The new "must know" for journalists

Data journalism is the new “must know” for journalists, but even with that in mind the idea of learning how to incorporate data into my pieces is still overwhelming. I have two main concerns with the idea of me using data journalism, first what if they data collected or given to me is presented wrong. I understand the concept of never having enough research, and I would go above and beyond to make sure it’s right, but there’s still this underlying fear that I won’t be able present it correctly or accurately and that could affect my credibility as a writer. My second concern is data journalism is definitely increasing in the media world, but data tends to get misused in the journalistic sphere. Sometimes writers will find data and take it out of context when placing it in their piece, which personally isn’t just morally wrong, but just ridiculous. Of course the best way to prevent this for any journalist is to stay true to the facts and make sure to keep things blunt in context at all times.

So I decided to take a look at two of my favorite sites, and I noticed a few things when dealing with data journalism for them. I first took a look at TedTalks, now my favorite thing about this site is its all videos that help me expand my knowledge on certain topics. However, they have an interactive transcript of the video for individuals to read through. I looked at Hilary Cottam “Social Services are Broken” and I noticed her speech was filled with data that helped back up her claims as well as where she actually got the data from. For my second site, Food & Wine, you honestly wouldn’t think that you would find any data in them, but I was surprised to see that site was able to incorporate it. In an article discussing the benefits of investing in a super juicer, the author was able to go over how much someone could save annually as well as how much better the Juicepresso is compared to other juicers. It was honestly interesting to see how far data journalism has come.

#foodandwine #TED #data #journalism