Ritchie S. King

I make charts. I build web applications for exploring them. I write narrative explanations that rely on them.

Previously a staff data visualization engineer at Netflix; before that, eight years in journalism as senior editor for data visualization at FiveThirtyEight, a visual journalist at Quartz, and a science writer and graphics editor at the New York Times. I also wrote a programming textbook called Visual Storytelling with D3.

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Professional timeline

Explore my full interactive résumé →

Eight Years at Netflix

I spent eight years building data products that growth and finance leaders used to run the business, first as a senior, then as a staff data visualization engineer.

Highlights
  • Account sharing. I gave each phase of Netflix’s crackdown on password sharing its own focused tool and did much of the data modeling and engineering.
  • Business insights. I built apps that growth and finance leaders used to make decisions about pricing, revenue, payments, and more.
  • The agent era. On Netflix’s generative-AI task force for data, I worked on how viz engineers should build data products with the help of agents.
  • Growing the team. Designed a panel of screens and interviews for hiring viz engineers, adopted by other teams. Mentored two junior viz engineers to launch their own apps within a year.
  • Enabling analysts. Teamed up with a non-developer analytics engineer on a workforce analytics app; I designed a scalable architecture and coached him so he could take on full ownership.
  • Shared tools. A market-geography library most of the team’s apps built on, a standard way to retire apps without breaking links, a query generator for Druid, and core features in Netflix’s charting library.

The full story, on my résumé →

Select Interactive Projects

FiveThirtyEight, where I did most of my work in journalism, was not only shut down by ABC News — all the stories and interactive projects were deleted. I’ve rescued some of them from the Internet Archive and republished them here, on my site. They mostly work! (Shoutout Fable 5).

Map Usually Dem. districtsHighly competitiveUsually Republican
Democratic gerrymander
26327145
District partisan breakdown: Democratic gerrymander
Proportionally partisan
17482179
District partisan breakdown: Proportionally partisan
Majority minority
16982184
District partisan breakdown: Majority minority
Highly competitive
9424299
District partisan breakdown: Highly competitive
Compact (borders)
15599181
District partisan breakdown: Compact (borders)
Compact (algorithmic)
151104180
District partisan breakdown: Compact (algorithmic)
Current
16872195
District partisan breakdown: Current
Republican gerrymander
13921275
District partisan breakdown: Republican gerrymander

all 435 districts, redrawn seven ways, plus the current map for comparison

The Atlas of Redistricting

FiveThirtyEight · Jan 2018 · editor

Seven ways to redraw every congressional district in America. I edited this one, coordinating the cartography, data, and design. Had to convince the lone maintainer of an obscure, long-untouched district-drawing app to pull it out of purgatory and update it with the latest Census data.

Explore the full interactive
open the interactive

the scatterplot, before you start hacking

Hack Your Way to Scientific Glory

FiveThirtyEight · Aug 2015

A hands-on demonstration of “p-hacking,” the process by which research scientists make small tweaks to their studies to yield a statistically significant, and thus publishable, result. My colleagues had the idea; I found a suitable research question and backing data sets and designed and built the interactive.

Explore the full interactive

Static Graphics

A pile of charts, maps, and diagrams

Quartz & FiveThirtyEight · 2012–2018

Before the interactives, there were a lot of static graphics: hundreds of them, for stories about jobs reports, hot sauce, hurricanes, the World Cup, and the Supreme Court. The stories were deleted along with the sites. I dug the graphics back out of the Internet Archive and piled them up on one page.

Browse the pile

Awards & Judging

Honors for my visual journalism at Quartz and FiveThirtyEight.

Personal awards

Team awards

FiveThirtyEight, for work I built or edited; most came while I led the data visualization team (May 2016–Sep 2018).

Judging

My Book

Cover of Visual Storytelling with D3

Visual Storytelling with D3 (Addison-Wesley, 2014) — an introduction to data visualization for the web, walking through a complete project from raw data to a finished interactive.

“I’ll buy Ritchie a beer if I ever run into him.” — an Amazon reviewer

Data-Driven Explainers

Writing

Collected stories for the New York Times, mostly about science and health. All gift links and free to read.