Data journalism in television news: A case of Globo’s news programs (original) (raw)

Data journalism in Spain and Austria: features, organizational structure, limitations, and future perspectives

Profesional De La Informacion, 2023

This paper makes an important contribution to comparative research by examining data journalism in Spain and Austria. This paper examines the practice of data journalism from a triple perspective: (a) the common features of day-today work, (b) the organizational structure and the role of the teams in newsrooms, and (c) the obstacles to and the future of data-driven reporting. Results from content analysis of data-driven news stories in El país and Der standard (N = 136) show differences and similarities in the covered topics, sources, narrative style, visualizations, interactive functions, and levels of transparency. Interestingly, only 36.8% of the analyzed news stories correspond to the normative expectations of transparency by incorporating both sources and methodological details. While the Spanish newspaper shows significantly higher levels of transparency compared with the Austrian newspaper, both newspapers perform very similarly when it comes to providing access to raw data, which was the case in only every fifth news story analyzed. Findings from focused interviews with the heads of data journalism teams deliver interesting insights into specific challenges that each news outlet is facing when creating day-today data-driven news stories. This research confirms the relevance that data journalism has achieved in countries such as Spain and demonstrates the effort of journalists in countries without access to information and transparency laws to create data-driven stories.

Data Journalism Research: Studying a Maturing Field across Journalistic Cultures, Media Markets and Political Environments

Digital Journalism, 2019

Although data journalism is practiced globally, data journalism research has traditionally focused on a limited set of countries, primarily within the liberal and democratic corporatist media systems. Many recently published studies illustrate a growing scholarly interest in data journalism in other parts of the world, but these studies are still limited in number. This special issue brings together five new empirical studies of data journalism around the world, as well as two commentaries and two book reviews on the topic with the aim of broadening the theoretical, empirical, and geographic perspectives on data journalism. The core of the special issue consists of five national and comparative case studies studying data journalism in Africa, the Arab world, Italy, the UK, and Argentina. Combined, these articles and the other publications in this special issue point to three important contextual factors that shape data journalism worldwide: journalistic cultures, media markets, and the political environment. After a discussion of each of these three factors, areas for future research are proposed.

DATA AND TECHNOLOGY: ONE OF THE CHALLENGES FOR JOURNALISM (Atena Editora)

DATA AND TECHNOLOGY: ONE OF THE CHALLENGES FOR JOURNALISM (Atena Editora), 2022

In the constantly changing society we live in, the way journalism is done has undergone major changes. However, it must be noted that the pillars of journalism continue to be based on ethical values, the search for truth and objectivity. One of the factors contributing to change in this profession is the widespread use of new technologies. In this work, in order to adjust teaching to the new emerging needs of future professionals, we will focus on the information contained in the data and how to analyze it, since the data have been increasingly used as a source of news. The proposed challenge was to analyze how three leading Portuguese newspapers covered the news of the pandemic caused by COVID-19. In this sense, it was necessary to prepare the database for analysis and plan what information to extract from the data. In addition to Excel, used to organize the database, we used the Python programming language, which allowed for a more detailed analysis of the news coverage of the pandemic.

Data Journalism Beyond Technological Determinism

Journalism Studies, 2021

Innovation in journalism became an important element to determine the current and future direction of the profession. Through incremental and cumulative transformations over time, because of many obstacles faced inside the newsrooms, journalism has suffered from significant and fundamental changes, including the deployment of data journalism. In Latin America, the practice has seen an increasing expansion in the last years. Nevertheless, there are important technological gaps that limit its development. The present study draws upon literature on data journalism, media management, and sociology, aiming to contribute theoretically to data journalism research. Our findings show that beyond the technological approach, practitioners are relying on data evangelists, collaboration, and audience-centered innovation to produce data storytelling in their newsrooms. On the other hand, these alliances form “homophily” and “endogamy” features that limit the dissemination of the practice, which must consider the potential implications for the social distance of the audiences. It argues that Latin American professionals are distancing themselves from technological determinism to embrace a more audience-centric innovation in newsrooms. Finally, it also states that it is important to take into account those limitations, as they pose obstacles for data journalism innovation research knowledge. The article concludes with an agenda for future research.

Profile of the data journalist in Spain: training, sources and tools

Doxa Comunicación, 2018

Data Journalism, the successor of Investigative and Precision Journalism, acquires a new dimension in the Big Data environment that is prompting the redefinition, currently in progress, of a new professional profile: the data journalist. The opening of large databases, the use of new statistical software, and the constant renewal of visualization tools open the door to a journalistic specialization that requires modification of routines and specialized training. This emerging and expanding profile is undergoing uneven development in the Spanish media. With the objective of becoming familiar with its evolution, this research offers the results of an open questionnaire sent to Spanish data journalists that focused the object of study on three categories: routines and training, the use of sources, and visualization tools. The main results seem to indicate that not all media have a specific section of data, that there are training deficiencies remedied by means of self-learning, that they use mostly public sources, and that visualizations are developed with a high level of creative freedom.

Waiting for Data Journalism

Digital Journalism, 2014

Data journalism has emerged as a trend worth of attention in newsrooms the world over. Previous research highlighted how elite media, journalism education institutions, and other interest groups all take part in the emergence and evolution of data journalism. But has it equally gained momentum in smaller, lessscrutinized media markets? This paper looks at the ascent of data journalism in the French-speaking part of Belgium. It argues that journalism, and hence data journalism, can be understood as a socio-discursive practice: it is not only the production of (data-driven) journalistic artefacts that shapes the notion of (data) journalism, but also the discursive efforts of all the actors involved, in and out of the newsrooms. A set of qualitative inquiries allowed us to examine the phenomenon by first establishing a cartography of who and what counts as data journalism. It uncovers an overall reliance on a handful of passionate individuals, only partly backed up institutionally, and a limited amount of consensual references that could foster a shared interpretive community. A closer examination of the definitions reveal a sharp polyphony that is particularly polarized around the duality of the term itself, divided between a focus on data and a focus on journalism and torn between the co-existing notions of 'ordinary' and 'thorough' data journalism. We also describe what is perceived as obstacles, most of which pertain to broader traits that shape contemporary newsmaking and explain why, if data journalism clearly exists as a matter of concern, it has not transformed in concrete undertakings.

Reporters in the age of data journalism

In the past, journalists were responsible for reporting the news. But today news stories disseminate as the incidents unfold, from multiple sources. Thus, gathering, filtering and visualizing events has a growing value. Huge amounts of data are available, but exploiting them is not an easy task. Data journalism can be defined as a journalism speciality in which numerical data are used in the production and distribution of information. This article investigates the necessary skills that journalists must have in order to cope with data journalism. More precisely, it defines data journalism, and discusses journalists' Information and Communication Technology (ICT) skills, as well as the necessary skills for supporting data journalism. Special attention is given to Web 3.0 and open data that can play an important role in data journalism. A survey conducted among professional journalists in Greece concerning data journalism is also presented and discussed.

Data Journalism in Sweden

Digital Journalism, 2014

Data journalism is an evolving form of investigative journalism. In previous research and handbooks published on this topic, this form of journalism has been called computer-assisted reporting and data-driven journalism, as well as precision, computational or database journalism. In Sweden, data journalism is still fairly uncommon. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the development of data journalism at seven Swedish traditional media companies, using action research methods. The content of this paper is based on an online survey of journalists and in-depth interviews with editors at these participating companies. The results indicate that, based on how this field is currently perceived by journalists in the interviews, there is a common definition of data journalism. Furthermore, the survey shows that the attitudes towards data journalism during the process of introducing new methods and genres of journalism into "old" organizations are correlated with the level of perceived experience in data journalism working methods. The main challenges facing the working methods of data journalism today are a shortage of time and the need for training and developing data journalism skills.

Data Journalism in the Context of Important Political Events

Medijske studije

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 th...

Waiting for Data Journalism : A qualitative assessment of the anecdotal take-up of data journalism in French-speaking Belgium

Digital Journalism , 2015

Data journalism has emerged as a trend worthy of attention in newsrooms the world over. Previous research has highlighted how elite media, journalism education institutions, and other interest groups take part in the emergence and evolution of data journalism. But has it equally gained momentum in smaller, less-scrutinized media markets? This paper looks at the ascent of data journalism in the French-speaking part of Belgium. It argues that journalism, and hence data journalism, can be understood as a socio-discursive practice: it is not only the production of (data-driven) journalistic artefacts that shapes the notion of (data) journalism, but also the discursive efforts of all the actors involved, in and out of the newsrooms. A set of qualitative inquiries allowed us to examine the phenomenon by first establishing a cartography of who and what counts as data journalism. It uncovers an overall reliance on a handful of passionate individuals, only partly backed up institutionally, and a limited amount of consensual references that could foster a shared interpretive community. A closer examination of the definitions reveal a sharp polyphony that is particularly polarized around the duality of the term itself, divided between a focus on data and a focus on journalism, and torn between the co-existing notions of “ordinary” and “thorough” data journalism. We also describe what is perceived as obstacles, which mostly pertain to broader traits that shape contemporary newsmaking; and explain why, if data journalism clearly exists as a matter of concern, it has not transformed in concrete undertakings.