In this latest post in the FAQ series, I’ve been asked to help answer a question on “the distribution of work between journalist, data analyst and designer” in data journalism.

Boundaries in data journalism teams will differ between different teams and different organisations. Generally the smaller the team/organisation, the fewer boundaries there are.

When someone is the only data journalist in their organisation, they might do everything from finding and reporting the story, to creating the charts and even any interactivity (if they can).

How much they do will depend on their skills and the organisation’s content management system (CMS).

For example it’s unlikely they will be able to change the CMS to create interactivity, so they might have to create that elsewhere (e.g. create a separate webpage) and link to that.

So when you ask about an interactive tool the questions would be: who has the power to add that to the website’s CMS? And who has the technical ability to create it?

In a very large team like the BBC News or New York Times data team, you might have designers and web developers, data journalists and editors, with all of those working together on projects where they all contribute different aspects.

In addition, it’s likely they will work with journalists outside of the team – for example a health correspondent – with specialist knowledge/contacts.

In that situation the idea might either originate with one of the journalists or editors within a team, or come from elsewhere in the organisation (a correspondent approaches the team with an idea), or higher up (someone in the senior editorial team suggests doing a large data treatment on a particular issue or event, e.g. the Winter Olympics).

The data journalists in the team would then collate the data (sometimes with the help of web developers if they need to scrape it or fetch it from an API and don’t have coding skills), analyse it, and conduct interviews (if the story has been suggested by a correspondent they might conduct interviews too), and then write the resulting story. Visualisation might be created by the data journalists using the chart creation part of the CMS, or by designers, and then if there’s some interactivity then that would be worked on by the developers and designers at the same time.

At The Guardian the approach is to partner up a journalist from a particular team (with specialist field knowledge and contacts) with a journalist from the data journalism team (with specialist data knowledge and skills) on a story. The idea might come from the data journalist or the non-data journalist, and someone from the visual team may also be involved.

I currently work in the BBC Shared Data Team where all the team are data journalists and there are no designers or developers. This means if we want to do something interactive we have to look to another part of the organisation for developer time to work on the interactive element for our story (for example a lookup facility where users can search for data on their own area). But we do our own visualisation, either using the CMS chart creation tool, or if we want something that it can’t do, we use R and ggplot.

There aren’t any boundaries in terms of one person not being allowed to do a particular type of work – but we tend to end up working in areas where our skills are in most demand. For example one colleague is very good at Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, and I tend to focus on data collection, analysis, scraping, etc.

With visualisation you might get data journalists who create their own charts for social and quick sharing – but more customised charts might be created for the website or publication by the organisation’s designers.

Nikki Usher’s book Interactive Journalism has a good chapter on the variety of setups in data journalism teams – some are entirely independent (working on their own stories), some act as service departments (only responding to requests from people in the organisation for charts, interactives etc), some are news-driven and create daily output, and some are more features- and investigations-focused, working to longer timescales.