Let me start with, “I don’t know.” It’s my rhetorical question of the day.  My email inbox, my Twitter feed and my Facebook feed are full of graphs, infographics, pie charts and diagrams, but my multiple newspapers are still most gray with copy.

The New York Times does have some spectacular graphics in their electronic edition, but they are super complicated to produce and have layers of movement and clickable engagement—hard to produce daily. USA Today does do a good job of visualizing more stories, but limit the charts to one section of each page.

For example, with all the talk about a tax for goods crossing from Mexico to the US, there have been hundreds of articles written, but here is one graph that sums it up better than hundreds of words.

So what’s my point? Well, when you see a media trend in multiple channels that are growing, you go with it. Just like McDonald’s did with breakfast (it was not the first fast-food retailer to offer breakfast). Graphic journalists are helping to tell complicated stories in quick, simple ways. There is still room for a long, well-written article, but for those who don’t want to read the entire article, give them a chart that still communicates. And, graphics will help de-gray your paper and make you look a little more trendy.