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What is The Outlier?

The Outlier is an independent publication specialising in using data to create public service stories and visualisations. Our hope is that the work we do helps people to understand the world around them a little bit better. We focus primarily on the issues that have the most impact on people’s lives: education, health, climate, politics, economics and state services.

We try to tell these stories and explain the relationships between things using a combination of data analysis, visualisation and computer programming.

The Outlier is published by The Media Hack Collective(MHC) which is where we first started doing this type of work. Over time MHC evolved to work with client and contract work and The Outlier was created as a platform for the work that we wanted to do but often didn’t have funding for.

We started MHC to experiment with data and visual storytelling and we’ve won a number of awards for our work. We’re now bringing the skills we developed working in MHC to The Outlier.

Some of the awards we’ve won:

Who is The Outlier?

The Outlier is a small team of data journalists and programmers. We work collaboratively on all of our projects and we experiment a lot as we try and find better ways to tell stories. You can see the current team members on our team page.

How is The Outlier funded?

The Outlier is currently supported by the work we do for Media Hack Collective. This allows us to keep The Outlier focused on journalism while we are still able to produce work for paying clients. If you’re interested in hiring us check out our Media Hack Collective website or email us.

Over time we will be looking for other ways of sustaining The Outlier as both a journalism platform as well as a teaching tool.

Contact Us:
Email: info@theoutlier.co.za
Twitter: @outlierafrica