Data? In journalism? Surely not!

 

I chose journalism as a profession and area of study for a number of reasons, one of those being that I was terrible at maths. Really bad, to the point where I can’t help my 14-year-old tutee with her maths homework. Journalism was meant to be all about words. Like many times before on my wondrous learning adventure we call a comms degree, I was proved wrong. But I did laugh when I opened the first chapter for this reading and read Tanner’s first two lines;

“Let’s face it, journalists tend to disavow any love of mathematics. Their stock-in-trade – so they claim – is words, not statistics”.

I really hadn’t noticed the importance of data in journalism until this topic was bought up. Then it was all I could see. I couldn’t believe I had discredited maths as being unimportant to journalism. While many stories are not about the data on its own, adding figures and report statistics to your story brings you above the rest in this day and age of ‘declining journalism’.

I can use these simple ones, mean, the median, percentage points, differences, opinion polls and sampling; my maths is poor but I’d get by with a calculator and a lot of will power. Hats off to data journalists, however.

Data journalists are deemed to be a special type of journalist who uses “a computer and simple software to analyse government data to reveal the patterns that tell stories which would otherwise be difficult or impossible to find” (Doig, Tanner/Richardson textbook). They find out extra information on anything from crime statistics to test cheats and political corruption. It seems they dab their fingers into all the hard core, serious, news worthy stories we all hope to one day be reporting.

So data isn’t just numbers, like house median prices and the average cost of fuel (all mind blowing news stories we’ve never heard before). Doig explains data as “information that is stored in table form, as an organised collection of rows and columns of information”. The type of information available in these data logs has enabled journalists to go “beyond anecdote to add actual evidence to their stories” (Doig). It doesn’t seem like all the numbers would be any good to a story, until you think of crime rates, poverty statistics, betting scams, fraud cases and realise that data is part of many important issues across the world.

The Data Journalism Handbook says that it’s important for today’s journalist to be able to understand and analyse data for news stories. “Gathering, filtering and visualizing what is happening beyond what the eye can see has a growing value”.

This handbook is fantastic in describing the importance of data in journalism, and sums it up with explaining that data content in news stories is the difference between being the first to report an issue, and the first to tell everyone what it actually means. It doesn’t just add numbers to the equation, but helps “shape” the story, explaining WHY things affect people, not just that they are being affected. The data journalist has a leg up because they are able to answer one of those fundamental 6 important factors of news, who, what, when, where, how and WHY so much better than the rest.

As for me, I’ll have to hit the books again to be able to keep up with the numbers. 1+1 = 2 right?

(image source)