The proof is in The Pudding
How Matt Daniels uses data to tell thought-provoking visual stories that spark cultural conversation
What happens when you mix creativity with data? You get The Pudding, a visual storytelling powerhouse that has been turning complex data-driven narratives into impactful and engaging visual stories for a decade.
We recently caught up with Matt Daniels, Founder and Visual Journalist at The Pudding, to uncover the secrets behind their approach. In our chat, Matt tells all about their unique creative process, how they strike a balance between fun and serious topics, and the daring philosophy that drives their bold experiments.
Elan: Matt, tell me about The Pudding. What is it, why does it exist, and how did it get started?
Matt: We’re a visual journalism publication, and we've been going for about eight years now. We primarily publish data-led projects, but I would say the best way to describe them is visually-led, because not all of them involve data.
We focus on stories that would struggle if they were a 2000-word essay. Or stories that are best depicted than described. So we’re doing a lot of charts and graphics, and every project starts from scratch.
We don’t really have a lot of guardrails on design. But that also means it’s a lot of fun when we end up publishing things.
Elan: I want to dive into your creative process in a bit, but first, what are some of the pieces you're most proud of? And why do you think they resonated in culture?
Matt: Yeah, there’s definitely a tension between projects that do well on the Internet and projects that I personally think are really good.
One of my favorite projects from last year was on loneliness, produced by my colleague Alvin Chang. He put together a really cool experience about what happened to people’s social communities during the pandemic.
I don’t think it went viral by any means. In fact, the project he just published went more viral than that one. But the loneliness project was really good. It picked a topic that had been written about a lot and brought it to life visually with a great emotional tone.
Those are the types of projects I’m most excited about—the ones that do something different and interesting, make you think, and also evoke an emotional response.
Elan: I love how your articles leverage data to spark an emotional reaction from the reader. What does that look like in the creation process? How do you think about that?
Matt: I’m more interested in the thinking side than the emotional side.
There are a lot of mediums that are really good for emotion, and video is definitely one of them. But I like what we do because our work makes you think, which can be hard to achieve with video sometimes.
Video requires so much of your attention that stopping to think is almost impractical. You kind of have to make it to the end and then reflect. During a movie, you’re so in it that all you can do is react. You’re not really sitting and thinking about a concept.
What I really like about our projects is they aren't synchronous. You can stop, think, go backward, and wrestle with the author’s argument. You can explore the data in a way that scratches a lot of thinking itches for people.
When our projects do have an emotional side, that’s great. From a process standpoint, I like pulling together a story that makes people think in a way they might not get from other mediums.
I focus on the main points I’m trying to communicate to the reader and the concepts I want them to react to or wrestle with. Those are the main things I’m thinking about when starting a project.
Elan: Yeah, that’s awesome. How do you do that in a world with such short attention spans? Today, you just have a few seconds to get somebody's attention.
Matt: Yeah, I don’t think we're trying to compete. We recognize it’s kind of like making a movie—you know what you’re getting into and the type of reader you're trying to persuade to sit with you.
With video, for example, you know you’re going to get them for about a minute before they stop watching. With a more data-led or visually-led project, you have to hook them a little faster.
It’s a classic journalism problem: don’t bury the lede. Your first paragraph needs to be super clarifying in terms of what the project is, why you should read it, and why the author wants you to spend 30 seconds of your day on it.
We really try to hammer that quickly. The luxury of not doing so exists in a lot of other mediums, including TikTok, where you have about 15-20 seconds before someone stops watching.
So we have to get to it really fast, which I think is true of most written journalism.
Elan: Not to get all Peter Thiel on you, but when it comes to storytelling, what are some things you believe that maybe few others do?
Matt: Hmm. There’s a quote from Randall Munroe, the XKCD creator, “Don’t overestimate the audience’s intelligence and underestimate their knowledge.”
Basically, it’s about realizing how smart your readers are. Make sure your projects assume they lack context and you'll need to bring them up to speed, but also assume they're intelligent.
A lot of people spoon-feed ideas. For example, when discussing complicated branding, you can assume your readers understand many concepts but might not know the lingo and semantics.
I think that’s a cool concept to realize. It’s also why XKCD is popular; Randall Munroe assumes his readers are smart and doesn't dumb down the content.
Elan: I love that. What are the ingredients that make for a good visual essay and how does that differ from a more traditional piece of journalism?
Matt: We're trying to find ideas or questions that can really be served with a visual presentation. For example, I’m working on a project I think you'll really enjoy: it’s about basketball courts. I have every basketball court in the country on a fully explorable map.
It’s one of those things where I don't know how you would do it without interactive visual media. That’s where my head is always at: what are the ideas and stories best served by this approach to storytelling?
There’s that component, and then the other is holding the reader’s attention. Why are you asking for their time? A lot of times we get pitches that aren’t clear about why someone should spend two minutes of their day on the topic.
Think about something like climate change or any current event. It’s important, but you need to explain why a specific aspect is worth focusing on. Having a narrow scope to the story you’re telling is really important. We aim to find good questions, good stories, and clear points—this is your stump speech. Why should people read or listen to this?
It's launching soon. This project maps all the basketball courts in America. This is a weird project that works really well visually. I don’t know what the story is yet, but I’m figuring that out. But It’s a fun thing, and I’m super excited for this.
Elan: How do you and your team figure out what to write about? There are all these potential stories and a small team working on developing them, so I'm curious what the process looks like.
Matt: Yeah, I mean, everyone on staff, which is about eight people, has the discretion to pick whatever they want to work on. They adhere to the high-level principles I mentioned earlier.
Sometimes, like with this basketball courts project, there isn’t a clear story, and I just kind of worked on it. There’s a lot of trust among the team to work on things the author is personally passionate about, as long as it roughly adheres to a rubric we’ve all agreed on.
We don’t write a 10,000-word treatise on climate change with no visual or data components. That’s unstated but understood. We also take a lot of pitches and decide on projects that fit our rubric: visually-led and telling a clear story.
Another big thing is novelty—it hasn’t been done before. We often do prior art research to ensure someone hasn’t already done the project. We try to find things that are truly unique.
I also like projects that add to the discourse, presenting new research or new analysis, not just regurgitating existing stuff. For instance, while someone might have done a project on categorizing love songs, a new approach to that categorization is what interests us.
So, beyond just finding a project that hasn't been done, we look for something conceptually new to the internet. I'm currently working on a project about the categorization of love songs, which involves new research and a novel approach.
That’s another big thing we look for: something new and not just a hot take everyone has been writing about.
Elan: It sounds like you have a lot of principles to help figure out what to focus on versus what not to focus on. Once you have an idea, can you walk me through how it makes its way through the creative process?
Matt: It's close to a magazine-type vibe. If you're on staff, you're kind of working on your own or with someone in a maker capacity. There isn't a traditional editor vetting your work for quality, which is typical in most organizations.
Also, no one is assigning work. There isn't an editor giving people stories, which is common in many publications. You’re picking your own projects, maybe working by yourself or with other people on the team.
If we’re working on a contributor project, which was pitched to us, then they're working on the project, and we are definitely editing it. They're not on our team, so we don't have the same level of trust we would with a colleague. We’re also filling in any gaps they have in production.
For example, if they feel confident as a writer and data analyzer but not as a designer, we'll find someone on our team or outside to fill that design gap. That often happens with contributor projects because it's rare for someone to be able to do everything.
Elan: Let’s double-click on the practice of not having an editor—what are the benefits of structuring your culture and team this way?
Matt: I'll speak to internal team dynamics because, externally, there isn't that level of trust, so it's hard to not have a hierarchy.
Internally, we benefit from each person being their own editor of what is good quality. In a typical hierarchy, you have a tree of decision-making, with someone at the top deciding what is good enough to publish, go live, or be shipped. The highest-paid person is usually making these decisions.
Because we don't have that, and we trust everyone to make their own decisions. A lot of work that would otherwise be shut down in a typical hierarchy gets published. I believe the highest person in charge sometimes has poor or misguided taste, and they are often too conservative on what is quality work, shutting down too many ideas.
On the other hand, because everyone is doing what they want, some stuff might not meet a generally-accepted quality bar, but we agree to live with that. We accept the losses from having a low filter because of the wins that come from giving authors freedom.
Elan: So interesting. How do you think about distribution?
Matt: Yeah, I mean, I've been doing this long enough—almost 10 years—that I'm kind of over the virality thing. If we were running a subscription business that relied on ads, we would probably think about this more, but it’s really just not top of mind for me.
Some people on the team do care and they promote projects more, but I think we all agree that we’re going to do good work and put it on the internet. We’ll add it to the newsletter and on Instagram, but we always think we should probably do more, but we don't.
If our business relied on virality and traffic, we would probably put more thought into promotion. For example, MSCHF, which I’m sure you think and talk about a lot, puts a lot of thought into promotion. They have big influencer campaigns and lots of people thinking about how to make things go viral.
Because our business model isn't tied to people liking it, there's not a lot of reason to put that much thought into promotion.
Elan: How do you think about success when publishing a piece? If you have the traditional KPIs of number of page views or how far it spreads, what does success look like for The Pudding?
Matt: Great question. It’s definitely not hard metrics for us. Everyone has their own barometer of success, just as they have their own barometer of quality.
For example, the loneliness project I mentioned earlier—I thought it was really successful because it engaged readers both critically and emotionally. Did it go viral? No. Have we had other projects that went viral? Yes, but they weren't as successful in my opinion.
There’s no way to measure success quantitatively for me because there's no KPI for “did this make me feel and think at the same time?” How do you measure that?
Other people might measure success differently and care about views and pickups. But I've been doing this long enough that I don't follow that anymore. I get more meaning from projects that feel really good when I publish them versus those that go viral.
We all know the viral equation, but it’s not fun to play that game. It’s more fun to do projects you’re really excited about. For example, I'm working on a project with a contributor about sleep training your baby. Could it go viral? Maybe. If one parent reads it and finds it helpful, that's success enough for me.
There’s a great podcast episode with Adam Moss and Ezra Klein. Adam Moss, the storied editor of New York Magazine, was praised by Ezra Klein as one of the best editors. Klein said he liked how New York Magazine articles felt like they were written for someone, not just part of the news cycle or a hot take.
When I do a project, like mapping basketball courts, it's because I think people will nerd out about it. It’s written for people, not for algorithms. I think that’s something special and rare on the internet today. TikTok content often feels like it’s made for the platform, not for people.
So, our success isn't predicated on algorithms. It’s about creating something that feels made for someone. That’s the headspace we're in.
Elan: I love how much you all enjoy experimenting. You’ve mentioned your process feels more like workshopping a movie script rather than critiquing a bar chart. How does experimentation feed the culture?
Matt: Yeah, we’re definitely more focused on the story.
Generally, it's about creating a clear experience that takes the reader through a journey, keeps their attention, and gets them to think and maybe feel something. That aligns more with the movie analogy—spending more time on the script than filming.
People often assume we spend months coding, which is true, but we spend a lot of time getting the story right before we start coding. This is especially true with contributor projects. We spend much longer on the data, the story, and the points we’re trying to make before kicking off production.
In fact, we have entire freelance contracts dedicated to just the story before we even get into production.
On the experimentation side, we encourage working on whatever you want, even if it’s not a guaranteed success in traditional terms. For instance, the basketball courts project has no clear story and involves a lot of technical risk. Most of my time has been spent just getting it to work and be feasible.
There’s a lot of trust involved, knowing that it might fail at any step. I could have pulled all the basketball courts, put them on a screen, and it could have crashed every computer, forcing me to abandon the idea.
There’s latitude to keep experimenting until it’s no longer feasible. That’s a big part of our culture.
Elan: I would love to talk more about this philosophy of empowering risk-taking. A lot of people want to be bolder and take more risks, but something often gets in the way. How do you overcome that?
Matt: Yeah, I mean, we don’t take risks with the money-making stuff.
We take risks on The Pudding and work with clients on projects that are more predictable. These are not necessarily easy, but they pay well, we know the client, and we know what we’re getting into. We avoid clients who might not pay, choosing to work with companies we trust.
We effectively choose our battles on risk-taking.
If you’ve ever read the book Creativity Inc, it talks about “feeding the beast” and “nurturing the babies” It’s about maintaining a balance. You have your creative projects, your “babies,” but you also have to feed the beast, which is making payroll or churning out content.
Pixar did this well. They kept making sequels to “Toy Story,” which fed the beast, while taking big risks on unconventional movies like “Up.” Some might fail, but others will be hugely successful.
We try to think similarly. What is our “feeding the beast” and what are our “babies?”
Elan: To wrap things up, how do you balance being this fun, culture-driven, bubbly data-driven company online while using highly technical data to shed light on serious topics? There's a dichotomy there, right? Being a fun brand online and also bringing really accurate metrics to the deep stories you're telling.
Matt: Yeah, it’s really hard. Our team is working on a very serious project about abuse in juvenile detention centers. It was hard to design around this with our existing brand.
On the other hand, many data company brands have a sterile, white-collar feel because they want to seem serious and trustworthy. We’re definitely not that, but this can be problematic when we tackle serious topics.
It's a tough line to draw. We deal with the consequences of having a quirky brand that sometimes doesn’t fit well with difficult subjects.
We’re also not really a destination brand. When people read our projects, they don’t always recognize The Pudding as the brand behind the work, so, we’re less worried about maintaining a strict brand reputation that people will recognize.
But what does trust even mean in journalism these days…
About Matt Daniels
Matt is visual journalist based in Detroit, reporting on stories that struggle to be told with prose alone. To advance the craft of visual storytelling, he founded two organizations, The Pudding, a visual storytelling publication, and Polygraph, a data visualization studio.
If you’d like to connect with Matt, DM on Twitter or LinkedIn.