The Pudding

About

The Pudding is a journal of visual essays. It’s a new publication from Polygraph, a collective specializing in visualization.

What is a visual essay? Imagine a New Yorker–esque longread about a complex topic, but code, data, and animation replace dense prose to construct a different sort of story. It’s one that’s reader-driven, explorable, and embeddable into other websites.

The Pudding prizes quality. Each project represents a few weeks of the author’s life, spent researching, analyzing, and coding a culturally rich topic. The output: an interactive experience that seeks to advance public discourse in a way that a traditional 20,000-word essay never could.

Each essay has three ingredients:

Passion and Depth: could the author spend 1-2 months (even for free) on the project with enough excitement/content?
Purpose: does it answer a publicly divisive question? Have we improved the public discourse on a topic? Have we enhanced a timeless watercooler/happy hour discussion? (i.e., no projects about the news cycle)
Craft: visual storytelling (with data, code, and animation) is a new medium. Are we moving it forward?

Want to contribute? Or hire us? See below.

Open Positions

For all hiring inquiries, please reach out to sup@pudding.cool. We respond to applications that accurately fulfill the requirements below. We highly encourage people of all backgrounds and experience to apply; formal education in statistics, journalism, or computer science is not required (though a demonstrated ability to do the work is).

Staff

We are looking for someone to help grow and contribute to The Pudding. You will have a hand in everything, from producing essays to helping with client-sponsored work. You will get a chance to wear many hats, from writing to designing to developing. If you consider yourself a maker / data visualizer / interactive developer / visual journalist / data reporter / data graphic artist / storytelling engineer / some combination of these words, this position is for you.

Skills and requirements

Comfortable working with data, databases, and analysis in whatever platform you prefer (e.g. R, Python, Excel, etc).
Experience with HTML, CSS, and JS.
Must have created at least one visual piece of editorial on the Internet that is commensurate with content on The Pudding (or better!).
Produce mobile-friendly content.

Benefits

$75K – $140K USD, depending on location and experience.
Full benefits.
May be remote.
Equity and stock options are on the horizon.

To apply, send us some of your best work, and let us know what ideas or topics get excite you. Applications must include a clear list of links to existing work. Applications without a link will not receive a response.

Freelance Contributions

We are a small but dedicated team. That means there are more great stories to tell, beyond what we can produce.

Each quarter, we commission up to three essays, typically requiring about a month of the author’s time, starting at a rate of $5,000. Reach out with your proposed topic (or check out our idea backlog) and a link to your portfolio or relevant work. If you need any support (e.g., design, code, or writing) we are open to collaboration. We love to see proof of concept, so send us prototypes, R notebooks, etc., to help us get excited.

Team

Contributors

Contact Us

For business opportunities, reach out to business@pudding.cool. For all other inquiries, reach out to sup@pudding.cool.