Data Journalism Classes in Australian Universities: Educators Describe Progress to Date

This article examines the extent to which data journalism (DJ) is being taught in Australian universities. It presents the results of interviews with 35 journalism academics about how they are incorporating data journalism into their courses. It includes details about the types of data journalism skills they are teaching, the resources they are using and the hindrances that have met or are making it difficult to teach data journalism. These hindrances include low and varied levels of quantitative literacy and math aversion among students, lack of time for upskilling and limited room in their courses for new material. The study found that at least nine Australian universities have semester-long units dedicated to data journalism and that at least a further nine are teaching it via some lectures and activities. Almost all respondents thought more should be done to incorporate data journalism into the curricula. This article lays a foundation for future exploration of how data journalism could be incorporated into journalism programmes where the staff requires upskilling

Podatkovno novinarstvo u kontekstu važnih političkih događaja: slučaj Slovačke

Data journalism is one way to provide readers with objective and relevant reports. The study ‎is a content analysis of the use of data journalism by Slovak online news portals. The research sample ‎consists of 11,267 articles published during February 2020, February 2019, June 2019 and November‎2019. The aim was to use a quantitative research strategy to determine whether significant policy events ‎have an impact on the higher frequency of data journalism components in domestic news. The results ‎show that data journalism is an integral part of newsrooms. Despite this, the use of data faces several‎ problems, especially in terms of journalists’ lack of skills and experience in this area of journalism. This ‎is also reflected in the limits of the use of data journalism in reporting on an influential agenda that‎ has an impact on public and political life. Newsrooms do not respond adequately to the presence of a‎ significant political and public agenda, which is mainly processed in the form of text articles, while more‎ sophisticated components of data journalism are used only sporadically.‎Podatkovno novinarstvo je jedan od načina pružanja objektivnih i relevantnih izvještaja čitateljima. Studija uključuje analizu sadržaja upotrebe podatkovnog novinarstva na slovačkim online‎ news portalima. Uzorak koji je analiziran sastoji se od 11,267 članaka objavljenih tijekom veljače 2020.,‎veljače 2019., lipnja 2019. i studenog 2019. godine. Cilj je bio koristeći kvantitativnu istraživačku strategiju‎ utvrditi imaju li značajni politički događaji utjecaj na povećanu upotrebu komponenti podatkovnog‎ novinarstva u domaćim vijestima. Rezultati pokazuju kako je podatkovno novinarstvo integralni dio redakcija .‎Unatoč tome, upotreba podataka nailazi i na nekoliko problema, posebice u smislu nedostatka‎ vještina i iskustva samih novinara u ovom području novinarstva. To je vidljivo u ograničenoj upotrebi‎ podatkovnog novinarstva u izvještavanju o važnim temama koje imaju utjecaj na javni i politički život.‎ Redakcije ne odgovaraju adekvatno na značajne političke i javne teme koje se uglavnom obrađuju kroz ‎tekstualne članke, dok se profinjenije komponente podatkovnog novinarstva koriste tek sporadično.

Contributions of academic articles to the practice of journalism and data management

The increasing number of open data resources and the arrival of big data have boosted the data available as a source of news. Journalists need new skills for collecting the data and creating the news. In addition, all this data can also be used to provide new media services and to take media business decisions, and journalists need new skills related to data for these tasks. Taking into account these areas of knowledge required by journalists for the use of data, we perform a structured literature review (SLR) followed by a content analysis. The results confirm the relevance of data management in journalistic practice, requiring skills in statistics, data visualization, technology, but also in ethics, marketing or audience monitoring

Expectations, Challenges, and Expertise : The Importance of Non-Western Data Journalism

Peer reviewe

Big Data as a differentiating sociocultural element of data journalism: the perception of data journalists and experts

The use of methods of the social sciences and computational tools to analyze databases in journalism has had several definitions since Philip Meyer called it precision journalism (PJ). In the last decade, this specialty has had an important development under the term data journalism (DJ), in a differentiating technological and sociocultural environment: Big Data. This research aims to differentiate DJ from PJ and computer assisted reporting (CAR) with a perspective taken from the science and technology studies, focusing the news as a boundary object between programmers, designers, journalists and other actors that now are part of the news production process. For this purpose, 14 in-depth interviews have been made from 2015 to 2017 to data journalists from Spain (8), EEUU (1) and Finland (1); PP, PD and transparency academic experts from Spain (1) and Finland (2); and one expert in transparency acts y access to public information in Spain, Europe and Latin American. As a result, it can be affirmed that big data is differentiating element of DJ because it is a sociocultural context where the open data philosophy, free software, collaborative and team work are part of its identity

Periodismo de datos iberoamericano: desarrollo, contestación y cambio social. Presentación

As the emphasis of data journalism research shifts to the Global South one region that remains relatively under researched is Ibero-America. Arguably, a space that has pioneered data journalism practices and with enormous potential for social change and development through open data, Ibero-America has excelled in many areas related to the field: La Nación in Argentina has to date one of the most inno- vative data journalism units globally. Also, La Nación, together with the Spanish newspaper El País, were, together with the Guardian, the New York Times and the Spiegel, the first news organisation that extracted and published information from WikiLeaks’ War Logs. Finally, Spain is one of the most open societies in Europe, and a global example for open data. Yet, an absence of Ibero-American data journalism studies from mainstream scholarship, creates an opportunity to further explore the developments and evolution of data journalism in this geographic region. In this vein, this special edition of Icono14 aims at repositioning Iberian American data journalism within the broadest discussions on the field, recontextualising its contri- bution into debates on the role of this journalistic practice in the Global South

Data journalism sustainability: An outlook on the future of data-driven reporting

During its period of rapid growth, data journalism was poised to position journalism as society’s watchdog once again. But despite eager predictions, its rate of adoption outside large news organisations remains low, limiting the consolidation of data journalism to a normative practice. Through Scenario Network Mapping, this article seeks to outline the possible futures of data journalism practice by determining its sustainability in the current climate of journalism austerity. Results suggest three possible scenarios: 1) As a skillset, data journalism will soon be regarded as essential for every professional journalist 2) As a genre, data journalism will remain a niche storytelling format but will ultimately find its way into smaller newsrooms due to decreasing limitations 3) Due to financial and personnel limitations, data journalism will be abandoned by the mainstream media, who will outsource data analysis to non-legacy actors. Within this context, it remains to be seen whether data journalism can continue innovating in order to remain competitive in the constantly evolving ecosystem of today’s news production

Design patterns for data-driven news articles

Technological advancements have resulted in great shifts in the production and consumption of news articles, which leads to the need to develop new educational and practical frameworks. This paper presents a classification of data-driven news articles and presents patterns to describe their visual and textual components. Through the analysis of 162 data-driven news articles collected from news media, we identified five types of articles based on the level of data involvement and narrative complexity: Quick Update, Briefing, Chart Description, Investigation, and In-depth Investigation. We then developed 72 design patterns to support the understanding and construction of data-driven news articles. To evaluate this approach, we conducted workshops with 23 students from journalism, design, and sociology who were newly introduced to the subject. Findings suggest that our approach can be used as an out-of-box framework for the formulation of plans and consideration of details in the workflow of data-driven news creation

Modalidades de la visión en dispositivos de visualización periodística online

El creciente numero de dispositivos de visualización de información en el periodismo online llama la atención no sólo por el éxito de estos mecanismos tecnológicos en la agenda informativa sino por la manera en que construyen una relación entre el productor y el usuario envuelta de elementos tanto prácticos como simbólicos. Teniendo en cuenta que esta relación ha sido estudiada desde diferentes aproximaciones, este artículo pretende aportar al estudio de los aspectos visuales a través del reconocimiento de la representación implícita del usuario en el dispositivo. De esta forma se estudian las operaciones de direccionamiento de la visión prescritos en un grupo de dispositivos provenientes de un reconocido concurso internacional para identificar las modalidades imperantes de ver información periodística. Se describen seis modalidades de la visión encontradas junto con casos que ejemplifican sus características: (1) visualización de eventos, (2) visualización de problemáticas ocultas, (3) visualización de lugares, (4) visualización de narraciones, (5) visualización de subjetividades y (6) visualización de convergencias. Finalmente se presentan algunas conclusiones acerca de los hallazgos contrastadas con los resultados de otras investigaciones en el área