Highlights and key lessons

Damian RadcliffeCarolyn S. Chambers Professor in Journalism

@damianradcliffe

#SOJCDDJ

30 expert contributors

20 new chapters

Context

1. Greater use of the power of dataAcross all walks of life – from politics to sport

2. Not as new as you might think…

Statistical chart invented by Florence Nightingale to show the predominance of disease as a cause of mortality in the British Army during the Crimean War. (April 1854 to March 1855 and April 1855 to March 1856)

Been around for over 150 years...

You know nothing something John Snow

“How often does a map change the world? In 1854, one produced by Doctor John Snow, altered it forever.In the world of the 1850s, cholera was believed to be spread by miasma in the air, germs were not yet understood and the sudden and serious outbreak of cholera in London's Soho was a mystery.So Snow did something data journalists often do now: he mapped the cases.“http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/mar/15/john-snow-cholera-map

The other John Snow…

3. Huge breadth and rangeCovering all genres and using many different comms styles

4. Unprecedentedly large data sets

391,000 records Wikileaks' Iraq release

UK: 170 million + records which can be explored for free

Creating opportunities and challenges

5. Global Practice

Including:

• Skills

• Format of public data

• Up to date data

• Newsroom integration

Data Journalists often face many of the same issues

5 x Great Case Studies

1. Analysis of news coverage 2015 UK General Election

• Upwards of 170,000 articles in traditional media and over a million tweets analyzed. • 7,000 /30,000 articles p/w. • Every tweet published by

3,290 political actors and influencers. • c.25,000 daily tweets and

over 170,000 tweets p/w. • Weekly analysis.

2. Conflicts of interest

• Analysis of Local Government Pension Fund investment data.• 99 FOI requests.• Highlighted ethical dilemmas.• Councils seeking to make

returns while also being arbiters on planning proposals in the nascent fracking industry.

3. Perception vs Reality• Matteo Moretti and colleagues

used data journalism to tackle Chinese migrant xenophobia in the Italian city of Bolzano.

• The series about the "People's Republic of Bolzano” won Data Visualisation of the Year (Small Newsroom), at the Data Journalism Awards 2015 run by Global Editors Network.

4. How US Intelligence budget is spent• Leaked by Edward Snowden, published by The Washington Post

Aug 13. • US government has annually released its overall level of

intelligence spending since 2007.• But ‘it has not divulged how it uses the money or how it performs

against the goals set by the president and Congress.’

5. “How Big Data Busted Abe Lincoln”

Implementation

5 x Tips

1. Choice of tools/visual methods mattersImpacts on readability, emphasis and representation

2. Keep it simpleAs with journalistic writing, don’t be convoluted for the sake of it.

3. Consider sustainabilityHow easily can work be refreshed and updated to remain relevant?

4. Show your workingsEspecially important if you’re going to criticize public bodies for not

5. Remember you’re still a storytellerData without context frequently tells us nothing.

Data Journalism in the future

1. *Must* be mobile friendlyAlready a leading media device for many audiences

2. PersonalizationSearch + interrogation

3. We will all need to be data literateIt will no longer be “cool” to not get math or statistics.

4. Includes knowing how to protect dataSources may all be electronic. So encryption matters.

5. It won’t be called data journalismIt will just be journalism

Thanks for listeningNow buy the book!

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