Laid-off journalist finds niche in data visualization
Getting laid off is not always a bad thing for a journalist. In the case of Manuel Benito Ingelmo, it created an opportunity for him to develop something he had been thinking about for a long time. Manuel Benito Ingelmo. Photo by Villanueva.edu He was a business journalist in Salamanca, Spain, with an interest in statistics and data visualization . He felt that print newspapers were definitely on the way out, he told me in an interview via Skype. "I wanted to make the jump to a digital publication but I did not want to do the same thing as we were doing on paper." Versi�n en espa�ol So when he was laid off from a small daily in 2012, he took his severance package and began to experiment with how to take advantage of the strengths of digital media -- interactivity, instantaneous publication, potential massive audience -- to create a journalistic product or service that would build on databases that were already available. He and a handful of partners started out by giving aw...