Just found out that Oil Change’s follow the oilmoney tool got a little blurb in an Italian fashion/women’s magazine:
“D” la Repubblica delle Donne, March 8, page 52
Yup, that’s us in the upper left — if you can draw your eyes away from that purse. The juxtaposition brings up an interesting point. One of our goals was to try to put campaign funding data into more visually interesting and accessible form, try to catch people’s eye and interest so they will click in and learn something. Yet despite many months of work, what we produced looks clunky and amateurish next to a high-production fashion ad.
Perhaps this is OK — it would be pretty inappropriate to be using images of sexy women to sell campaign finance reform. But it does make me wonder if infographics really have any potential to compete for people’s media attention. Maybe we just need better designers.
In a more content-related direction, the site now has VoteTracker feature for showing how Congress-people voted on specific oil- and climate-related bills.