Question
Visit one (1) of the following newspaper’s Websites: Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, USA Today, or New York Times. Select a line graph, pie chart, or bar chart on the Website. Be prepared to discuss.Graphical Representations of Data” Please respond to the following:
From the e-Activity, discuss the data that the graph is used to visually represent. Speculate on why the editor chose the graph, as opposed to merely reporting the data.
Sample paper
Data Representation
The wall street journal has been one of the outstanding America business focused journal for decades. The journal is often published six days a week by Dow Jones & Company, where it focuses on business and economic news as well as luxury and lifestyle magazines. Research shows that it is the largest newspaper in the US by circulation. Notably, the newspaper is popular for its use of graphs to represent financial and economic data of the country and other countries in other regions. For example, the journal uses the Dow Jones Industrial Average to show the stock market ratio and some of the indices in the market (Bace, 2016). This study will attempt to identify and analyze one of the graphs used in the journal.
The graph above represents the daily market index of the Dow Jones Industrial Average which closes at 1650. A stock market index shows the measurement of a part of the stock market. The index is often calculated from the values of the chosen stocks, particularly the weighted average of the stocks. The blue line in the graph represents the market index value while the red line shows the simple moving average often regarded as the change in the market index.
Different analysts and authors use graphs for differevnt reasons to drive their message across to their readers and audiences. However, the primary reason that drove the editor to use this graph is to simplify it to make it easy for the readers and audiences to process and understand. It is always difficult for people to understand and manage large amounts of data and figures, but a graph makes it easy to simply and analyze these large amounts of data at a glance (Powell & Hopkins, 2015). Therefore, the editor wanted to make it easy for the readers to understand the market performance of the stocks.
References
Bace, E. (2016). STOCK RETURNS AND LEVERAGE: ANALYSIS OF THE DOW JONES INDUSTRIAL AVERAGE, 2000-2015. Proceedings of the 23rd International Academic Conference, Venice. doi:10.20472/iac.2016.023.017
Powell, J., & Hopkins, M. (2015). Graph databases and how to use them. A Librarian’s Guide to Graphs, Data and the Semantic Web, 197-207. doi:10.1016/b978-1-84334-753-8.00022-1
