As we approached the off-year primary election in the spring of 2014, the reporting staff at The World in Coos Bay, Oregon, began looking for interesting ways to cover the races. We had started experimenting with interactive graphics (I created a simple funding timeline to accompany a reporter’s story.) and we thought this tool would be useful to show our readers where campaign funds came from and where they went. I worked with a reporter to obtain the necessary data from the Oregon Secretary of State website and we used the publicly available Tableau Public software to make connections within the data. This tool allowed us to sort through more than 5,000 rows of financial data to present it in a condensed, easy-to-navigate format.
One candidate, who ended up losing the election after her opponent out-fundraised her 7-1, tweeted …
Eye-popping! MT @TheWorldLink #interactive graphic of SW #Oregon campaign sources & spending http://t.co/k4tkGeNMHo @hjesteve @dherbaker
— Susan Acree (@Acree4Assessor) May 17, 2014
This is a three-part graphics series. Please use the page navigation below.