The claim made by this article is that the daily newspaper circulation is falling in the West (in countries like USA, Europe etc) and rising in the East (in countries like India, China etc).
A few statements from the article – “Since 2008 circulation in America has fallen by 15% to 41M while advertising revenue has plummeted by 42%, accounting for three-quarters of the global decline in advertising revenue in the same period.”
“Looking further east, though, things look brighter. Circulation in Asia has risen by 10%, offsetting much of the decline elsewhere. With 114.5M daily newspapers, China has surpassed India to become the world’s biggest newspaper market.”
Audience – This chart and the article were published on The Economist whose readership includes highly educated people many of whom are influential executives and policy-makers.
Measures –
1. Percent change in newspaper circulation
2. Daily newspaper circulation per 1,000 population
Lets break down the visual –
Color – The chart uses stacks of newspapers to denote the percentage change. Usually unnecessary beautifiers (like 3D cues) do little if not nothing to convey the message and this chart is no different. The only save in this case is the choice of colors for the negative and positive changes in percentage.
Chart Icons – The author has taken care to keep the number of papers on the stacks reasonably proportionate to the percentage change they represent. Numbers are rounded either up or down, so a 5.3% change becomes 5 newspapers and a 0.5% change becomes one newspaper on the stack.
Layout – The structure and layout is simple and clean. The negative and positive directions (of change) are clear and immediately apparent to the viewer.
Unfortunately the most important part of the chart, the numbers, are way off and the chart is found to be misleading upon close examination.
Problems – At first glance, it seems as though the numbers in the grey boxes (Daily news paper circulation per 1000 population) are denoted by the height of the corresponding newspapers stack. But the heights are related to the colored numbers directly on the stacks. This is confusing and the author could have left out the grey numbers since they don’t contribute to the message of the visualization.
Lets look at the second claim stated above – “Looking further east, though, things look brighter. Circulation in Asia has risen by 10%, offsetting much of the decline elsewhere. With 114.5M daily newspapers, China has surpassed India to become the world’s biggest newspaper market.”
The measures in the chart;
China – 106 daily newspaper circulation per 1000 population
33.2% increase
India – 139 daily newspaper circulation per 1000 population
7.8% increase
This information, without actual population numbers of those countries, is not reliable. Lets look at the numbers and see the actual results for four countries on the positive side of the scale on the chart.
| 2012 Population | Newspaper circ./day/1000 | Percent change | Newspapers in circulation/day | |
| China | 1350700000 | 106 | 33.2 | 143174200 |
| India | 1263600000 | 139 | 7.8 | 175640400 |
| Lux. | 530,946 | 711 | 19.8 | 377502.606 |
| HK | 715460 | 609 | 5.3 | 435715.14 |
Lets compare China vs India and Hong Kong vs Luxembourg.
The charts above show that the article had made a wrong claim that China had overtaken India in the newspaper market. In addition, Hong Kong with a less percent change and less newspaper circulation/day/1000 actually has more newspapers in circulation than Luxembourg in contrary to what the article and chart depict.
Reading through the comments for this article I was intrigued to find that not many people had found out the chart’s deceptiveness. This just goes to show how easy it is to manipulate visual depiction and spin a seemingly plausible story in a direction that best serves ones interest.
References –
Article – http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/06/daily-chart-1
The population data was taken from the world bank – https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=sp_pop_totl&idim=country:CHN:IND&hl=en&dl=en#!ctype=l&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=h&met_y=sp_pop_totl&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=region&idim=country:CHN:IND:HKG:LUX&ifdim=region&tstart=1210575600000&tend=1336806000000&hl=en_US&dl=en&ind=false