NIGHTINGALE IS FREE!, Nightingale

Last week Nightingale celebrated a major achievement. Since our launch in 2019, we always planned to have a stand-alone website and create a platform to serve the needs of our dataviz community.

After announcing at Outlier that we were leaving Medium and that we were starting a print version of Nightingale, we put out a call for volunteers to get involved and received an overwhelming response. Since then, a core team of nearly 30 folks have dedicated countless lunches, evenings, and weekends across a range of time zones to launch the new site. Now we have three teams focused on editorial, design, and operations (check out our team page.)

Yes, we are now FREE! Yes, all our articles on this site are free and open to anyone to read. There is no more paywall, and we will leave most of our old articles up on Medium as an archive. All DVS members have access to the Medium links on the DVS slack and we might just port over many articles to the new site per the desires of our writers (they have the last word).

While our push over the past few months has been mainly operational, we are also free to shift into a more design and editorial focus moving forward. Not only will we bring in a new creative director in Julie Brunet / Data Citron to help our brand evolve, but we also welcome Claire Santoro to help us organize sections and alternative content forms. In the next few weeks, you’ll begin to see how this evolution in the content will continue to diversify our discourse, extending into spotlights and more content for children and education.

Essentially, we’ve organized the site into three pillars:

Dataviz discourse and topical discussion
Practical applications and how-tos
Community spotlights that feature accomplishments like books, webinars, podcasts, exhibits, and cool projects

The new site also allows us added flexibility, which we’re embracing to introduce new short-form and image-rich content like Heather Jones’ cicada piece and fast takes like our 3 Questions With features. Stay tuned for all kinds of fun stuff like trivia, quizzes, horror stories, how it started/how it’s going, and more! And, if you have ideas for content you want to see, let us know!

Also – we are SUPER excited to introduce a new section: Kids Dataviz! Designed to showcase fun, creativity, and engagement, we kicked off this series last week with Julia Krolik’s article in collaboration with her son. This is a topic the editorial committee is extremely jazzed about and we see so many amazing opportunities to explore more! What about comics? Treasure hunts? Coloring books? We are building a dedicated team for this now, but we want you to get involved, so email us for details.

There are many questions about Nightingale Magazine (that’s what we’re calling our print version) – and you can read more about our vision – but, we will be following up with more explicit details when we open up our subscription service in the coming weeks. We see this as an important opportunity to expand beyond our professional “bubble” and plan to launch our first issue later this year.

Finally, because Nightingale is free of the Medium paywall, we are also free to find and collaborate with Sponsors. Please consider helping us find sponsors willing to invest in the important work of sustaining this community resource. Our readership represents an extremely unique cross-section of people who care deeply about dataviz. Our community is enthusiastic and willing to dedicate significant time and attention engaging with high-quality content. As stewards of this audience, we are seeking like-minded sponsors who recognize this value. You can find a link to sponsorship opportunities front and center on our home page.

We remain committed to providing a platform by and for the dataviz community. We want to hear your thoughts and ideas on how we might improve the new Nightingale. Did you find a bug? Can we improve our SEO? We are always looking to improve so please let us know.

Nightingale is indeed now FREE: free for everyone to read, free for our community to use as a platform for expression, free to evolve, and certainly free to enjoy and support.

PS: Our editorial process has changed slightly but please keep submitting articles! We pay all our writers and pair you with an editorial team committed to making sure your article is the best it can be. Get started by reading our editorial guidelines and then submitting your pitch/article materials to nightingale@datavisualizationsociety.org. It works best if you send a link to a Google folder containing the article and the images. In the article, please note which image to place in which position. This is a change from our previous process of submitting through Medium.

Jason Forrest

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Jason Forrest is a data visualization designer and writer living in New York City. He is the director of the Data Visualization Lab for McKinsey and Company. In addition to being on the board of directors of the Data Visualization Society, he is also the editor-in-chief of Nightingale: The Journal of the Data Visualization Society. He writes about the intersection of culture and information design and is currently working on a book about pictorial statistics.

Mary Aviles

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For 20 years, Mary Aviles has stewarded projects driving strategy and content, human experience, concept development, and systems change. A graduate of the University of Michigan, her work has spanned the business-to-business, health care, and nonprofit sectors. Mary is a mixed-method UX researcher at Detroit Labs and the managing editor of Nightingale. She writes about dataviz in real life (IRL) in an effort to help practitioners and “non-data” people enjoy better understanding and experiences in their shared ecosystems.