The Wall Street Journal’s Visual Storytelling Team Goes Audience-First

Under Editor in Chief Emma Tucker ’s leadership, The Wall Street Journal has undergone a digital transformation that is focused on getting closer to audiences. A key component of that work is to innovate in how it tells stories. Enter Director of Visual Storytelling Ryan Watts and his department, which welcomed two new designers in 2025: Audrey Valbuena and Annie Ng . They also work alongside design editor Andrew Levinson . Although the Journal has unified its design standards and set rules around how its designers approach visual storytelling, the new team is also encouraged to break the rules if the story calls for it. They deviated from The Wall Street Journal’s traditional styles, color palettes, typography, and structure for a story on the economy of “blind boxes” and on its guide to the world’s largest animal migration. In a blog post for the International News Media Association (INMA) called “ Audience-first designers break the rules at WSJ ,” Ryan Watts writes: “Our aim is for our entire department to be working this way: proposing experiments, trying something different, reporting back with their findings. The Journal’s graphics team wears many hats. They are reporters, designers, developers, data visualisers, cartographers, 3D modelers, animators, and artists. It’s a talented team of specialists, but they’re often required to work on simpler visual tasks. Newsrooms can’t afford for any of their visual experts to operate as a service desk. The goal should be to empower our partners in coverage to self-serve as often as possible.”

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