My 6 Years at Nightingale: 1,443 Digital Articles, 5 Print Magazines, and a Whole Lot of Love

In the past 6 years, our community published 1,443 digital articles and 5 print magazines of Nightingale. This article will mark my last one as the Editor-in-Chief. Yes, it’s time for me to pass the torch to our editorial team and reveal my master plan!

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The Data Visualization Society (DVS) launched on February 20, 2019 with a post on Medium. It was a shock, a movement, a global phenomenon.

That article begins: 

“Over the last few years, data visualization has grown dramatically more common in our day-to-day experience. We see it in our news articles, in our social media and, for many of us, every day at work. The task of designing, creating, and deploying data visualization isn’t just a single profession but shows up in the work of engineers, analysts, salespeople, doctors, journalists, designers, students, and more… We created the Data Visualization Society in order to address that lack of professional development in the field, create a larger community, and provide a space that makes it more possible to learn from one another, differences and all. In doing so, we hope to establish guidelines for professional development to support people starting out in data visualization as well as those who have established careers.”

The DVS was started by Elijah Meeks, Amy Cesal, and Mollie Pettit months after a great conference called Tapestry held at the University of Miami in the fall of 2018. I was there because, earlier in 2018, I had written a series of lengthy articles about the data visualizations of W.E.B. Du Bois and had been chosen to give what was probably the first public presentation on his amazing work. I was so nervous that I read my talk word-for-word from a paper script because I was so worried that I’d mess up in front of a room of my new heroes.

On the first day, I met Elijah and he invited me to sit with him for lunch. In the next few minutes, the people who joined that table were a who’s who of dataviz—Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic, Mona Chalabi, Steve Wexler—I think Amanda Makulec was there too, or maybe she was at the next table. I was a big fan of RJ Andrews and he was at the next table. I was buzzing just to be near them all. I met Robert Crocker in the coffee line. Bill Shandler, too. Mollie Pettit had some kind of an amazing jacket and I told my wife how cool she was that night. Joey Cherderchuck showed off a demo that literally blew my mind the next day. I had no idea at the time, but many of the people at that conference turned out to have a major role in my life ever since. I had arrived into a scene somehow without even realizing it was a scene.

But a few months later, when Amy, Elijah, and Mollie made their announcement, I instantly joined. I think I was the seventh person to sign up for the DVS, and I pretty much blew off work to watch the DVS Slack grow by hundreds of people every few minutes. Something was happening and it was exhilarating!

Like I said, I had been writing a lot about dataviz and I was bummed about not having a good home to publish in. The main game in town at the time was Toward Data Science, and the data visualization subsection was a small, neglected back corner of their Medium empire. 

I was chatting with Elijah—it was my fourth or fifth message on the first day of the DVS Slack: “You know, if we do this thing right, we could make an amazing publication.” A few messages later I said, “if DVS grows, maybe we could do a print magazine one day!” That was the beginning of Nightingale. I knew from day one that we could make a community publication, and we would eventually make something physical. 

I became the Publications Director, and together with Elijah, we brokered a deal with Medium to create an exclusive publication which they paid for monthly. It felt clandestine.

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On July 15, 2019, we launched Nightingale the Journal of the Data Visualization Society with four articles: 

Welcome To Nightingale by me, Jason Forrest, an introduction to the new publication.

Florence Nightingale is a Design Hero by RJ Andrews, which was the germ of an idea that evolved into his incredible book on Nightingale a few years later.

Beyond Nightingale: Being a Woman in Data Visualization by Stephanie Evergreen on tokenism in our community.

From the Battlefield to Basketball: A Data Visualization Journey with Florence Nightingale by Senthil Natarajan on creating a rose diagram for basketball stats.

Together, we felt these four articles represented a significant new direction for discourse in our community. These were not peer-reviewed papers, these were not articles playing second fiddle to hum-drum machine learning how-tos—these were serious explorations into divergent corners of dataviz that had never been explored. They were interesting, and they were alive!

My article started with this perky introduction:

“Nightingale will bring you high-quality articles each day covering many of the applications of data visualization — including education, entertainment, history, sports, best practices, new techniques, and any other form of visual information design we find compelling. We’ll host interviews with thought leaders and interesting people from the DVS community and beyond. Like all adventurers, we want to explore the unexplored, to look to the past and dream of the future. It’s exciting!”

So, here we are, six years later, and it’s worth noting that, as adventurers—we have done exactly this. We have explored so many new concepts that have never been written about in dataviz before. We created new ways to share our thoughts, spotlight new perspectives, share our work in progress, and reflect on our accomplishments and failures in an effort to help others. We held interviews, reviewed books and conferences, and created a global platform for our field to easily share their feelings and half-baked ideas. I am shocked at how thoroughly our mission at Nightingale has lived up to this initial statement and that of the DVS in general. We have created a living, active dialogue.

But establishing Nightingale in partnership with Medium also created two crucial mechanisms for our success: it allowed us to pay writers and hire staff to edit, illustrate, post, and promote each article, but it also provided critical start-up funding for the DVS. It can not be underscored enough how building this editorial team has helped our community! While no one has become rich from writing a Nightingale article (or being on our team) we can honestly say that everyone involved has been paid. By establishing an editorial team, we ensured that articles were systematically published at a sustainable rate to keep the conversation going. Consistency is so important for a professional publication, and we’re proud to have fought the good fight to keep Nightingale standards high, to keep everyone paid, and publish roughly two thousand articles.

Building an editorial team was the real joy

It started with our first managing editor, Isaac Levy-Rubinett, a sports journalist with an interest in dataviz. He helped us establish our first group of editors, created standards and processes to get articles edited, designed, posted, and promoted. Isaac was a gifted editor and created the theme week concept and much more. Our next managing editor was Mary Aviles, a design researcher and writer from Detroit who brought our publication to the next level in many ways. Mary got shit done but with grace and a deep consideration for our writers and community. 

On Feb 8, 2021, Mary and I co-published an article called “The Future Of Nightingale,” announcing the brazen goal of launching a print magazine. I honestly don’t think anyone really understood what that meant, but Mary and I were excited to give it a try. We pulled in our hot-shot editor Claire Santoro to be our new “Content Editor”—a role focused on creating and editing the best content for the new print magazine. Claire is a data analyst focused on sustainability and she crafted much of the vibe of Nightingale Magazine. Claire came up with a lot of our series content, like the popular Dataviz Horror Stories, etc.

I remember we had a few meetings with our editorial committee team where we asked questions like: “What even goes in a print magazine?” and “How do you ship them?,” but we figured it all out together. We also re-platformed from Medium to our own website (this one) and set up a CMS, which was a total pain, but it meant that all articles would be free and open to everyone.

This was right as the first Outlier was happening. It was still the pandemic, so it was online, and that’s where we first saw the amazing work of Julie Brunet (aka datacitron). It was a leap-before-look moment when I wrote her on Slack, and immediately said:  “Do you want to be our Creative Director?” She agreed and designed our brand and (almost) every page of our print magazines since! Some of my most exciting professional moments over the past six years were seeing her designs for the first time—and there are too many of those special moments to count!

Various images from the first five issues of Nightingale Magazine

We had published two issues of Nightingale magazine when our next Managing Editor, Emily Barone, joined us after being a data journalist and editor at Time Magazine. We were so excited because we were finally working with someone who had done this before! Emily brought so much care to her role in addition to her operational publishing expertise. She came up with the special sections in the back of each magazine, among many innovations, and helped us publish two more print magazines and another few hundred articles online. Emily also handled a bunch of the extremely difficult shipping logistics and set us on the right road for Issue 5 of the magazine.

Printed copies of Issue 5 at the printers. About 600 of these also took an international trip to EU that took more than three months—UGG!

I’m so proud of each member of our editorial team! Our current group—Will, Teo, Ale, and Julie—have already begun to take over my day-to-day responsibilities and will continue to provide the same level of care and enthusiasm for our writers and community as we have for the past six years. Honestly, there’s so much I can say about each of our editors (my friends) that I could go on and on. But I’ll wrap this up by saying that I truly learned so much from each one of you and I will forever be grateful for your collaboration!

My master plan—revealed!

Ok, I’ll admit it. For the last six years I had an agenda all along—to expand our community and influence it towards creating more illustrative, human-focused design. When I announced the magazine, I told people “it’s like a fashion magazine, but for dataviz”—and that was exactly the point. To make dataviz more alluring and to build on the magic of embodying data by showing our community the added power of illustration and design.

This is in service to attracting more attention to the data, to shining a light on new perspectives, and to propose a new way of communicating information to people. If you look at dataviz before Nightingale, and look at it today, I think you can see how we helped dataviz evolve our field in this direction. Sure, Nightingale hasn’t been the only publication pushing for this, but it’s easy to see how we championed creative, engaging ways to illustrate data and expand the scope of what is possible—and we have done this on a global scale.

In conclusion

So, here it is, the 1,444th article. Yes, it’s a bit bittersweet, but transitioning into my next phase as contributor, patron, and I hope, advertiser, means that I get to find new ways to engage with our community and support this amazing publication that has done far more for me than I can express. 

I thank my co-founder and friend, Elijah Meeks, for your collaboration over all these years. You always showed me so much respect from our first meeting to today, and I have learned much from your guidance and become wiser for (mostly) following it. 

I’d also like to warmly thank my friend and collaborator, Amanda Makulec, the former Executive Director of the DVS, who has been with me from the beginning of the DVS until now. We have a deep respect for each other and have supported each other through the ups and downs (yes, there have been a few of those), but we always remained focused on doing what was best for our community. I can’t wait to see where you go in your next chapter!

Lastly – I WANT TO THANK YOU!!! For the past six years, I have constantly engaged with our global dataviz community as an editor, on social, at conferences, answering your customer questions and complaints (yes, mistakes have been made!) and I remain still buzzing to just be part of it all. It’s like that moment back at the Tapestry Conference, when I was surrounded by all those famous dataviz people I had heard about—and that feeling just never stopped. In many ways, the community I feel a part of today is a reflection of the community I had always wanted to be part of—like a dream come true, a fantasy realized, a warm conversation with old friends. Thank you all for being so amazingly kind.

What’s next for me?

As most people know, I have a lot of energy and a lot of ideas!

I’m currently building the Jason Forrest Agency—a dataviz agency specializing in interactive projects in business. We’re small but growing fast, and I think we bring a different perspective on how to apply data storytelling concepts in a way that feels more relevant than ever.

I have also been hard at work on Data Vandals, a data activism project which is becoming increasingly more public. There’s so much more to explore by making dataviz more experiential and public. We’re excited that the idea is catching on! 

I also have a third “big thing” that is starting later this year. Unfortunately, I can’t announce it just yet, but my goal of advancing a more illustrative, human version of dataviz, and helping to open it up to the general public remains my focus—and it feels like the conversation will only get more dynamic from here.

Lastly, I look forward to writing more! I started Nightingale because I was a writer, but slowly this got pushed aside to deal with fun tasks like international shipping. I’ve also finished a book, so there will be so much more to write about, elaborate upon, and promote! 

So yes, I’ll be busy, and easy to find.

THANK YOU SO MUCH—IT’S BEEN AN HONOR!

Jason Forrest