Lately, some of the best articles in the NY Times and Bloomberg are 99% code. The end-product is predominantly software, not prose.

Here’s an example: the NY Times’ mapping of migration in the US.

Mapping migration in the US. A elegant depiction of a complex topic.

Several years ago, this article might have been a few thousand words. There’d be tables and charts. They’d reference academic studies and correlate the data with something like unemployment.

This example is different. It’s a well-designed data dump. It’s raw numbers without any abstractions. There’s no attachment to the news cycle. There’s no traditional thesis. It cannot be made in Photoshop or Illustrator. You must write software.

It represents the present-day revolution within news organizations. Some call it data journalism. Or explorable explanations. Or interactive storytelling. Whatever the label, it’s a huge shift from ledes and infographics.

Here’s another example: a graphic from the NY Times on yield curve data:

The story is the code. It depicts the yield curve, an incredibly complex system, in all of its glory. It’s an amazing piece of software (I bet financial companies would even buy it).

Here’s another example: The Parable of the Polygons, an explanation of an academic paper about segregation.

It’s is a very elegant presentation of a system using code. For reference, here’s how the original author conveyed the idea, back in 1991.