By NYU Staff

WSJ Subprime Graphic

Who goes to work thinking how to put himself out of work? The Wall Street Journal’s online graphics editor Jovi Juan says that’s what gets him up every morning.

“We are spending more time designing simple software for reporters to do graphics themselves instead of having us do it for them,” says Juan. The goal? To free up his team so it can build the next big thing: data aggregation.

But after three years on the job, Juan is nowhere closer to the goal.

The problem is not the technology. Over the years, the team has built an photo editor software called “cropper”, a simple gadget that lets reporters who want to include photos with their online posts crop the images  to a standardized size and pixel for the WSJ.com. Another software, Chart Builder, was created for reporters to build flash. “We’ve made it a lot easier to use, but a number of reporters do not want to learn it.”

He said the toughest part of moving forward is the old mindset. But the majority of the reporting team would eventually have to move on. And only then can Jovi’s 8-person team start to aggregate Dow Jones data and make it sharable.

Eventually, everyone will be able to access to the data and visualize it. The idea is to build WSJ’s own Many Eyes program, an online data visualization tool.

Two or three years down the road, there is a distinct possibility to get paid through WSJ’s data site, Juan says.