Tag Archives: ICIJ

3 more angles most often used to tell data stories: explorers, relationships and bad data stories

6 Replies
Scale: 'This is how big an issue is' Change/stasis: ‘This is going up/down/not improving’ Outliers/ranking: ‘The best/worst/where we rank’ Variation: "Postcode lotteries" and distributions Exploration: Tools, simulators, analysis — and art Relationships/debunking: ‘Things are connected’ — or not, networks and flows of power and money Problems & solutions: ‘Concerns over data’, ‘Missing data’, ‘Get the data’

Yesterday I wrote the first of a two-part series on the 7 angles that are used to tell stories about data. In this second part I finish the list with a look at the three less common angles: those stories focusing on relationships; angles that focus on the data itself — its absence, poor quality, or existence — and exploratory stories that often provide an opportunity to get to the grips with the data itself.

Data angle 5. ‘Explore’: tools, interactivity — and art

How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk
This New York Times interactive became one of their most-read stories of all time

Exploratory angles are largely web-native. Its selling point is often characterised by a ‘call to action’  like “explore”, “play” or “Take the quiz”. Alternatively, it might sell the comprehensiveness of the analysis in the way that it is “Mapped” or documents “Every X that ever happened”, or simply answers the question “Who/how/where”.

Continue reading →

Is there a ‘canon’ of data journalism? Comment call!

27 Replies

Looking across the comments in the first discussion of the EJC’s data journalism MOOC it struck me that some pieces of work in the field come up again and again. I thought I’d pull those together quickly here and ask: is this the beginnings of a ‘canon’ in data journalism? And what should such a canon include? Stick with me past the first obvious examples…

Early data vis

These examples of early data visualisation are so well-known now that one book proposal I recently saw specified that it would not talk about them. I’m talking of course about… Continue reading →

Ethics in data journalism: protection of sources, leaks and war

3 Replies

This is the fourth in a series of extracts from a draft book chapter on ethics in data journalism. The first looked at how ethics of accuracy play out in data journalism projects, the second at culture clashes, privacy, user data and collaboration, and the third at mass data gathering. This is a work in progress, so if you have examples of ethical dilemmas, best practice, or guidance, I’d be happy to include it with an acknowledgement.

Protection of sources

Most news organisations’ professional guidelines include sections on protecting sources. In some countries this is also enshrined in law. Many journalists, however, are not aware of how they can betray sources’ identity by publishing original files online.

Metadata stored in those files – information about the date and location of access, the computers and accounts used, and other data, can be used to identify a leaker. Even photocopied or printed materials can bear invisible digital watermarks which describe what machines were used to produce them, and when (Reimer, 2005; PicMarkr, 2008). Continue reading →