I do love a complicated flowchart. There is something inherently engaging about following all the paths, crossing and twisting around the diagram, until you reach all possible endings. I blame Choose Your Own Adventure books.
These flowcharts from New York Magazine, though, make my brain hurt.
Does presenting information in flowchart form always make it easier to understand? Maybe, in this case, presenting it in flowchart form is supposed to make it more complicated, so we see exactly how convoluted a process news creation is?
I get it. Their article, Where News Comes From by Jeff VanDam (no design credit on the flowcharts), impresses me with just how nutty the evolution of news can be.
I don’t want to read the flowcharts, though. Since each path is linear and only the news sources cross between them, I wonder if this isn’t a case in which the information would have been better presented in another form?
What do you think?
