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Data-driven journalism: Enriching the news

Ten, even five years ago, the use of data as a basis for reporting was difficult and costly, requiring IT skills far beyond what is common in the media. Databases were used mainly by investigative journalists. Editors and reporters usually relied on information provided by outside sources.
 
Today there is a notable change. Collections of data are becoming available online, often for free. There is a whole stack of tools to dig into ‘big data‘. Open source tools allow swift navigation and analysis of large amounts of data, and there are now online applications that allow us to share and visualise data.
 
Developing the know-how to use the available data more effectively, to understand it, communicate and generate stories based on it, represents a huge opportunity to breathe new life into journalism. Journalists can find new roles as ’sense-makers’ digging deep into data, thus making reporting more socially relevant.
 
In this interview, Stefan Fichtel, creative and infographics director at KB Consulting (Berlin, Germany) and one of this year’s judges in the 18th International Infographics Summit Malofiej, explains more about the emerging field of data-driven journalism, and the possibilities for visual contextualisation of stories.

EJC: Can data-driven journalism help the industry during these times of crisis and restructuring? If so, how do we make the most of it?

SF: Today journalism faces many challenges and changes. It is very difficult to see through the mess to find where the really interesting prospects might be. However, while working as a creative and infographic director at KircherBurkhardt, Berlin for the last couple of years, I discovered that there is a big deal missing in news business today. What would be the “new story” that would allow journalists to captivate a new, broad readership in the future?

I think a promising perspective is stashed away behind the term of data-driven journalism (DDJ). Most people think that this is just the art of creating colourful but confusing diagrams frequently out of open source information available on popular social networks (indeed, it often seems that people play around with this promotional data just because it is available, and I think there is not other professional future for this kind of infotainment than student research projects).

But that’s not entirely what data-driven journalism is or could be about. Where are the compelling stories behind these incomprehensive graphical pictures of hardly interesting figures? Is there something else to open up for the worldwide journalist community than just new tools for data mining? What else could be included by the term data-driven journalism?

EJC: How can data-driven journalism help tell a different story about big events?

SF: Take the incredible disaster of BP in the Gulf of Mexico at the moment. It’s a good example: Important content, high relevance with a meanwhile long timespan of reporting. How could we handle this appropriately?

Since the first reports of the catastrophe were published, there have been countless interviews, expert analyses, exposures of corruption within companies and administrations, of ineffective reparation efforts, citations, explanations and helpless excuses. The coverage in Germany, for example, has thus produced an unmanageable chaos of information.

After two months of reporting I have lost the overview. What were all the quoted failures? When were they revealed? Which groups and companies are the involved?  How much oil is streaming out each day? How much fuel is sold at just one gas station per day in comparison? How many people are affected by this tragedy? The point is: The daily updates blur our view of the big picture of this disaster.

Any reader, listener or viewer trying to get an overview would have to do research of for at least two or three days. And when you finally look at your little collection of facts and figures, your small library, the problem remains: Where is the clue, where is the conclusion on it all?

This gap is exactly the missing part in journalism these days: What we lack are sites where we can see how a global story evolves from the moment it becomes breaking news. Readers need journalists who offer summaries and give decisive hints for interpretations within easy-to-use interfaces.

With all the tools we have today we could deliver better, deeper insights and start in the very moment we realise an incident might become worth covering. And even if the information is conflicting and cut into little pieces at the beginning, the goal must be to build all this into one easy-to-understand and meaningful piece of reporting. From speculation to measuring the impact: in a step-by-step process. 

EJC: What are the possible new formats for telling ‘big stories’ in a more appealing way?

SF: While the disaster in the Mexican Gulf still evolves, we find perfectly arranged online tools for the world soccer championship, for example. You will find all teams compared to each other by means of individual statistics, get the whole schedules and track records of each player described in detail. All the news and special reports are there to create a substantive and informative online experience.

Why don’t we have something like this for other news stories as well? It does not matter if you distribute this kind of journalistic work over a PC, over an iPhone or whatever device you want. This is not a question of technical platform, but of a different approach.

EJC: How can better visual connections help us to understand masses of information?

SF: This is a different way to think and presupposes a diverse cognitive model - first of all: a much more visual connected perception. People cannot cope with our written information overflow today, so we need not only word-based but visual journalists who are able to bundle, clear up and arrange the mass of available information and to line this information with graphic ideas and illustrative representations for a better understanding. They have to work together with infographic artists and programmers in other news-interfaces than the existing CMS-based applications.

Therefore we have to implement new workflows in our common newsrooms and add other specialists to the staff there, to develop new, nonlinear and adequate storytelling techniques. At the moment this kind of news coverage is much too expensive because we don’t have ready-to-use formats, yet. But as we have developed the ability to gather huge amounts of data nowadays, we will now have to improve – at last – our ability to explain complicated processes, political and social interrelations in much more illustrative ways than before.

There is high demand for such “depicted” stories today. A great many systems governing our world have become far too complex to be described only by words. The standard structure of the “chronology of sentences” is not able to create on its own a holistic view of such issues.

This would not replace traditional journalism; on the contrary it could revive it. This is why I think an important news segment with more visual and vivid formats is evolving right now. One that inspires new audiences in the future.

Links:

Data visualisation – diagrams without a story?
Doodlebuzz
Where does my money go?
Super Bowl tweets
Solvency of Spanish banks
Human development

Getting more journalistic:
German Parliament on Decisions, Politicans and Distinctions
Democratic Debate Analyser

Testing new storytelling formats:
Battle of Wanat

Tags: creative and infographics director, creative and infographics director, data mining, data mining, design, germany, graphics, graphics, infographics, infographics, interactive, interactive, kircherburkhardt, kircherburkhardt, stefan fichtel, stefan fichtel, summit malofiej, summit malofiej, visuals, visuals,

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