The Pudding is a digital publication that explains ideas debated in culture with visual essays. We often say that our storytelling follows the “spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down” method: on the surface many of our stories or presentations can feel fluffy and frivolous, but they often tackle much deeper, systemic and structural problems.
Our goal is to create a visceral, emotional experience. We’re cultivating curiosity in our audience, and betting in quality over quantity. We have the luxury of not having to follow the news cycle or to adhere to strict deadlines, so we get to experiment with weird, creative stuff a lot.
We use interactive innovation and creative technology in every piece we produce. The 5 stories we included in our submission include gamification, user input, scroll-driven stories, video explainers, choose-your-own adventure data explorations, audio storytelling, investigative reporting, and podcasts.
We are active on most social platforms including X (Twitter), BlueSky, Threads, LinkedIn, Facebook, Patreon, TikTok, and Instagram (plus our newsletter) — and we experiment just as much on them as we do with our stories. In the last year we have asked our audience to participate in an open-ended, yet-to-be-revealed survey, ran poster and crokinole board giveaways, created a 4-part video tutorial series to help people recreate our charts without code, hosted our 8th annual Pudding Cup competition, personally responded to over 130 pitches, ran a 3-person fellowship cohort, and offered open office hours.
Our work has previously been recognized by the Peabody Awards, the Society of News Design, the Online Journalism Awards, the Information is Beautiful Awards, the Emmys, World Press Photo, and more.
