My digital journalism story begins in an age of computer technology when folks used to talk about floppy disks and peer into monochrome monitors at their work desks. The internet had not come into existence. I had just started my career as a print journalist and saw personal computers making their advent into the newsroom. I was fascinated by these devices and inadvertently stumbled upon a database programme called dBase III plus, which was the first computer programme I used in my journalism career.

Once I realised the potential of this programme for data analysis and basic visualisation, I persuaded my colleagues on the technical side to give me access to the programme. It was not meant for reporters but it turned out that they were as enthusiastic as I was in exploring the use of these tools for doing stories. I was soon creating databases manually (sometimes, with their help) out of election resuts and trying to work out electoral trends and patterns and using basic charts to visualise the data.

Digital automation

I also got interested in automating workflows for print using digital technology. One of the projects I tried out those days (yes, using dBase III plus!) involved the setting up of a digital database populated with historical election data to almost instantaneously fetch the relevant background details to add depth and perspective to current electoral results (as close to real-time as possible). And also to automatically generate the data required in the format required for the typesetting template (instead of looking up old election data handbooks and doing the math manually and typing it as the results came in, which the standard practice).

Later, I ran a blog, onlinenewsdesign.com (link to an archived snapshot of a page), for several years. It was a Wordpress installation and I customised a theme for my site. At one point I got very interested in the design of news sites and their architecture and I created the online space to share news and trends related to online news sites, especially their design and architecture.

Launching a datablog

I worked at The Hindu, and I played a role in the launch of a datablog, called Datadelve. Data blogs had become the rage those days and many news sites had launched these. I came up with many data-based posts - I thought it would be appropriate to highlight the status open government data in the very first post.

I also occasionally contributed to the ‘Data Point’ column of The Hindu, which essentialy uses data visualisation to explore a topic in the news. That apart I also did stories that involved the use of tools like R and D3. What interests me these days is geojournalism - journalism involving the use of maps, various kinds of geographical data including remote sensing data and different digital geographical tools.

Created: April 14, 2021; updated 9 May 2021.