The Pudding proves that a website can still be journalism

The remarkable part is that the interaction is the journalism. It isn’t a chart placed beside a story, an animation commissioned to make a page more attractive, or a novelty added after the reporting is finished. The reporting, the design, the code, and the reader’s actions are built into the same experience.

Founded in 2017, The Pudding is an independent digital publication devoted to visual essays about culture. Its subjects can appear almost absurdly specific. The team has investigated the language of fictional characters, the mechanics of popular music, the frustrations of buying women’s clothing, and the relationship between familiar expressions and the books that repeat them. Beneath that playful selection of subjects is a serious editorial practice: find a revealing question, gather evidence, and choose the form that makes the answer understandable.

This matters because the web has gradually become a delivery system for familiar publishing formats. Articles are formatted as articles. Videos appear in players. Data sits behind dashboards. Social feeds determine how much attention individual stories receive. The browser, despite its enormous creative possibilities, is often treated as a place to display material conceived for another medium.

The Pudding works from the opposite assumption. A website is capable of telling a story that couldn’t exist in quite the same way anywhere else.

And when that approach works, it makes ordinary online reading feel strangely limited.

The website is the story

Open pudding.cool and the first impression is closer to wandering through an eccentric editorial collection than visiting a conventional news publication. The homepage offers illustrated entries into stories about apparently unrelated subjects. There is no urgent attempt to persuade readers that every piece explains the most consequential development of the day.

That absence of urgency is deliberate. The publication says it does not organize its work around breaking news or clickbait. Its editorial attention goes toward ideas that become more interesting when they can be shown, compared, animated, or explored. The stories are chosen partly because the web can tell them differently.

It’s a distinction that becomes clearer after opening a few pieces. A traditional article may describe a pattern, provide examples, quote an expert, and present a graphic showing the result. The Pudding often begins with the pattern itself. It invites readers to recognize a problem before they receive the complete explanation.

Sometimes you scroll to advance an argument. Sometimes you select between competing perspectives. Sometimes a question asks you to make a prediction before showing what the collected evidence says. The mechanics vary because the stories require different forms of attention.

There is a quiet confidence in that approach. Readers aren’t always handed the finished interpretation immediately. They are allowed to make discoveries, and occasionally mistakes, along the way.

Good interaction changes what the reader understands. That’s the standard worth applying to The Pudding. A button that reveals an amusing detail is entertainment. A comparison that makes a hidden assumption visible is part of an explanation. An interactive sequence that changes how a reader interprets evidence becomes a genuine editorial device.

Not every story requires a button or a complicated animation. A carefully constructed sequence of static graphics can do the job. The crucial decision is whether the chosen presentation makes the subject clearer, more memorable, or more open to examination.

The publication’s structure also changes what an author can be. Its team describes working as a collective, with contributors often responsible for research, data analysis, writing, design, and code. The familiar separation between journalist, illustrator, and developer becomes much less rigid.

This produces a different relationship between an idea and its final presentation. If the person examining the data can also experiment with how readers will experience it, the reporting can shape the design from the beginning. A surprising pattern may suggest an unexpected visual treatment. A difficult comparison might change the direction of the investigation.

It’s closer to developing a documentary, an exhibition, or an interactive essay than assembling a standard webpage.

For readers, the result is immediately noticeable. You don’t always know what the next scroll will do. On much of the commercial web, that uncertainty would be a usability problem. Here, within a coherent story, it can become a reason to keep reading.

But the design is never entitled to attention merely because it moves. The story has to earn the movement.

That tension between creativity and restraint is where The Pudding becomes especially interesting. Its best work is not a demonstration of everything a browser can do. It is an argument for doing the particular thing that a subject needs.

Stories that change as you read them

The easiest way to understand The Pudding is to compare stories that have almost nothing in common. A linguistic investigation, a report about clothing sizes, and a personal account of infertility are not obvious neighbors on an editorial calendar. Yet each reveals why the publication’s approach deserves attention.

Their shared achievement is making the reader’s experience part of the explanation.

A surprisingly revealing investigation of ordinary language

In May 2026, Russell Samora published Comparisons as Predictable as the Sunrise, an investigation of approximately 200,000 similes extracted from popular fiction.

The subject initially sounds like something belonging in a linguistics journal. Why would anyone spend time analyzing comparisons built around the familiar construction “as … as …”? Surely everyone already understands expressions such as “as cool as a cucumber” or “as hard as a rock.”

That assumption is precisely what makes the story interesting.

The familiar phrases turn out to have measurable personalities. Some adjectives are repeatedly paired with a narrow selection of nouns. Others invite far more variation. Certain nouns appear with many qualities, while others are almost inseparable from a particular expression.

Instead of beginning with a complicated statistical framework, the article asks readers to complete a simile. It’s a tiny interaction, but an unusually well-chosen one. You enter the subject as a writer rather than as someone preparing to inspect charts.

Once you’ve made a choice, the collected examples begin to matter differently. You’re not merely being told that writers repeat themselves. You’ve been given a chance to notice your own instinctive response before encountering the larger evidence.

The project then moves through distributions, recurring linguistic patterns, and peculiar exceptions. It examines why the same objects become attached to particular adjectives and why some comparisons retain their familiarity across generations of writing.

Consider the different roles played by a cucumber and the word “hell.” One is strongly associated with a familiar expression of calmness. The other works across many descriptions, sometimes functioning more as an intensifier than as a literal comparison.

A conventional account could describe both findings. But the interactive presentation makes the shape of language visible. Readers can move between individual examples and aggregate patterns without mentally reconstructing the relationship from a succession of paragraphs.

There is another important detail. The author explains the limits of the investigation.

The dataset concentrates on a specific grammatical construction rather than every possible simile in English. The process involved extracting candidate phrases, filtering irrelevant results, normalizing expressions, and using language models in parts of the analysis. The article acknowledges that individual classifications can be imperfect even when the overall dataset reveals useful patterns.

That methodological transparency is fundamental to the piece’s credibility. The visualization makes the investigation approachable, while the explanation makes it possible to understand what has actually been measured.

The charm attracts attention; the reporting justifies it.

There is also a pleasing contradiction at the heart of the project. A website devoted to an old-fashioned literary device relies on computational analysis to reveal something about human imagination. Technology isn’t the subject. It’s the means of noticing what thousands of separate reading experiences would struggle to uncover.

And unlike a conventional infographic, the story doesn’t end when you’ve seen the central finding. Small discoveries continue to emerge from the examples. A word you assumed was versatile turns out to be predictable. A familiar comparison becomes stranger once you’re asked to account for its popularity.

The result feels less like receiving a lesson and more like being allowed into someone’s investigation.

A clothing-size story that exposes a larger problem

Sizing Chaos, published in February 2026, approaches a very different subject. Reported by Amanda Sakuma with Jan Diehm, it explores the mismatch between women’s bodies and the systems used to label and sell clothing.

Almost everyone understands the practical irritation of inconsistent clothing sizes. A garment marked Medium in one store can fit like a Large in another. Measurements vary across brands. The same shopper may need completely different sizes depending on where they buy.

That experience is easy to dismiss as an ordinary inconvenience.

The Pudding makes it difficult to dismiss.

The story begins with the changing body of a girl moving through adolescence and adulthood. Measurements and clothing classifications appear as the narrative develops. Readers watch the relationship between body size and the retail system become increasingly strained.

Instead of presenting a single average body measurement and asking readers to interpret its significance, the story develops a visual account of what happens to the fit between people and products.

It examines a particularly uncomfortable contradiction: the available clothing-size system does not consistently accommodate the bodies of the population it is supposed to serve.

The analysis draws on population measurements and compares them with clothing-size conventions, including the size charts of multiple retailers. It addresses the inconsistency between nominal sizes and real measurements, along with the limitations of conventional retail ranges.

The subject stops being about shopping frustration and becomes about who the system was built to accommodate.

This is where visual storytelling has an advantage over a densely written report. Readers can follow the changing measurements and compare them with the categories available in the market. The mismatch is presented as something observable, rather than something readers must accept on the author’s authority.

The work is also an example of choosing the right narrative perspective. Starting with a young person whose body changes over time makes the subject immediate. It avoids treating adult clothing sizes as a detached statistical puzzle.

There is a personal dimension to the reporting, but that doesn’t replace the evidence. It supplies a reason to care about the evidence.

The distinction matters. A weaker piece might rely on frustration alone, assembling anecdotes about badly fitting jeans before calling for industry reform. Another might produce a detailed chart of measurements that never connects with the lives of actual shoppers.

The Pudding combines those approaches without allowing either to carry the whole argument.

The data explains the pattern; the human experience explains why the pattern matters.

The story also makes a useful point about design outside journalism. Many digital products force people into predefined categories. Sometimes those categories are reasonably convenient. Sometimes they’re inherited from systems that no longer represent the people using them.

Clothing sizes offer a particularly tangible example because the consequences are physical, financial, and emotional. But the underlying question travels easily into other fields: how long should a system continue to define people after its original assumptions stop making sense?

A reader doesn’t need to be especially interested in fashion to recognize the importance of that question.

The emotional possibilities of a browser

In March 2026, A Journey Through Infertility took the publication’s experiments in another direction.

Written by Lam Thuy Vo, with Jan Diehm and Michelle Pera-McGhee, the piece presents an interactive journey through in vitro fertilization from two perspectives: parent and child.

Readers choose a perspective and move through a sequence of illustrated experiences. The structure allows them to switch viewpoints rather than simply receive a single linear account.

The decision to provide two perspectives changes the emotional architecture of the story.

The subject could have been presented as a conventional personal essay about medical treatment, uncertainty, disappointment, and hope. That would have been a legitimate form of journalism. The Pudding instead uses the browser to organize the experiences into a journey in which the chosen viewpoint affects the way the narrative is encountered.

There is no reason to assume that clicking produces greater empathy automatically. Readers don’t acquire another person’s lived experience by navigating an illustrated story. Interactive design has limits, especially when the subject is intimate and emotionally complicated.

Yet the format creates space for a different kind of engagement. The reader must acknowledge that the experience has more than one position from which it can be understood.

The navigation doesn’t attempt to turn infertility into a competitive exercise or a puzzle with a correct solution. The interface exists to hold different parts of a story together.

That is a considerably more difficult design problem than animating a chart. Emotional stories require restraint. An interaction that feels playful in a music analysis might feel inappropriate in a narrative about reproductive medicine. Visual transitions that delight in a cultural investigation could become distracting when the subject concerns loss, uncertainty, or family.

The important editorial judgment is recognizing those differences.

There is also a more basic advantage to the form. Complex personal experiences often involve long sequences of decisions, developments, and competing interpretations. An interactive structure can create a sense of progression without compressing every event into a single block of text.

The design’s contribution is not to explain away the difficulty. It is to make the narrative’s structure more legible.

Placed beside the simile investigation and Sizing Chaos, the IVF story reveals how little sense it would make to prescribe one visual formula for the whole publication.

Each project has to invent enough of its own form to suit the reporting.

That ambition brings production costs and technical risks, but it also explains why The Pudding’s archive feels like a collection of individual works rather than a succession of pages generated from one template.

Three examples of the medium doing different jobs

These projects are useful precisely because they don’t share the same interaction pattern.

What the interaction contributes

The formats aren’t interchangeable. The strongest interaction is the one that gives the reader access to something the subject would otherwise conceal. That principle explains more about the publication’s editorial identity than its visual style, awards, or technology choices.

The lesson becomes especially apparent when trying to imagine these stories elsewhere.

The simile investigation could be adapted into a printed feature, but readers would lose the opportunity to test their own linguistic instincts against the evidence. Sizing Chaos could work as a documentary, but its careful progression through comparisons would require a different editorial structure. The IVF story could become a personal essay, but the experience of choosing a viewpoint would disappear.

None of those alternatives would necessarily be inferior. Each medium has different strengths.

The Pudding’s achievement is recognizing what becomes possible when the website itself is treated as the primary storytelling medium instead of the final destination for an article conceived in another format.

Curiosity is a serious editorial instinct

The Pudding’s subject selection may be its most underrated quality.

Editors are often encouraged to work backward from established audience interests. A technology publication covers technology. A business publication covers business. A politics publication follows political events. Such specialization gives readers understandable expectations, and it gives publishers an easier way to describe themselves.

The Pudding works with a less predictable proposition. The connecting subject is curiosity itself.

One month, it might examine language. Another, relationships. Then clothing, politics, cooking, music, or an unusual question about how people behave.

There’s no guarantee that someone fascinated by literary similes will also care about the geometry of chopping onions. A reader arriving for a story about film dialogue may have little interest in the analysis of old restaurant menus.

Yet the publication has a recognizable identity without requiring a narrow subject area.

That identity comes from its editorial method. Stories begin with questions that appear answerable but haven’t necessarily been examined with sufficient imagination. They then use original analysis, unusual datasets, visual experiments, or interactive reporting to investigate.

A reader learns to expect an interesting question pursued further than expected.

This makes the site especially suited to the kind of discovery that once characterized independent online publishing. You arrive for one subject, find another you never searched for, and spend an unexpectedly long time reading it.

Consider the questions represented in the publication’s recent archive.

The 2026 project A love story traces changes in relationships through a longitudinal survey. In pursuit of democracy examines how the word democracy has been used in the United States Congressional Record since 1880. The publication has also explored historical restaurant menus, the representation of animals in children’s books, and thousands of moments associated with human happiness.

On paper, this is an unusual editorial mixture.

But the range becomes coherent when the stories are considered as investigations of familiar assumptions.

People assume they understand romantic relationships because they have personal experience of them. They assume a politically important word has a stable meaning. They assume restaurant menus are lists of food rather than artifacts of changing social tastes. They assume the characters in children’s stories are innocent artistic choices rather than material that might reveal recurring patterns.

The best questions start with something people have stopped examining.

That doesn’t mean every oddity deserves a full investigation. A question can be charming without leading anywhere. A dataset can be enormous without revealing anything important. An interactive experiment can be technically impressive while leaving its audience with little beyond admiration for the programming.

The Pudding’s editorial challenge is separating a promising curiosity from an interesting-sounding dead end.

This is a different discipline from collecting viral facts.

A viral fact is often presented as a finished surprise. It has already been packaged into a conclusion suitable for sharing. The audience’s job is to react.

A good Pudding-style story gives readers a reason to care about the process that produced the finding.

An investigation of restaurant menus, for example, becomes much more interesting when the menus serve as evidence of historical habits rather than decorative objects from another era. The question isn’t merely what people ordered. It concerns what those choices reveal, what the surviving records can establish, and what may have disappeared from the historical record.

The same principle applies to political language. Counting the frequency of a word only becomes journalism when someone examines what its use means in context. The word democracy can appear in arguments defending very different political arrangements. Its frequency alone cannot tell the complete story.

A count is not an explanation. It is material from which an explanation might be developed.

The publication’s investigations are strongest when they maintain that distinction.

The pleasure of following an unexpected question

There is a particular enjoyment in watching someone investigate something that seems too small to deserve a major editorial project.

The 2025 piece about dicing onions is a good example of the archive’s deliberately varied interests. The question concerns how to cut an onion into pieces of relatively uniform size. It’s a domestic, practical problem rather than a matter of national importance.

But it contains an appealing investigative structure.

There is an assumption about how a familiar task should be performed. There are possible techniques. There is a physical outcome that can be compared. A question that might otherwise produce a short kitchen tip becomes suitable for measurement and visual explanation.

The point isn’t that everything in ordinary life needs to be quantified. Quite the opposite. A carefully chosen measurement can make an ordinary experience more interesting without pretending it is historically important.

The Pudding allows space for different levels of seriousness.

Some pieces tackle structural inequality. Others examine culture, language, and private behavior. A few are playful experiments that exist because someone was unusually curious about a particular thing.

This variation is refreshing. It allows readers to encounter difficult subjects without insisting that every page be solemn, and to enjoy lighter topics without treating them as inferior journalism.

Such freedom is also a reminder that editorial seriousness and a serious tone aren’t identical.

A publication can take its evidence seriously while finding its subject funny. It can use humor to introduce a difficult argument. It can let a reader enjoy the shape of a chart while gradually revealing why the data matters.

The Pudding describes this philosophy through the familiar idea of making difficult material easier to approach. Its own pitching guidelines insist that an apparently light subject should have something substantial underneath the surface.

That expectation stops the format from becoming a gallery of technical experiments.

Without it, visual journalism risks turning into spectacle. Beautiful interfaces emerge, readers admire them, and the underlying material becomes almost incidental.

Curiosity has to lead somewhere.

The difference between novelty and discovery

The words novelty and discovery can sound interchangeable, but they describe very different experiences.

Novelty catches attention because something looks unfamiliar. Discovery rewards attention because the unfamiliar thing reveals something previously unnoticed.

An elaborate scrolling animation can provide novelty. A chart that responds to user input can provide novelty. A website that behaves like a game can provide novelty.

None of those features, by itself, makes a good story.

Discovery occurs when the interactive element changes how a reader interprets information.

In a story about language, readers may recognize that their instinctive comparisons belong to larger linguistic patterns. In a story about clothing sizes, they may see that a problem they attributed to personal measurements arises partly from the categories retailers offer. In a story about a sensitive human experience, they may encounter a perspective that complicates the account they expected.

The reward is an altered understanding, not the animation.

The distinction also explains why The Pudding works as a discovery destination. Readers aren’t necessarily returning for updates to a familiar subject. They’re returning because the publication has earned their trust in the process of finding interesting things.

That trust is demanding.

Every ambitious story has to produce a new result. It cannot merely reproduce the interaction that made the previous article popular. A repeating novelty eventually stops feeling novel.

The publication therefore takes on the unusual burden of repeatedly inventing the form in which its reporting will appear.

That can be inefficient, unpredictable, and difficult to manage. It’s also a large part of what makes the archive worth exploring.

The reporting behind the beautiful pages

The Pudding’s work can look deceptively effortless. A story scrolls smoothly, a visualization responds to movement, and a question turns into a memorable sequence of discoveries.

What readers don’t see immediately is the research, failed prototypes, data cleaning, editing, and software development required to make that experience feel natural.

The apparent simplicity is the product of unusually complicated work.

The publication’s public explanation of its process reveals a useful fact: its projects are not assembled by choosing a visual effect and looking for a dataset to match it.

The starting point is generally an editorial question.

An author proposes an investigation, identifies the evidence required, and considers what kind of answer the available data might support. Only after examining that evidence can the team decide how the story should unfold.

The result might be a scrollytelling narrative, an interactive chart, a set of comparisons, an illustrated journey, or an experiment built around the reader’s input.

Sometimes it turns out that an idea doesn’t deserve publication.

The Pudding openly acknowledges abandoning projects during development. Its relatively loose relationship with breaking-news deadlines allows contributors to take risks that would be difficult in a newsroom required to publish on a fixed schedule.

The willingness to abandon a weak story is as important as the willingness to attempt a strange one.

That may sound obvious, but there is a considerable difference between discovering that a hypothesis is unsupported and pushing forward because a visual design has already consumed weeks of work.

A technically ambitious project creates its own pressure to survive. Once the code exists, the temptation to justify it becomes powerful. A publication that treats visual design as reporting has to resist that temptation.

The question must remain more important than the implementation.

A pitch must have an argument, not just a topic

The publication’s pitching guidelines are unusually revealing.

Contributors are asked to explain the argument behind a proposed story, what assumption it challenges, why the investigation belongs in a visual format, and how the necessary evidence might be collected.

This is a demanding standard, especially for an editor attracted to unusual subjects.

A proposal about the history of music, for instance, is a topic. It might produce an excellent article, but the subject alone doesn’t tell an editor what readers will discover.

A proposal examining whether a particular musical technique became more common over a defined period is closer to an investigation. It has a question, possible evidence, and an outcome that could challenge the original assumption.

The distinction becomes even stronger when the author identifies a reason the findings need to be heard or seen rather than merely summarized.

The data must have something to say, and the visual form must have a reason to exist.

The guidelines also insist on evidence. A promising investigation requires at least a plausible plan for obtaining and analyzing the underlying material.

That requirement prevents a familiar weakness of visually ambitious digital projects: an attractive idea is approved before anyone establishes whether the information necessary to support it actually exists.

There is no guarantee that collecting the data will produce a useful result. Sources may be inconsistent. Historical records may have gaps. The available sample may not represent the population being discussed. A popular assumption might turn out to be true, leaving the author with no meaningful surprise.

Good reporting can still emerge from an expected result, but the author has to find the argument worth making.

The pitch process treats this uncertainty as part of the work rather than an inconvenience to conceal.

A particularly telling detail is the publication’s emphasis on human curiosity. Its current guidelines acknowledge the use of AI tools during production but reject pitches submitted solely by AI agents. The team wants a specific hypothesis, original thinking, and a reason someone genuinely cares about the question.

This is not nostalgia for a pre-computer newsroom. Data analysis, programming, and computational tools have always been central to The Pudding’s approach.

The distinction is between using machines to investigate a question and allowing a machine to substitute generic subject selection for editorial judgment.

The software can assist with the investigation. It cannot supply a convincing reason to care.

The experiment that asked AI to replace the newsroom

In 2024, The Pudding published one of its most revealing self-examinations: Can an AI make a data-driven, visual story?

Russell Samora and Michelle Pera-McGhee attempted to use Anthropic’s Claude to reproduce the process behind a typical Pudding article. They divided the work into stages involving idea generation, data collection and analysis, storyboarding, prototyping, development, and writing.

The project is interesting because the team didn’t simply ask a chatbot for an article and judge the result.

They tried to reconstruct the workflow.

Claude was asked to propose editorial ideas, develop an approach to data, outline visual sequences, create prototype charts, and produce software for the finished presentation. At different stages, the team evaluated what worked and what required intervention.

The experiment exposes the gap between generating plausible material and making defensible editorial decisions.

The initial ideas sounded reasonably familiar. They involved subjects such as representation in video games, the environmental effects of fast fashion, and emotional patterns in popular music.

None was inherently absurd. But the team found that plausible topics did not automatically become sharp stories.

A broad investigation of emotional language in popular songs, for example, requires decisions about the songs to include, the period being studied, the unit of measurement, the limits of sentiment analysis, and the claims the evidence can support.

Without those decisions, the proposed analysis risks resembling a complete editorial plan while remaining insufficiently grounded.

The software was better at some parts of the process than others. It could assist with prototyping and chart development, sometimes rapidly. But the team also encountered work that looked complete before essential details had been properly resolved.

The published experiment records problems with implementation, judgment, and the difficulty of producing something that felt genuinely distinctive rather than statistically plausible.

It’s worth remembering that the experiment involved the models available in 2024. It should not be treated as a definitive assessment of what AI systems can do in October 2026.

Its lasting interest lies elsewhere.

The experiment makes the publication’s normally invisible editorial decisions visible.

A completed visual story conceals much of the uncertainty involved in making it. Readers see a polished explanation and may assume the investigation followed a straightforward path.

The AI project reveals how frequently an author must reconsider the scope of an idea, question a proposed measurement, revise the narrative, or reject a visual treatment.

Those decisions require attention to the audience, the limitations of the evidence, and the possibility that the most obvious story is not the right one.

The publication’s willingness to document its own experiment also prevents the result from becoming a simplistic argument against technology. The team acknowledges tasks where AI proved useful and incorporates those observations into its assessment.

That balance is more convincing than treating the tools as either miraculous replacements or irrelevant distractions.

The investigation concerns what people contribute to a complex editorial process, particularly when the final work must combine statistical accuracy, visual clarity, and a recognizable point of view.

And it brings the discussion back to The Pudding’s central strength: the publication doesn’t treat writing, programming, and design as isolated products to be assembled at the end.

They are different parts of the same investigation.

A story can be designed before it is written

Conventional editorial production often follows a familiar sequence. A reporter produces material. An editor determines what belongs in the article. A designer creates supporting graphics. A developer implements anything requiring interaction.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that arrangement. Specialization allows large news organizations to produce technically complex work at scale.

But it can also encourage the assumption that a story is primarily a sequence of sentences, with everything else serving a supporting role.

The Pudding’s process begins to break down that distinction.

A visual sequence can carry an argument without requiring a paragraph to explain every step.

Consider a dataset showing a relationship across several decades. A conventional report might place the full chart on the page immediately and describe the important periods beneath it.

A different approach could reveal the same chart progressively, allowing the reader to see how the pattern develops and where the explanation becomes more complicated.

Neither approach is inherently superior. The second only earns its complexity when that progression contributes to the reasoning.

Yet thinking about the visual structure early permits an author to ask questions that might otherwise be neglected.

Would readers understand the relationship better by comparing individual cases first? Would an unexpected result be more convincing if the earlier expectation were made explicit? Does the data need geographic context? Are categories being combined in a way that conceals important differences?

These are editorial questions, not merely design specifications.

The interaction can also reveal problems in the evidence. If a chart only works when the axis is distorted or several inconvenient categories are hidden, the proposed visual treatment may be exposing a weakness in the analysis.

If a story cannot explain why one data point belongs to a particular category, perhaps the classification requires further examination.

Design becomes a way of testing the reporting.

That relationship between analysis and presentation is particularly interesting for publishers building stories around unusual datasets. Data rarely arrives in the form required for a polished visual essay.

Records have to be collected, cleaned, compared, and interpreted. Categories must be defined. Uncertainty has to be handled. The author must determine which patterns are meaningful and which are artifacts of collection methods or statistical choices.

Only then does the visual form have something reliable to communicate.

The Pudding’s resources section offers a substantial collection of material about that process. It includes articles and presentations on data work, design, storytelling, interactive development, and the judgment involved in deciding whether to continue a project.

The material is useful because it doesn’t present visual journalism as a mysterious talent available only to gifted designers.

It treats the work as a discipline involving research, criticism, experimentation, and revision.

The browser is a production environment

There is a technical side to the operation, but it is less exotic than the finished stories sometimes suggest.

The team describes working with familiar web technologies, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, D3.js, and Svelte. It also uses conventional analysis and design tools, alongside specialized libraries for scroll-based experiences.

The surprising part is not the list of technologies.

It is what happens when those tools are directed by editorial questions rather than standard product requirements.

A typical commercial website uses interactive components to support tasks: searching, selecting products, managing an account, submitting information, or completing a transaction.

A Pudding story may use related technical capabilities to reveal an argument, introduce a contradiction, or compare a reader’s assumptions with observed evidence.

The mechanics are familiar. Their editorial application is less common.

The publication also shares technical resources and, where possible, data and code associated with its work. That makes the project interesting beyond its readership. Developers, visualization specialists, and journalists can study not only what the site produces but how some of its production choices are made.

This openness matters because visual journalism is still developing its conventions.

Readers already understand much of the grammar of conventional articles. A headline introduces the subject. Paragraphs advance the narrative. Quotations represent sources. A caption explains an image.

Interactive essays lack an equally universal grammar.

One story may require a reader to scroll through a changing visualization. Another might use keyboard navigation. A third could ask for a prediction, while a fourth might offer multiple narrative paths.

Every unfamiliar interaction creates a small design problem: how does the reader know what to do, and why should they do it?

The team therefore has to solve both an editorial problem and a usability problem.

Successful visual storytelling makes the explanation feel natural without concealing the mechanics so thoroughly that readers become confused.

And because individual stories can demand different solutions, the publication has built an archive that functions partly as an ongoing experiment in what online journalism can become.

A different kind of publishing ambition

The Pudding challenges another assumption about digital publishing: that a successful website must constantly produce new material to remain relevant.

Traditional news organizations have legitimate reasons to publish frequently. Audiences need timely reporting about events, decisions, and developments that affect their lives. Breaking news also creates opportunities to correct misinformation while public attention is concentrated on a subject.

The Pudding isn’t trying to replace that function.

Its own editorial identity rests on a different calculation. An unusual story that remains interesting for years may be worth more to its readers than dozens of pieces that become irrelevant after a weekend.

That changes the economics of attention.

An article about a breaking political development may attract readers for a short period because people need immediate information. A thoroughly reported visual essay about literary language has a different lifespan. Its central subject doesn’t disappear when the day’s news changes.

The same is true of many investigations into cultural patterns, historical records, and familiar human behavior.

They remain discoverable because the questions remain interesting.

This doesn’t guarantee that older interactive stories will continue to work perfectly. Web technologies change. External data services evolve. Browsers introduce new restrictions. Third-party authentication systems can become unavailable.

A static article can often survive years with minimal technical attention. An ambitious interactive work may require maintenance long after publication.

Editorial longevity and technical longevity are different problems.

Still, the decision to produce stories with a longer shelf life creates something unusual: an archive readers can explore without feeling that everything worth reading happened yesterday.

The homepage reinforces this identity. Its entries invite visitors to browse subjects rather than simply consume the newest update.

A reader can arrive through a specific story and find another whose subject has nothing to do with the original reason for visiting.

That is closer to the experience of browsing a well-curated magazine or collection of essays than following an endless stream of updates.

An editorial identity that doesn’t require constant repetition

Many publications establish their identity through a recognizable format. Their articles use familiar headline structures, predictable lengths, consistent layouts, and recurring sections.

There are excellent reasons for consistency. It reduces production costs, makes navigation easier, and gives audiences reliable expectations.

The Pudding’s consistency is less visible.

A story about clothing sizes may look and behave nothing like a project about language. An intimate illustrated journey may share few visual components with a politically oriented data investigation.

Yet the work still feels connected.

The editorial identity lives in the quality of the question and the manner of investigation.

That is harder to reproduce than a design template.

A competitor could imitate the visual appearance of an individual Pudding article. It could adopt unusual illustrations, animated graphics, playful typography, or scroll-triggered transitions.

Reproducing the publication’s judgment about which subjects justify that effort would be much more difficult.

The value lies in decisions that happen before the reader arrives: which questions deserve attention, what evidence can answer them, and what kind of experience would clarify the result.

That also makes the publication a useful reference for independent website owners.

The lesson is not that every site should hire creative developers and produce elaborate interactive essays. Most publications have budgets, schedules, and audiences that would make such an approach impractical.

The more transferable insight is that a website’s editorial personality can come from its choices rather than from its volume of content.

A publication that investigates unexpected questions thoroughly may create a stronger reason to return than one that publishes interchangeable articles about topics already covered everywhere else.

This is especially relevant when many websites compete for visibility using similar content structures, popular search phrases, and increasingly automated production.

An original investigation gives readers something they cannot obtain merely by asking for a generic summary of a subject.

Recognition without abandoning the oddities

The Pudding’s approach has also received recognition from the professional journalism and design communities.

Its published awards record includes honors for online journalism, visual storytelling, and design. The portfolio has received recognition through organizations such as the Society for News Design, and individual projects have attracted awards for their treatment of specific subjects.

The publication also lists a Peabody Award for digital journalism among its earlier honors. Its 2026 work on women’s clothing sizes received recognition for visual storytelling.

Such recognition is relevant, but only up to a point.

An award doesn’t explain why an interactive article works. It cannot replace an evaluation of the reporting, nor does it guarantee that every project in the archive is equally successful.

What it does establish is that the publication’s unusual editorial approach has been taken seriously beyond the audience attracted by its playful presentation.

The site belongs in a discussion about journalism, not merely a collection of beautiful websites.

That distinction is particularly important because visual sophistication can sometimes make editorial work appear less serious than a conventional newspaper article.

A playful color palette does not mean that the investigation is superficial. An illustration does not disqualify a story from rigorous reporting. A reader who interacts with a piece rather than simply reading it has not necessarily abandoned critical thinking.

The quality of the work depends on the sources, evidence, methods, and editorial decisions supporting the presentation.

The Pudding is useful precisely because it offers examples worth examining on those terms.

The cost of making things differently

Originality is appealing until someone has to pay for it.

A conventional publishing system becomes more economical as its processes are standardized. A familiar content-management system, reusable templates, established editorial workflow, and predictable article structure reduce the effort required for each new piece.

The Pudding often chooses a more expensive path.

Its custom essays can require substantial reporting and development work. According to its current contributor guidelines, the standard rate for a freelance project handled from investigation through front-end production is $7,200, with adjusted arrangements when responsibilities are shared. Projects may take several months to complete.

Those details are revealing because they attach real labor and cost to the finished experience.

Custom journalism is expensive because the work cannot always be reused.

A new dataset may require a different collection method. An unusual argument may demand a different visual structure. An interactive device developed for one story may be inappropriate for another.

This is a less economical system than filling familiar page templates, but economy is only one measure of publishing success.

The question is whether the resulting work creates enough reader interest, editorial distinction, and lasting relevance to justify the investment.

The publication has historically supported its editorial work partly through commercial visualization projects associated with Polygraph. Its website also offers ways for readers to contribute, including Patreon. These arrangements illustrate different ways independent editorial work can be financed, although the precise revenue mix should not be assumed without current financial disclosures.

There is no universal business model hidden inside The Pudding that every digital publisher can adopt.

The transferable principle is editorial rather than financial.

If your main product is original work, the production process has to protect the time required to make it original.

That principle conflicts with the pressure to publish constantly, especially when performance is measured through short-term traffic.

A publication may receive fewer immediate impressions from one deeply researched story than from dozens of cheaply produced pages. But the two outputs are not equivalent. Their ability to earn attention, citations, return visits, and long-term recognition may differ considerably.

The Pudding offers an example of a publisher willing to treat depth and distinctiveness as strategic choices rather than decorative extras.

Where beautiful interaction becomes a problem

It would be easy to praise The Pudding’s technical creativity without considering the complications it introduces. The more interesting assessment recognizes that interactive journalism has weaknesses of its own.

An elaborate experience can make a story harder to understand as easily as it can make the story clearer.

Consider a reader who wants a straightforward answer to a question. A conventional article may establish its central finding within the opening paragraphs, then provide supporting evidence and context.

An interactive essay might require several minutes of scrolling before the complete argument becomes visible.

That delay can be useful when the reader’s gradual discovery is part of the explanation. It becomes frustrating when the author is merely withholding information to create an artificial sense of drama.

The distinction isn’t always obvious.

Scrollytelling also controls the order in which information appears. That can make an argument easier to follow, but it reduces the freedom to scan, jump between sections, or compare distant parts of the story.

The reader may be exploring the evidence, but the author still decides which evidence appears and when.

This is an important reminder that interaction doesn’t guarantee neutrality.

A graphic can guide attention toward a particular pattern while making competing interpretations difficult to examine. A limited selection of controls can suggest freedom without offering a meaningful choice. An impressive visual sequence can persuade emotionally before readers understand the assumptions behind it.

None of these problems is unique to The Pudding. They are risks inherent in the format.

The accessibility challenge

Interactive storytelling also raises practical questions about accessibility.

A conventional article with semantic headings, readable text, descriptive images, and sensible navigation can be relatively straightforward to make accessible. Complex visualizations require more deliberate work.

Can the story be understood without relying on color alone? Can someone navigate it using a keyboard? Does a screen reader receive the information conveyed by animated graphics? What happens when motion is reduced or disabled? Does the experience remain coherent when text is enlarged?

These questions become more complicated when every story has its own technical structure.

A control that behaves intuitively with a mouse may be awkward on a touchscreen. An animation designed for a large desktop display might become difficult to follow on a narrow mobile screen.

Custom design increases the responsibility to test experiences beyond the designer’s own device.

This does not mean interactive journalism is inherently inaccessible. Carefully designed alternatives, structured explanations, accessible controls, and thoughtfully presented data can make sophisticated work available to different audiences.

But accessibility cannot be treated as a final cosmetic adjustment.

If the argument exists entirely inside an animation that some readers cannot perceive or control, those readers have been excluded from a portion of the reporting.

The Pudding’s experimentation is most persuasive when it demonstrates not only what browsers can display but how those experiences can remain understandable to people using them in different ways.

The danger of making evidence feel more certain than it is

A second problem concerns the authority of polished visualization.

A rough table of figures often encourages skepticism because the data looks unfinished. A beautifully animated chart can create the opposite impression: the information appears precise, complete, and settled.

But sophisticated presentation doesn’t eliminate uncertainty.

The underlying data may contain sampling bias. Important cases may be missing. An apparent relationship may depend on the categories chosen for comparison. Historical sources may reflect the priorities and limitations of the people who preserved them.

The visual language of precision can make these problems less apparent.

A convincing chart is not necessarily a convincing argument.

The Pudding’s simile investigation offers a useful illustration of responsible practice because it explains its extraction methods and acknowledges limitations in the dataset.

Its clothing-size investigation also places measurements and definitions at the center of the analysis rather than asking readers to trust an unspecified impression.

Such disclosures matter, especially when stories address subjects involving inequality, health, politics, or public policy.

Readers should be able to distinguish between a measured result, a reasonable interpretation, and a conclusion the available evidence cannot establish.

Interactive work can support that distinction by exposing sources, definitions, methodological decisions, and alternative views of the data.

But those features must be accessible without requiring an unreasonable amount of detective work.

The best result isn’t a page overflowing with methodological footnotes. It’s an experience that communicates its central argument clearly while allowing interested readers to examine how the authors reached it.

Not every story needs to be interactive

There is a broader lesson for people who admire The Pudding and want to reproduce its approach.

The goal should never be to make every article behave like a Pudding article.

Some subjects are best explained through direct reporting and careful prose. Others need photographs, interviews, audio, or documentary footage. A single well-designed static chart can sometimes communicate more effectively than an elaborate animated sequence.

Interaction has a cost for both author and audience.

The author has to create, maintain, and test it. The reader has to learn how to operate it. If the interaction contributes little, both parties are spending effort without gaining much.

This is why the publication’s own insistence on a strong visual rationale is so important.

The format should emerge from the question.

A story about changes across time may benefit from a progression that follows those changes. A comparison involving many possible categories may benefit from filtering. An investigation based on personal experience may benefit from giving readers a choice of narrative perspective.

But a clear factual statement doesn’t become better journalism merely because it appears after an animation.

Editorial restraint is part of good interactive design.

The Pudding’s more ambitious pieces make the strongest argument for that principle precisely because their technical decisions are attached to recognizable editorial purposes.

When something works, the reader remembers what was discovered, not just the cleverness of the interaction.

That is the difference between a memorable digital publication and a portfolio of attractive web experiments.

Questions worth asking before you explore

Is The Pudding free to read?

The publication’s visual essays are publicly accessible on its website without a general subscription paywall. Readers can open the archive, browse subjects, and explore individual stories directly through a browser.

Some projects may involve optional contributions, while the publication offers readers opportunities to support its work through Patreon and other donation arrangements.

The distinction between accessing a story and financially supporting the publication is useful. Readers can discover its work without making a purchase, while those who appreciate the reporting have ways to contribute toward the time required to produce it.

Individual interactive projects may have their own requirements, particularly if they involve connecting an external service or supplying personal input. The sensible approach is to review those requirements before participating.

For a first visit, there’s no need to register or commit to anything. Open a visual essay that sounds interesting and follow the story.

Do I need to understand statistics or data visualization?

No. Many of The Pudding’s strongest stories are designed around questions rather than technical knowledge.

You don’t need to understand a statistical index before beginning the simile investigation. You don’t need experience interpreting population datasets to appreciate why inconsistent clothing sizes create problems.

The stories generally establish a familiar situation and introduce the relevant evidence as the argument develops.

Some projects contain complicated analyses, and technically curious readers may want to examine the methods in greater detail. That material is part of what gives the reporting its credibility.

But the purpose of visual storytelling is partly to reduce the amount of specialist knowledge required to recognize an important pattern.

There is a difference between making a complex subject accessible and making the subject simplistic. The Pudding is most successful when readers understand the central observation without losing the opportunity to examine the underlying complexity.

If an interaction is unfamiliar, take a moment to look for navigation instructions. Some experiences are controlled mainly by scrolling, while others offer choices or more direct exploration.

Does it work on mobile devices?

The Pudding is a web publication, and its projects can be opened in mobile browsers. The quality of a particular experience may depend on the story and the device being used.

Interactive work places different demands on a phone than on a large monitor. Complex charts have less horizontal space. Detailed comparisons may require different navigation. Animations can feel quite different when scrolling with a thumb rather than a mouse.

A well-designed mobile version may reorganize the material rather than simply shrink it.

If you encounter a particularly dense investigation, opening it on a larger screen may make comparisons easier. That isn’t a universal requirement, and it shouldn’t be interpreted as a substitute for accessible mobile design.

The right device depends partly on the work itself.

A narrative built around sequential illustrations may feel natural on a phone. An investigation requiring close inspection of many individual data points may benefit from desktop viewing.

The best experience is the one that lets you concentrate on the story rather than its controls.

Is The Pudding a news website?

It is a digital journalism publication, but it does not operate primarily as a breaking-news service.

Its editorial mission emphasizes cultural questions and subjects that benefit from visual investigation rather than immediate coverage of unfolding events.

That means visitors shouldn’t expect conventional daily reporting, live news updates, or comprehensive coverage of a particular political or economic beat.

The distinction is important because journalism encompasses more than current events.

Investigative reporting, documentary work, explanatory journalism, historical analysis, and data-based investigations can all produce journalism without following a daily news cycle.

The Pudding occupies a distinctive part of that field.

It investigates claims, examines evidence, presents arguments, and publishes original reporting. Its unusual appearance and playful range of topics do not place it outside journalism.

Indeed, the publication is particularly interesting because it asks what reporting can become when the final product is created for an interactive browser rather than adapted from a print article.

How reliable are the stories?

The strongest reason to trust a Pudding investigation is the evidence it provides, not the sophistication of its graphics.

Readers should look for source information, explanations of the datasets, methodological notes, and a clear distinction between observation and interpretation.

These elements vary across projects because the investigations differ considerably.

A story based on literary text requires different checks from an analysis of population measurements. A personal narrative has different evidentiary responsibilities from a study of historical political speeches.

It is useful to ask what the data represents, how it was collected, whether the sample is appropriate, and what conclusions remain uncertain.

For stories addressing complicated or disputed subjects, readers should also consider corroborating evidence outside the publication.

There is no reason to grant an interactive article automatic authority merely because the presentation is exceptionally polished.

The Pudding’s willingness to discuss its research and development methods is a strength, but critical reading remains necessary even when the work is delightful.

A good visual essay should make informed skepticism easier, not discourage it.

Does The Pudding use artificial intelligence?

Yes. The publication’s contributor guidelines acknowledge the use of AI tools in its production process.

Its 2024 experiment with AI-generated visual journalism also provides an unusually detailed example of how the team examined both the capabilities and shortcomings of the technology.

Using AI as part of a research or development workflow is not the same as delegating editorial responsibility to it.

The Pudding’s publicly stated approach continues to emphasize original hypotheses, human judgment, specific evidence, and editorial curiosity.

That distinction matters for any publication using automated tools.

AI may assist with programming, early visual prototypes, categorization, or research preparation. The finished editorial work still requires someone to evaluate the sources, challenge the assumptions, assess errors, and decide what conclusions the evidence supports.

Readers should remain attentive to methodology, particularly when automated classification plays a part in the analysis.

The publication’s openness about some of these processes makes it worth examining for anyone interested in the relationship between journalism and emerging technologies.

Can journalists and designers contribute stories?

Yes. The Pudding accepts freelance pitches and provides public guidance about what it wants to commission.

The strongest proposals are built around specific questions with an argument worth testing. They identify potential evidence and explain why a visual approach would communicate something that a conventional article might struggle to show.

The publication doesn’t require every contributor to arrive with an entirely finished design and dataset. Its guidelines acknowledge collaboration across reporting, design, and development.

But proposals need enough originality and preparation to justify the considerable production effort.

For someone considering a pitch, the most useful preparation may be to study several published projects and identify what the visual form contributes to the journalism.

Then ask a difficult question of the proposed idea: would the reader discover something that could not be communicated as effectively through a straightforward written report?

If the answer is unclear, the visual concept may not yet be necessary.

If the answer is compelling, the idea may fit the publication’s distinctive editorial approach.

What should I read first?

A good starting point is Comparisons as Predictable as the Sunrise. It demonstrates the publication’s personality without requiring a particular interest in politics, technology, or specialized statistical analysis.

The familiar subject makes the opening immediately approachable, while the patterns revealed by the investigation provide a satisfying reason to continue.

For a more socially consequential example, try Sizing Chaos. Its treatment of an everyday frustration demonstrates how visual reporting can expose a structural problem.

A Journey Through Infertility offers a different introduction to the publication’s work, showing how an interactive experience can organize a sensitive personal narrative.

Readers particularly interested in digital journalism, AI, and the making of online stories should explore Can an AI make a data-driven, visual story?.

Don’t try to understand The Pudding from its homepage alone. The publication’s real personality appears inside the individual investigations, where the relationship between subject, evidence, and design becomes apparent.

Choose one story and experience it completely before moving to another. Switching between five projects after only a few seconds will reveal the visual diversity of the site, but much less of its editorial quality.

A good Pudding article is designed to reward sustained curiosity.

What makes The Pudding worth bookmarking?

The strongest reason is that its archive offers something different from the standardized experiences that dominate much of the web.

The publication does not promise daily coverage of every subject, and it isn’t trying to replace search engines, conventional news organizations, or general reference websites.

Instead, it provides a place to encounter carefully investigated questions that may never have occurred to you.

That makes it particularly appealing to readers who enjoy finding unusual online projects, but its significance extends beyond novelty.

The Pudding illustrates a form of publishing in which the website isn’t merely the channel through which journalism reaches the audience. The website’s possibilities influence which stories are pursued and how their evidence can be understood.

Its best projects reward observation, participation, skepticism, and patience. They remind readers that information can be presented as an experience without abandoning accuracy or editorial responsibility.

There is also something encouraging about the fact that such an archive exists independently of the usual requirement to make every page resemble a commercial content product.

The design is often playful. The questions can be peculiar. The investigations may take months. And the reader is occasionally required to do more than scroll past another headline.

The Pudding makes a case for an internet where publishing still means making something distinctive.

Its work doesn’t prove that every website should become interactive journalism. It proves a more interesting point: the browser remains an expressive medium whose possibilities are far from exhausted.

The next time an online article feels like an interchangeable block of text wrapped in advertising, recommendations, and familiar design components, The Pudding offers a useful contrast.

Someone asked an unexpected question. Someone investigated it. Someone built a small piece of the web around the answer.

And the result could only fully exist there.

Author:
Jan Bielik
CEO & Founder of Webiano Digital & Marketing Agency

This article is an original analysis supported by the sources cited below

The Pudding The publication’s official website and editorial archive, including its latest visual essays and interactive investigations.

About The Pudding The publication’s own account of its editorial mission, creative process, team structure, and recognition for journalism and visual storytelling.

Comparisons as Predictable as the Sunrise Russell Samora’s 2026 investigation of recurring similes in popular fiction, including the dataset, interactive presentation, and methodological explanation.

Sizing Chaos Amanda Sakuma and Jan Diehm’s visual investigation of women’s clothing sizes, body measurements, retail standards, and inconsistencies in the apparel industry.

A Journey Through Infertility Lam Thuy Vo’s interactive narrative about IVF, developed with Jan Diehm and Michelle Pera-McGhee, using parallel perspectives to structure the experience.

Can an AI make a data-driven, visual story? The publication’s documented 2024 experiment using AI to reproduce the development of a visual journalism project, from idea generation through implementation.

Pitch a Story Official editorial pitching guidelines describing The Pudding’s expectations for original ideas, evidence, visual storytelling, contributor compensation, and production timelines.

Our Resources The Pudding’s collection of technical guides, editorial process documentation, visualization resources, and material for journalists and developers working with interactive storytelling.

This article was prepared with the assistance of artificial intelligence tools. The content underwent expert human review, and Webiano Digital & Marketing Agency assumes editorial responsibility for its final version and publication.