Sure it had a stupid name and couldn’t possibly be accused of presenting a neutral point of view with how it presented the data but I am very sorry to see Ampp3d close it’s doors at Trinity Mirror.

There is no doubt it was a massive influence on my team at ONS when it came to our discussions about digital first formats. At times our approach to visuals on social media was clearly inspired (nay stolen) from the experiments of the team at Ampp3d. In fact to such an extent that their editor was compelled to comment on it 😉

Internal discussions about content decisions around our personas often referenced an Ampp3d vs FT approach to such an extent that it has become a common shorthand within our team.

The initial pitch for Visual.ONS was for an experimental platform for visual data journalism i.e. a ‘politically neutral Ammp3d.’. We studied the blogposts Martin Belam and William Turrell  shared about setting the site up and included details from that directly in to the brief for DXW who built Visual.ONS for us.

Members of the Ampp3d team, particularly Federica, have also been unfailingly helpful to us in providing feedback on our work on building a new ONS website. This support has been incredibly useful and we really do appreciate it.

I don’t know any of the team personally away from Twitter but I follow many of them and always enjoy their interactions with each other – it always seemed like a close-knit group (including some members of the Us Vs Th3m team I think).

One thing I learned from following this team was just how much grief women get on Twitter – particularly it seems female journalists with any opinion at all. Like most people I was of course aware of the misogynistic streak throughout Twitter but I’d never seen it so clearly and so regularly before and was consistently amazed at how well they handled the abuse.

Other people will write blogposts that better sum up the influence Ampp3d etc had on digital journalism in the UK – I am not qualified to do that. I will just say thank you for the inspiration, for demonstrating there was an audience for data journalism beyond the broadsheets and for the ever entertaining social media channels. Shouldn’t have stopped the daily newsletter though 🙂