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The Rise of Data Journalism: The Making of Journalistic
Knowledge through Quantification
5 April 2016,Sciences Po, Paris, France Liliana Bounegru | lilianabounegru.org | @bb_liliana
Jonathan Gray | jonathangray.org | @jwyg
Jonathan Gray Liliana Bounegru
Data Journalism MOOCThe Data Journalism Handbook
Data Journalism News Trainings, Conferences and Workshops
Data Worlds:The New Politics of Public Information
Jonathan Gray
“Wikileaks didn't invent data journalism. But it did give newsrooms a reason to adopt it. There was
just too much data for it to happen any other way.”
Simon Rogers, The Guardian Datablog
What is in this 2.6 terabyte leak?
11.5 million documents 4.8 million emails
3 million database entries 2 million PDF documents
1 million images 320,000 text documents 214,488 offshore entities 14,153 different clients 200+ countries involved 21 offshore jurisdictions
Over 370 journalists from 109 different media organisations
in 76 different countriescollaborating for nearly 2 years.
(And we are only on day 2 of 14!)
The so-called “data revolution” and the “transparency revolution” have given rise to new journalism practises rooted in data, quantitative methods and computational
techniques.
These practises are transforming not only the way news is sourced, produced and
delivered but also who and what is doing the sourcing, production and delivery of
journalism.
NewYorkTimesInterac2veNewsandGraphicsteams ChicagoTribuneNewsAppsteam
GuardianInterac-veTeam “JournalismUnicorn”
“Thereissomethingaboutnotjustbeingabletothinkandactlikeaprogrammerbutalsotobeabletothinkandactlikeajournalist,whichisquitedemanding.[…]Newsroomsarecryingoutfortheseskills.”(EmilyBell,Professor&Director,TowCenterforDigitalJournalism,‘Columbiaislaunchinganewpost-bacprogramtobreedjournalismunicorns’,NiemanLab,2013)
Source: Alan McClean, New York Times
Source: Alan McClean, New York Times
The programmer-journalists
The computer-assistedreportersThe data journalists
Three Kinds of Data Journalism
1.Pu&ngnewsintocontextwithdata
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/oct/31/europe-unemployment-rate-by-country-eurozone
The Guardian Datablog: Journalism as a Source of Data
“Mostofwhatwedoisthiskindofverynewsy,quickpiecesofdatajournalism,thatarebasedaroundstoriesthatjusthappentobeinthenewsthatday.Everynewsstoryhassomedatabehinditandwe’reheretomakethataccessibleandsurfaceit.”(interviewwithSimonRogers,6September2012)
“WhenwelaunchedtheDatablog,wethoughttheaudienceswouldbedevelopersbuildingapplicaCons.Infact,it’speoplewanCngtoknowmoreaboutcarbonemissionsorEasternEuropeanimmigraConorthebreakdownofdeathsinAfghanistan — oreventhenumberofCmestheBeatlesusedtheword‘love’intheirsongs.”(Rogers,Simon.2012.“BehindthescenesatTheGuardianDatablog.”InTheDataJournalismHandbook,editedbyGray,Jonathan,LilianaBounegru,andLucyChambers,34-37.Sebastopol,CA:O'ReillyMedia)
The Guardian Datablog: Journalism as a Source of Data
2. Data-driven investigative journalism
3. News apps as research tools for journalists and audiences
http://
“Byshowingeachreaderdatathatisspecifictothem,anewsappcanhelpeachreaderunderstandastoryinawaythat’spersonallymeaningfultothem.ItcanhelpareaderunderstandtheirpersonalconnecContoabroadnaConalphenomenon,andhelpthemaNachwhattheyknowtowhattheydon’tknow,andtherebyencourageadeepunderstandingofabstractconcepts.”(Klein,S.(2012).NewsappsatProPublica.InJ.Gray,L.Bounegru,&L.Chambers(Eds.),Thedatajournalismhandbook(pp.185-186).Sebastopol,CA:O'ReillyMedia)
Why Does Data Journalism Matter?
–Emily Bell, Professor & Director, Tow Center for Digital Journalism, 2012
“One of the most important questions for journalism’s sustainability will be how individuals and organizations
respond to this availability of data.”
“Data-driven journalism is the future.”
–Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web, 2012
Newformsofgatheringinforma-on,newformsofknowledgeproduc-on,newformsofpresenta-onanddissemina-onofstories.
Why Does Data Journalism Matter?
"Anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a toss-up right now is such an ideologue, they should be
kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops and microphones for the next
10 days, because they're jokes.”
(Joe Scarborough, MSNBC, 2012)
“I am Nate Silver, Lord and God of the
Algorithm”
(Jon Stewart, 2012)
Geeks vs. pundits: clash of two epistemological cultures?
New forms of knowledge
“Partofwhatwe’vebeentrained,asasociety,toexpectoutoftheBigDealJournalis]cStoryissomething“new,”somethingwedidn’tknowbefore.Nixonwasacrook!OsamaBinLadenwasfoundbytheCIAandthenallowedtoescape!Butintheserecentstories,it’snotthepresenceofsomethingnew,buttheabilitytoteaseapaNernoutofalotofliNlethingswealreadyknowthat’sthebigdeal.It’snotthenewsnessoffailure;...it’stheweightoffailure.”
(C.W.Anderson,assistantprofessorintheDepartmentofMediaCultureattheCollegeofStatenIsland,2010)
It is said to improve the democratic function of the media:
• enhancing journalistic objectivity
• more accountable journalism
• more efficient journalism workflows
• increasing citizen participation in public life
Why Does Data Journalism Matter?
“At The Texas Tribune … the data sets account for 75 percent of the site’s overall traffic.” (Columbia Journalism Review, 2010)
Potential for the media as a businessWhy Does Data Journalism Matter?
Time on page substantially higher than on other sections of the Guardian (Simon Rogers, former Data Blog editor)
Is Data journalism New?
Datajournalismwasn’tbornyesterday
John Snow’s map of cholera outbreaks in 19th century London
Social survey movement in 1900s
Precision journalism in 1960s
Source: Alex Howard
Emergence of term “data journalism” in 2000s.
“For example, say a newspaper has written a story about a local fire. Being able to read that story on a cell phone is fine and
dandy. Hooray, technology! But what I really want to be able to do is explore the raw facts of that story, one by one, with layers of attribution, and an infrastructure for comparing the
details of the fire — date, time, place, victims, fire station number, distance from fire department, names and years
experience of firemen on the scene, time it took for firemen to arrive — with the details of previous fires. And subsequent
fires, whenever they happen.”
(Adrian Holovaty, 2006, “A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change”)
The profile of the data journalism team
Source:CindyRoyal,2013,niemanlab.org
datajournalisminthenewsroom
Lonerangers:GuardianDatablog
Two-personteam:
GuardianUS
Small-scale
team:WNYC
Largeteam:NewYorkTimes
Source:SimonRogers,datajournalismcourse.net
Data journalism outside the newsroom
Computational journalism in universities
Data journalism and computer-assisted reporting in the NGO sector
http://towcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Tow-Center-Data-Driven-Journalism.pdf
Data Journalism Awards: https://www.globaleditorsnetwork.org/programmes/data-journalism-awards/
Whosponsorsus?
Who funds data journalism?
How do you study data journalism?
How have these recent developments been discussed in academic literature?
“Could computing technology - which has played no small part in the decline of the traditional news media - turn out to be a saviour of journalism’s watchdog tradition?” (Cohen, Sarah, Chengkai Li, Jun Yang, and Cong Yu. 2011. "Computational Journalism: A Call to Arms to Database Researchers." CIDR 2011: 148-151)
“If there’s a silver lining in this situation, it is the ability of computer scientists to strengthen the hands of the remaining professional reporters and engage new players in the watchdog process” (Cohen, Sarah, James F. Hamilton, and Fred Turner. 2011. “Computational journalism.” Communications of the ACM 54 (10): 66-71)
Flew, T., Spurgeon, C., Daniel, A., & Swift, A. (2012). The promise of computational journalism.
Cohen, S., Li, C., Yang, J., & Yu, C. (2011). Computational journalism: A call to arms to database researchers
Hamilton, J. & Turner F. (July, 2009). Accountability through algorithm: Developing the field of computational journalism.
How have these recent developments been discussed in academic literature?
Royal, Cindy. 2010. “The Journalist as Programmer: a Case Study of the New York Times Interactive News Technology Department.” Presented at the International Symposium on Online Journalism, Austin, Texas.
Parasie, Sylvain, and Eric Dagiral. 2012. ‘‘Data-driven Journalism and the Public Good: ‘Computer-assisted-reporters’ and ‘Programmer-journalists’ in Chicago.’’ New Media & Society 15 (6): 853-871.
How have these recent developments been discussed in academic literature?
List of academic literature on data journalism
hap://lilianabounegru.org/2014/05/07/list-of-academic-papers-about-data-journalism-and-computa]onal-journalism/
If stage one of data journalism was 'find and scrape data', then stage two was 'ask government agencies to release data' in easy to use formats. Stage three is going to be “'make your own data'.
How about data sources?
Javaun Moradi, Product Manager, NPR
Whose voices and viewpoints structure and inform news discourse goes to the heart of democratic views of, and radical concerns
about, the news media. (Simon Cottle, 2003)
Sourcing practices
Bounegru, L. “What Data Journalists Need to Do Differently.” Harvard Business Review.https://hbr.org/2014/05/what-data-journalists-need-to-do-differently/
“…when journalists are building their stories exclusively around existing data collected by a small number of major
institutions and companies, this may exacerbate the tendency to amplify issues already considered a priority, and to downplay those that have been relegated or which
aren’t on the radar screens of major institutions.”
–Bounegru, L. “What Data Journalists Need to Do Differently.” Harvard Business Review, 2014
Sourcing questions
• To what extent do we see new sourcing practices and new processes of journalistic knowledge production emerging?
• How do these new processes compare with traditional sourcing practices?
• How do these allegedly innovative and transformative practices and processes of sourcing and knowledge production shape the democratic function of the media?
Knowledge production questions
• How can data journalism be understood as part of the broader computational culture that permeates our societies?
• How does data journalism reconfigure traditional journalism epistemologies?
• How are audiences configured in this process?
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