Makeover Monday: How Has Press Freedom Changed Around the World?

• The colors contrast well and represent the values well (i.e., green = good, etc.).
• The map zooms in nicely as you select a region across the top.
• Good tooltips
• The white borders around each country make them easy to distinguish.
• Using dots to represent the small islands.

• Without using the zoom feature, small countries are very hard to see.
• The title doesn't really tell me what the data map is about.
• You can't see trends over time. In other words, you don't know if the press are getting more or less free.
• There are no definitions for what the scores mean, unless you hover over a country.

• I started by building a trellis chart that showed every country and its score over time. It was so messy and crowded so I scrapped it.
• I wanted to see the overall trends, so I focused on the percentage of countries within each year that fall into each status.
• I used the same color palette.
• I wanted to show the change vs. 1993, so I included that as text on the end of each line.

I found this to be a particularly interesting, and a bit alarming data set. According to this data, the Press are becoming less free. That's not good for democracy.