The Pudding's Visual Essays

In 2017, journalist and developer Matt Daniels relaunched a small digital publication called The Pudding with a radical editorial premise: every story would be told primarily through interactive data visualization, not traditional text articles with charts sprinkled in. The Pudding's breakout piece, 'Film Dialogue,' analyzed the scripts of roughly 2,000 movies to calculate the proportion of dialogue spoken by male versus female characters — and presented the results as a mesmerizing scrollytelling experience where readers could explore individual films, genres, and decades through animated, interactive charts. The piece went viral, was covered by major outlets, and established The Pudding's signature style: deep data analysis on culturally resonant topics (hip-hop lyrics, regional language patterns, pockets in women's clothing, the geography of band names), presented through technically sophisticated visual essays that feel more like playing with a toy than reading a report. Co-founders Daniels and Russell Goldenberg, along with contributors like Jan Diehm and Amber Thomas, built a publication that consistently proved data journalism could be genuinely fun. By the mid-2020s, The Pudding had published hundreds of visual essays, won numerous awards from the Society for News Design and Data Journalism Awards, and inspired a generation of 'scrollytelling' practitioners who saw that the best way to explain data wasn't to hand readers a static chart — it was to invite them on a journey.