I think the key distinction lies in your title: “data driven journalism and storytelling.” Because I sympathize with Alberto: a story should be linear, at least in a given telling. So an image, including a visualization, cannot itself be a story. But it can be an excellent aide to telling a story, like if you’re going through a slide deck, and there’s an barchart. It can also be the focus of a story, like if you walk an audience through an entire viz; then you tell the story around its components, as well as with background information, &c. And you could do the same with text obviously. So I agree with you that Alberto goes too far: vizzes are great for doing storytelling with/on/around, and we can’t forget about telling a story to actually help people understand what’s going on.