A drumbeat is continuous pressure. It puts relentless focus on an issue.
Ad hoc articles are easy to ignore. Persistent coverage with no end in sight provokes a reaction.
Data is a mechanism to create a drumbeat. The series below is an example.
They show Australia's confirmed Covid cases (pink lines) with Italy's (blue lines). Day 1 was the first day each country registered 100 cases. Italy was three weeks head.
You probably remember charts like these from March 2020, and the sheer relief around day 20 as that curve began to bend.
This series demonstrates the first principle of drumbeating with data: updates must be frequent.
Covid Hothouse
Covid was a hothouse for learning the best ways to track and communicate public interest data. Those of us who were neck-deep in it developed a set of principles to help report with greater impact (starting with the 1st principle above):
Climate Drumbeat
Just like Covid, the climate challenge requires us to change personal behaviour to flatten a collective curve. That's why we're finding ways to apply these principles to create a new drumbeat – this time with climate data. There are countless challenges, including domain complexity, less political urgency, and a lack of timely data. But climate change is a data story at its core.
