data journalism

MaryW commented on the word data journalism

Data journalism is not graphics and visualisations. It's about telling the story in the best way possible. Sometimes that will be a visualisation or a map . . . .

But sometimes it's a news story. Sometimes, just publishing the number is enough.

If data journalism is about anything, it's the flexibility to search for new ways of storytelling. And more and more reporters are realising that. Suddenly, we have company - and competition. So being a data journalist is no longer unusual.

It's just journalism.

December 29, 2016

MaryW commented on the word data journalism

What is data journalism? I could answer, simply, that it is journalism done with data. But that doesn’t help much.

Both ‘data’ and ‘journalism’ are troublesome terms. Some people think of ‘data’ as any collection of numbers, most likely gathered on a spreadsheet. 20 years ago, that was pretty much the only sort of data that journalists dealt with. But we live in a digital world now, a world in which almost anything can be — and almost everything is — described with numbers.

. . .

What makes data journalism different to the rest of journalism? Perhaps it is the new possibilities that open up when you combine the traditional ‘nose for news’ and ability to tell a compelling story, with the sheer scale and range of digital information now available.

And those possibilities can come at any stage of the journalist’s process: using programming to automate the process of gathering and combining information from local government, police, and other civic sources . . . .

Or using software to find connections between hundreds of thousands of documents . . . .

Data journalism can help a journalist tell a complex story through engaging infographics. . . . .

Or it can help explain how a story relates to an individual . . . .

Data can be the source of data journalism, or it can be the tool with which the story is told — or it can be both. Like any source, it should be treated with scepticism; and like any tool, we should be conscious of how it can shape and restrict the stories that are created with it.

December 29, 2016

MaryW commented on the word data journalism

Journalism in the 21st century involves finding, collecting, analyzing and visualizing data for stories. The Journalism School offers foundational courses in data‐driven journalism as well as a two‐semester specialization in data journalism for students interested in advanced skills.

December 29, 2016