The Function of Data Journalism
The definition of data journalism is both painfully simple and frustratingly vague. In his Tow Center paper, Alex Howard offered a detailed definition for data journalism: “gathering, cleaning, organizing, analyzing, visualizing and publishing data to support the creation of acts of journalism.”
Those who practice it do tend to agree on one principle: data journalism is, first and foremost, journalism. It simply uses data as a source in addition to humans.
We tend to delineate a few categories, each with its own skills and job descriptions. While these may vary or overlap depending on who you’re talking to, they tend to fall roughly along these lines:
● Acquisition: Getting data, whether that means scraping a website, downloading a spreadsheet, filing a public records request or some other means.
● Analysis: Doing calculations or other manipulations on data you’ve got, to look for patterns, stories or clues.
● Presentation: Publishing data in an informative and engaging way. Infographics, news apps and web design are all examples of this.
Not all of these categories might fit a strict definition of reporting, but they all do constitute journalism, said Sarah Cohen, who leads a data team at The New York Times. Even news app developers who spend their days writing code are journalists, Cohen says, because they’re writing code in order to explain and communicate information to the public. The necessary skill for a data journalist is journalism and some interest in data.
While data brings its own challenges, it also offers some opportunities that are impossible or harder to get at in more traditional forms of reporting.
Data allows journalists to more authoritatively verify claims
The clearest advantage data has over other sources is that it’s fact. It’s an actual counted number of fatalities, for instance, or tax dollars or potholes. There’s not as much need to rely on anecdotal evidence when you have the real evidence in front of you.
Take a story by the Associated Press from earlier this year, which used a congressman’s Instagram account as a source for an investigation. This particular politician had been taking flights on his donors’ private jets, and billing the public for it, suggesting an overly cozy or even illicit relationship with his top donors.
The reporters had found the scoop by comparing the location data on his Instagram posts to public data on flight records. These days, anything can be data.
Data allows journalists to tackle bigger stories
With data, size no longer matters: reporters can easily get ahold of information ranging from granular to the global. It might be just as easy to get budgets for every county in the state as it is to get it for just your county, opening up a wealth of new possibilities for exploration.
This capacity gives newsrooms an “investigative edge” they wouldn’t have otherwise, especially small or medium-sized newsrooms. Back in 1992, Steve Doig, a reporter at the Miami Herald, had to examine millions of building code inspections using a computer program called SAS. His investigation revealed the state had been extraordinarily lax about its inspections. Such a monumental task would have been impossible if his team of reporters had to work only with the inspection reports on paper.
Data makes it easier to find new stories
With data, reporters can suss out patterns and follow up on leads in a way they can’t with verbal stories or anecdotes. While reporters should still use their journalistic judgment, data offers a view that doesn’t lean so heavily on instinct or personal judgment. Computers are great when it comes to discovering things faster or discovering things you didn’t expect.(https://www.daowen.com)
Data enables journalists to better illuminate murky issues
Data can also support or oppose an existing claim, or theory, or even an urban legend. Like Steve Doig, a Miami Herald reporter who found a clear connection between building inspections and hurricane damage, The Guardian used hard numbers to clear up what had been an issue of finger pointing. “The core of data journalism, on at least the analysis end, is looking for patterns,” Doig said. “The patterns are going to be what tells the story.”
Just as data can illuminate a murky social issue, it can also quantify it, which contributes valuable information to the social discourse.
In 1989, even before Doig was doing his hurricane investigation, reporters in Atlanta were trying to investigate rumors of racial discrimination in bank loans. Using six years’ worth of lender reports, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was able to show African-Americans were denied bank loans at rates far exceeding those for whites. The paper became one of the first to win a Pulitzer for an investigation using data.
The Atlanta reporters already had anecdotes about racial discrimination, Doig said, but the data allowed them to go beyond that and establish clear patterns—even illuminating the quantity and scale of the problem.
Data can offer detail and distance
Data allows more capacity for showing the ‘near’ and ‘far’ view of a topic. In other times, a man on the street interview would be the ‘near’ and an expert interview would be the ‘far.’ There’s not so much need to rely solely on expert testimony when data can provide the ‘far’ or ‘macro’ view more precisely.
On the other hand, the scale of the data itself can be overwhelming for the audience. While data on every police force in the United States can offer a “far” view for a story, no reader is actually going to sift through all that information if it’s put in front of them. But the web allows them to “look at their own ‘near’”.
Data offers the potential to be more transparent
At the same time, there may be a reason to share a huge data set with an audience. Data sources and web technology have made it possible for journalists to be transparent as they have never been before. Reporters can even share how they reached their conclusions, or allow readers to come to their own. “Transparency is the new objectivity” became a saying among journalists.
“Outside of the realm of science, objectivity is discredited these days as anything but an aspiration,” Blogger David Weinberger wrote. “If you don’t think objectivity is possible, then presenting information as objective means hiding the biases that inevitably are there. It’d be more accurate and truthful to acknowledge those biases, so that readers can account for them in what they read.”
Data can make reporting more efficient
Reporters frequently collect information from the same sources over and over again: building permits, police reports, census surveys. Obtaining and organizing this information can be made infinitely more efficient, even totally automatic, by keying in to the data behind the reports.
Derek Willis, a developer at ProPublica, found himself constantly checking the Federal Election Commission’s website for new campaign filings. He automated this process, bit by bit, until he had a program that checked for new filings every 15 minutes, and alerted him to interesting ones. “I don’t miss a thing,” he said.
A little programming knowledge had made Willis’ task not only more accurate and efficient, but freed up his time for other reporting tasks.
Words & Expressions
constitute：构成
pothole：坑洼；岩石中的溶洞
fatality：死亡
granular：由颗粒构成的
murky：浑浊的；阴暗的
testimony：证词
[1] COHEN S. Ways of doing data journalism[EB/OL].(2019-03-26)[2022-01-16].https://datajournalism.com/read/handbook/two/working-with-data/experiencing-data/data-methods-in-journalism.
[2] The power of data journalism[EB/OL].(2014-11-05)[2021-02-18].https://harvardpolitics.com/power-data-journalism.
[3] SUNNE S. How data journalism is different from what we’ve always done[EB/OL].(2016-03-09)[2022-02-13].https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/reports/strategy-studies/how-data-journalism-is-different.