INTERVIEW: REBECCA LIEBERMAN
Image courtesy of the designer.
Rebecca Lieberman is an interaction designer at the New York Times covering some of the most urgent political and social issues of our time. We speak about the confluence of design and journalism, storytelling, artistic restraint, ethics, and making sense of the current moment.
MC
How do you describe yourself? Because you seem to operate at the intersection of journalism, visual design, code, and the news. So there is a lot that’s happening here.RL
That’s a tough question. I mean, I see myself as a designer. The context in which I work happens to be a journalistic one. And I think in doing so, I fulfill the capacity of a certain kind of editor in a lot of ways. But yes, the primary way that I see myself moving through the world is as a designer.MC
Great, so let’s take it a step further. It looks like you alternate, and sometimes work simultaneously as a designer and an editor like you said. And your official designation is ‘graphics editor.’ So what does a graphics editor at the New York Times do?RL
Well, it’s so funny. On the one hand, it’s just terminology, so it doesn’t really mean anything. Let’s be real. But on the other, being a graphics editor means different things to different people and contexts. But anyway, within our newsroom, there are basically three teams that make up the interactive work that we do. So there’s my team, which is called ‘digital news design.’ There’s the graphics team, which is called ‘graphics.’ And then there’s a third team, which has a totally different, expertise, and they’re called interactive news. They are essentially their newsroom engineers. So they have a pretty in depth understanding of the technical infrastructure that power our interaction work.So my team is called ‘digital news design,’ and we’re all graphics editors. And within that, there’s a range of skills specializations. There are some people like me who come more from a design background, and other folks who come with more front end development and art direction backgrounds. So everybody’s a maker, but some people come more from journalism.
MC
So it is clear that the lines between the the design teams can be blurry. How does this play out between design and reporting teams? My work and writing of late has focused on the social role that designers can play in raising awareness about a whole host of urgent issues among the public. And I feel like being a designer in the journalistic space makes one perfectly poised to make such social change happen. Do you have room to pitch your own stories?RL
Um, I’ve done a little bit of reporting and I think that’s what’s great about being in the building is you can pitch your own stories and when you do, you can be as involved as you want.
The Xinjiang Papers / November 16, 2019
Ms. Lieberman contributed to the harrowing exposé revealing how the Chinese government detained and persecuted Uyghur Muslims of the Xinjiang region.
MC
That’s wonderful. Now let’s consider a more conventional scenario: when you receive a story, how finished would it be? And how much room do you as a designer have in determining how the story is told? Is there room to maneuver here?RL
Yeah, sometimes a project will come to me and it’s essentially a two sentence description of what the story is about. It’s like “we have an idea for this,” and that’s one case where I’m not actually pitching the story, but have a lot of leeway to really shape what that is. And in general, I think it depends a lot on your willingness, initiative, and how much you care to do that kind of thing, of deciding how a story gets told. And it really depends on the editors, relationship building, and knowing who your audience is.So there have been times when I’ve decided that a story that I just received, really needs to be a long form reported piece. Or if I know the editor who’s sent me the story, and know that they’re not really used to working in a collaborative way, or that they don’t usually do visual stuff, that becomes a situation where I might be a little bit reticent to really try to shape the project.
Or sometimes it just comes down to lack of resources. You know, for example, if my team doesn’t have a budget to get a reporter and a photo editor, but if I have an idea that’s really compelling, like the Block Party story last summer, I can pitch it to the right editor and make it a reality.
MC
Let’s now pivot to storytelling. You have reported on a variety of stories ranging from elections, and food, to ethnic cleansing in Xinjiang and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. This presents an interesting scenario because each story requires a different approach to storytelling with some requiring editorial restraint rather than overwrought narratives. How do you decide how a story gets told?RL
That’s a really good question. I think my short answer is that sometimes I get a story for which there’s already a draft. And the photographs don’t really make sense, or the piece is too long, and I will have to change it. But that’s kind of the rare case.I would say that generally the way that I would approach it is, first of all, meet with the team: the editor, reporter and the photo editor. And really, we all become, in an ideal world, collaborators on it. But sometimes I’m the one to get people to think outside of the box because, you know, some people at times have visual backgrounds, but a lot of people have more traditional print or just traditional journalistic backgrounds. And so they need like a little touch of crazy in the room to like make them think outside their box.
Love and Pride in Alabama / June 29, 2018
Ms. Lieberman’s first piece of reporting, uncovering the L.G.B.T community’s fight for greater visibility and acceptance in the Bible Belt.
RL (CONTD.)
But the way that I think about it is “what is the best way to tell this story?” Like, what assets do we have to work with? And I don’t just mean digital assets, sometimes it is literal assets. For example, if it is a piece on Thanksgiving pies, I would think about ways to take sexy photos of actual pies.If a story is early enough in the process, my collaborator and I go off to our separate rooms and really think about what the story really has to offer. Like is it like beautiful food? Is it firsthand images of the Guantanamo Bay complex that only our photographers have get access to? Is it, you know, data?
For example, something that we tried to do with our Democratic Primary election results pages and hopefully will continue to do in our general election coverage is the usage of narratives alongside data. Thinking about, you know, how can we bring more narrative onto these pages that are just a lot of numbers and how can we guide people? So one thing we did that was successful was we had reporters all over the country sending us scenes from the campaign, whether it was from a bar where there was an election gathering or a Biden watch party.
And I think it was really helpful to bring that kind of storytelling onto an otherwise typical election page.
MC
This is very interesting. So I assume that even here, when deciding how best a story can be told, there is space for you to go back to the editor and say “you know what, I think we should dial down on the text. We should probably add an audio component to this piece instead.” Is that the case?RL
Definitely. I mean, it’s the New York Times, so there’s always going to be a preference for the written word. With that said, I’m always going to be the one in the room being like, “make it shorter.” People are not going to read that or think about how many phones scrolls that is on mobile. Like nobody’s gonna read a 400 word intro.But yeah, there’s absolutely opportunity. I mean, even the Bergamo piece we did documenting the coronavirus deaths in Italy, came together really fast—faster than any other thing I’ve worked on for the most part. And I had a collaborator on that who was a lot more technically skilled with code than I was, because I knew I wanted to do a lot with transitions and fading between sections of photography and text.
The Coronavirus in Bergamo, Italy / March 27, 2020
A multimedia web article designed by Ms. Lieberman capturing the devastating effects of the Coronavirus in the Italian city of Bergamo. Readers are confronted by a wall of obituaries, drawing from an viral image of the obituaries section of a local Bergamo newspaper.
RL (CONTD.)
So this was a story where we immediately knew that there was going to be photos. We knew there was going to be some text, and after I saw some of the initial filings, I asked if this story was going to be character-driven. Like are we following these doctors and medical workers in Bergamo? Are our timestamps important? Is there a sense of how this unfolds over time? And then it became clear that these factors weren’t the case. So here is a story where, as we began designing the web page, nothing was written, which gave us a lot of freedom.And so we decided that we were going to have sections of photos that feel like they were written through the story.
And then there will be a section of text to break the photos because they were depressing, like a breather. And so that was the structure. And then we just gave it to the reporter and he wrote it, you know? And then. We had to figure out how to weave his writing into the photo sections because, you know, we didn’t want it to feel like any other multimedia storytelling project that split images with text.
And I remembered that I had seen this viral video about the Bergamo newspaper and how many pages of obituaries there were. And so I mentioned as an idea “what if we did something with that for the top of the story?” And so we decided to lead with the obituary.
MC
It’s so interesting to hear about how you and the team put it together because I found the Bergamo piece to be very moving. I think what was so successful to me about the piece was that it avoided the kind of guilt inducing tragedy porn that critics like Susan Sontag, and John Berger criticized in news coverage of disasters and adversity.It was almost as if each ubiquitous gesture on the phone was conferred a deeper purpose, where a scroll took the reader to a wall of text resembling a graveyard, and a click, into photographs of the homes of people suffering. Are these intentional moves? Because to implicate viewers in the story like this requires thinking simultaneously about larger questions about readership, narrative, and storytelling, and more logistical questions like web interactive gestures, word counts and scrolls. How do you approach a story like this?
The Coronavirus in Bergamo, Italy / March 27, 2020
A multimedia web article designed by Ms. Lieberman capturing the devastating effects of the Coronavirus in the Italian city of Bergamo. Readers are confronted by a wall of obituaries, drawing from an viral image of the obituaries section of a local Bergamo newspaper.
RL
No, that’s a really good question. I think they are related. You know, as for the larger questions, the one thing that we do a lot, and I can’t speak for other news organizations, is that we try not to hide information behind clicks, and generally keep our interactions simple, so that people can understand issues clearly.Where I think it helped is in our election coverage. I was a big advocate for making our tables more scannable and like actually truncating them. And that way the public just sees the most important results and you inform them. But I think generally we have to operate under the assumption that people are lazy and people are not going to spend a lot of time with something and people are not going to click into whatever sort of interactive device.
MC
Yes and on the flip side, have you had situations where, even though you had the opportunity to include elaborate narrative elements in the form of interactive gestures, you chose not to because they would divert from the integrity of the story? In other words, have you chosen not to narrativize some stories and just present them in their original form?RL
Yeah, that’s an interesting question. Mmm. There definitely have been times when I’ve gotten a story and felt like things were working as they were, and didn’t need my involvement. So I just leave it alone. Also because when the design team gets involved in things, we have a whole system for doing custom pieces and it just makes more work for everybody.So one of the first things I worked on was this big investigation about sexual assault at a Ford factory. And it was already a heavily reported investigative piece. They happened to have these incredible portraits of the women, and they had audio testimony of them because one of the reporters had a background in radio. So she had conducted great audio interviews with them. So here was a case where there was evidence straight from the people which was very powerful by itself, and felt like my involvement wasn’t as necessary.
How Tough Is It to Change a Culture of Harassment? Ask Women at Ford / December 19, 2017
An example of aesthetic restraint, Ms. Lieberman chose not to intervene by way of interactive storytelling devices because powerful testimonies were already being shared.
MC
One of the reasons why I am drawn to your work was that it is urgent, it has a wide reach, and in a very real sense, helps craft public understanding of social, economic and political issues. Do you ever get a chance to step back and reflect on the work you do, or does the daily grind keep you from accessing such moments of pause?RL
Yeah. I would say I’m so absorbed in the day to day that it’s very rare that I do that. But sometimes, like on election nights when I think about how many people are looking at our pages and how many people know what’s going on and what to pay attention to, that’s a moment where I think, “holy shit, like people are looking at my work! And people’s understanding of what’s happening at this current moment is shaped by work that I am doing.”Also, because of this whole coronavirus crisis, I’ve just been very reflective about everything and feeling grateful for the work that I have been a part of at the Times. There recently was a 3-D piece on coughing, which I didn’t work on, but was amazing. But back to your question: I am sometimes reflective, but usually just caught up in the day-to-day grind.
MC
That’s totally understandable. Now, bringing our conversation back to the current moment. What kind of work have you been doing at the Times of late?RL
I’m doing all coronavirus work and it’s all fairly depressing. I was joking with my colleagues that like, somehow I’ve ended up on all the depressing projects! I worked on the Bergamo story, I worked on this obituaries piece. I’m currently working on a piece about healthcare workers, so that’s really interesting.MC
Finally, let’s pivot to some personal stuff. So you’ve been covering a stream of sobering and less than cheerful topics of late. What kind of impact has it had on your personal life, and how have you been weathering all of this?RL
Mmm, good question. I think working on the elections was different cause all it really required was limiting other news intake. I think one limiting news to just having other outlets that feel nice. Like I’ve been knitting a lot, you know, this hat. I always miss making stuff with my hands, but I’m okay. And just trying to find delight and creativity in work that is a little bit of a downer.You know, even working on the Bergamo obituaries piece, I was really trying to think about how we could make the project reflective and beautiful. I think there always are opportunities to introduce beauty or joy into work that is otherwise sobering.
MC
And now that the Coronavirus has thrown a wrench in everyone’s lives, do you see it having any long last effects on the field of journalism itself? How do you think your work will change, if at all? Any silver linings that you can think of?RL
Probably, I don’t know what they are. As for silver linings, I think personally—and this may sound trite— it’s made me have an appreciation for the work I do and has given me a sense of purpose. It’s given me structure, and a reason for me to wake up in the morning. It has also made me appreciate the people that I work with because I miss them a lot.But on the flip side, the Times, being an old school organization was always resistant to remote work, believing that to make a newspaper, everyone had to be in the building. I think this crisis, having forced us to work remotely, has convinced the leadership that we can make a print newspaper with everyone working from home. That’s a reassuring outcome, I think.