A roundup of the custom-designed, interactive news items that helped readers prepare for and understand a solar eclipse.

Here’s a reminder: In normal times, US-based publications normally don’t put much effort into visualizing foreign elections. Of course, with presidency of Donald Trump, a British vote to leave the European Union, and a presidential election in France without either of the mainstream political parties qualifying, we don’t live in normal times.

The White House budget proposal was released on March 16, and while the document itself was “skinnier” than in years past, news organizations’ efforts in parsing it were as robust as ever. Let’s take a look at how they found their way into and visually reported out the 60-page document.

Welcome! This is the first of an occasional series of posts I’ll be writing here about how news organizations around the world are going about the same things differently. The plan is to focus on the kind of work that doesn’t fit neatly into our CMSes, or that need custom design or code. I’ve been doing this work for seven years and remain to be fascinated by the varying approaches to the same subject matter. When news breaks, (or perhaps when news is planned 12 months ahead) how do we in media make the same things, differently?

“Someone could screw it up” is a terrible excuse not to cede control. We hear it often as a defense of why a newsroom doesn’t let its reporters make their own charts. It sounds reasonable enough, but when you consider the deluge of other types of content that come out of a newsroom getting swiftly edited to the highest standard, it becomes easy to see how the possibility of “screwing it up” is a terrible excuse. It’s time to think about and produce graphics in the same way that we do paragraphs: crafted by a reporter and vetted by an editor for both substance and style.