You don’t need the resources of The New York Times to create a data journalism team in your newsroom. But you do need to think out the structure. Here are 10 things you should consider if you are considering setting up your own team.
Twenty journalists, 11 media outlets, 11 countries, two continents and one massive corruption scheme. Investiga Lava Jato, a high-stakes, complex investigation, launched in June as a collaborative effort to develop and disseminate in-depth reports on corruption with tentacles in Latin America and Africa.
The Oxford Dictionaries named “post-truth” as the Word of the Year 2016. It is an adjective defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” This attitude of readers choosing their own beliefs over facts has been a huge problem that beset journalism in the past year, with media outlets trying to regain readers’ trusts and debunking false news from dubious digital sites. Here is a list of initiatives to combat fake news that have popped up in response to this challenge.
When faced with data journalism, journalists often say “Oh, I can’t do that, it’s too complicated” [or] “I hated math in school, I really can’t take the time to learn how to do this”. However, data expert Helena Bengtsson stresses that data journalism is not that hard, and insists that every journalist should have basic knowledge of how to sort and filter a spreadsheet, and do simple calculations.
