situation that is unprecedented – and changes almost daily. ZEIT ONLINE’s Corona reporting is an example of exactly what this can look like: always up-to-date, always comprehensible, always close to what moves a society, always in the best possible form of presentation.

The team: Paul Blickle, Fabian Dinklage, Annick Ehmann, Christian Endt, Elena Erdmann, Carla Grefe-Huge, Dagny Luedemann, Maria Mast, David Schach, Corinna Schoeps, Florian Schumann, Jakob Simmank, Julian Stahnke, Sven Stockrahm, Julius Troeger, Sascha Venohr, Claudia Valentin, Claudia Wuestenhagen