The utilization of Data Journalism in Political reporting

As technology becomes an increasingly important part of society, graphics and data have become to play a significant role in journalism. In order to facilitate readers’ perception of information and increase accuracy of their own reporting, journalists are looking for more effective methods of data presentation. Further data helps to drill down into charts and graphs for more detail, interactively changing what data you see and how it’s processed. Data was used for maps and graphs in the 17th century, while the pie chart was invented in the early 1800s. One of the first examples of statistical based graphics occurred when Charles Minard in 1869 mapped Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Russia. The map depicted the size of the army as well as the path of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, and it tied that information to temperature and time scales for a more in-depth understanding of the event (Tufte, 1983).

It’s the entire process of deriving meaning from data to develop a story - not only the visual output. A written story that relies on data analysis and interpretation is a better example of data journalism than an info graphic with dozens of meaningless numbers. More than anything, data is about stories that play a direct role in people’s lives. Many data stories have the ability to not only tell individual stories but also contextualize a story by placing a person in his or her neighborhood or country. Data journalists do more than just sift through mountains of data and identify trends. They can often provide a creative perspective to a story which allows them to engage with new audiences. While it’s true that data-driven stories can benefit from people with technical and design skills, most of the work stems from an editorial understanding of a subject. As long as you have an eye for a story and are willing to collaborate with others, you can become a good data journalist.

Data journalism is often referred to by various terms, such as data driven journalism, computational journalism or computer – assisted reporting. An info graphic or chart without an underlying story is not data journalism. A data journalism project should involve the uncovering of a story from a dataset. Within Al Jazeera we’ve produced award-winning data journalism projects with a mobile phone, camera and computer (as will be demonstrated in our case study below). While, longer-term investigative projects may take time and resources to develop, there are many daily stories that newsrooms are producing that involve analyzing and presenting data.

The main ingredient to a successful data story is creativity. Data by itself is not a story. It requires you to think creatively about what’s relevant to your audience and what is not. On the flip side, a great story idea without data is also not a data-driven story. Often, finding the right balance between what stories you want to tell us. What data you have requires some trial and error. A mistake a lot of inexperienced data journalists make is thinking that they need to analyses big datasets to tell a story. A better approach is to start off with smaller datasets and develop them over time. This will help develop data-fluency and ensure more effort is placed on extracting the story’s meaning.

The very first Data Journalism awards by the Global Editors Network in 2012 have also emphasized the importance of the investigative reporting tradition in data journalism. It is also worth mentioning that the average amount of time used to compose a story was several months, the longest period was seven years (Burn-Murdoch 2012).

Importance of Data Journalism

According to journalists, they are saying to filter the flow of data, data journalism is very important. When information was scarce, most of our efforts were devoted to hunting and gathering. Now that information is abundant, processing is more important. Information is being processed at two levels: (1) analysis to bring sense and structure out of the never-ending flow of data and (2) presentation to get what’s important and relevant into the consumer’s head. Like science, data journalism discloses its methods and presents its findings in a way that can be verified by replication. Further Data journalism brings new approaches to storytelling which  is an umbrella term that, to everyone’s mind, encompasses an ever-growing set of tools, techniques and approaches to storytelling. It can include everything from traditional computer-assisted reporting (using data as a ‘source’) to the most cutting edge data visualization and news applications. The unifying goal is a journalistic one: providing information and analysis to help inform us all about important issues of the day.[3]

‘Data journalism’ only differs from ‘words journalism’ in that we use a different kit. We all sniff out, report, and relate stories for a living. It’s like ‘photo journalism’; just swap the camera for a laptop. Data-driven journalism is the future. Journalists need to be data-savvy. It used to be that you would get stories by chatting to people in bars, and it still might be that you’ll do it that way some times. But now it’s also going to be about poring over data and equipping yourself with the tools to analyze it and picking out what’s interesting. And keeping it in perspective, helping people out by really seeing where it all fits together, and what’s going on in the country. Data journalism serves two important purposes for news organizations: finding unique stories (not from news wires) and execute your watchdog function. Especially in times of financial peril, these are important goals for newspapers to achieve. Data journalism is another way to scrutinise the world and hold the powers that be to account. With an increasing amount of data available, now more than ever it is important that journalists are of aware of data journalism techniques. This should be a tool in the toolkit of any journalist: whether learning how to work with data directly, or collaborating with someone who can.