How a data journalist at The Economist, Sondre Solstad, uses Our World in Data

Our mission at Our World in Data (OWID) is to make data and research on the world’s biggest problems — and their solutions — easier to access and understand.¹

Millions of people see our work directly each year by visiting our site, receiving our newsletters, and following us on social media.

But we also design our work to have an indirect impact, from others sharing and building on it. That’s why we use a permissive Creative Commons license and include easy options to share and download our charts and data.²

One important indirect impact is via the many journalists around the world who rely on us for their work, including those at top outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, and more.

To understand how this key group uses our work and how we could improve it for them, we recently spoke with Sondre Solstad, The Economist’s Senior data journalist.

We learned a lot from speaking with Sondre: how he uses our work, what features he finds most helpful, and some ways we could improve.

In this article, we share one particular part of Sondre’s story because it exemplifies how we think about our impact. Making important data easier to access is more than just saving people a few clicks. It can help how journalists use and write about data.

We hope you find Sondre’s story interesting, and perhaps it sparks some ideas for how OWID could be useful for you.

We share Sondre’s story and summarize what he told us with his permission and approval of this published version.

Like all journalists, Sondre Solstad is always on the lookout for interesting new perspectives.

He had written a couple of articles for The Economist on the climate impacts of food, “in most cases using data from OWID”.³ Writing a follow-up piece at some point was in the back of his mind.

One day while browsing the web, Sondre came across a couple of our charts showing data he hadn’t seen before — the carbon footprint of different foods, given by calorie count and by protein content.

This turned out to be what Sondre needed: seeing those charts gave him a new angle on the climate impacts of food and sparked the initial idea for an article.

Sondre’s next step was to get a handle on the data. He visited OWID and dug into our Environmental Impacts of Food Data Explorer, a tool showing a wide range of data on the carbon footprints, land use, and water footprints of many food products.

After spending some time to get a good overview of the data, Sondre downloaded it so that he could do the specific analysis he had in mind, and that served as the foundation for his article.⁴

The end product was Sondre’s article for The Economist, “A different way to measure the climate impact of food”, which compared the carbon footprint of different foods by weight, calories, and protein content — all indexed to the banana.

The visualization here is from the article; see the article for an interactive version.

Sondre told us that OWID was an important resource for his article in two ways:

Because the data was so easy to find, and because there was so little friction between the data and me getting it — and also because you had made me aware of the data in the first place, that this data existed — it was instrumental in making the story become a story.

It saved me a lot of time. And I think it saved me time to the extent that I probably wouldn’t have written this article if I didn’t have the data readily available.

Seeing our chart made Sondre aware that the data existed and sparked the initial idea for his article. And because he could access reliable data quickly, he was able to spend more time analyzing it and crafting the writing and visualizations.

Sondre’s article was covered extensively across The Economist’s channels (online, print, newsletters, and its The Intelligence podcast), reaching its audience of millions of readers and listeners. It also won the 2024 Royal Statistical Society Excellence in Journalism Award for Best Data Visualization.

Sondre’s experience is one example among many of how journalists use our work. It’s not just about saving a few clicks — making the data easier to access and use helped make Sondre’s article a reality.

This is key to how we think about our impact: giving others — journalists, teachers, policymakers, researchers, and many others — what they need to do good work.

We hope you enjoyed reading this and maybe picked up some ideas on how OWID could be useful for you, too.

Are you a journalist who uses OWID for your work? We’d love to hear from you.

We know that many great journalists use OWID, and we’d like to better understand the different ways that they use our work.

So if you’re a journalist and would like to speak more with us, please email us at [email protected]. Thanks — we look forward to hearing from you!

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