Illustration: Ramachandran

Data journalism has gained in importance over the years - a trend that has been highlighted by key surveys and reports.

“Data journalism is clearly on the rise,” observed International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) in its report The 2019 State of Technology in Global Newsrooms. “Data-driven journalism has become much more common today than just two years ago. An increasing reliance on data marks the biggest change in the way journalists work. Data journalism is among their most regularly used digital skills.”

Main factors

A key factor that propelled data journalism to the foreground is the almost global availability of datasets in the public domain and the ever-increasing number of tools to access those and build data-driven narratives based on points of news interest.

Rapid innovation and exploration of new, mostly digital ways, of story-telling also had a huge bearing on data journalism and the manner in which it gained ground in recent years. News organisations are realising that in this digital age, data journalism vastly enriches reader experience and lends a cutting-edge to their product offering.

Besides, news sites are finding that data journalism does give traction to them in gaining readership and enhancing engagement.

So data journalism here to stay. If ever, it is going to evolve and provide challenging opportunities to journalists to diversify their skillsets and come up with ever more innovative and interesting ways of story-telling.

That said, media organisations differ widely to the value they attach to data journalism in their daily workflow. And also in the kind of organisational structures they have in place to further it. But they can no longer afford to totally ignore it.

Sought after skill

An earlier ICFJ report had in 2017 described data journalism as an advanced ‘third-tier skill’ that is used by less than a third of newsrooms worldwide. It is “the most sought-after training, with over half of journalists wanting it. However, it is offered by only 40% of newsrooms.” The 2019 report said “Seventy-nine percent of journalists want training on analyzing data, while only 35% of newsrooms provide it.”

“More journalists than news managers also believe that data journalism has a positive impact on their work: On average, 65% of journalists believe that data journalism helps engage audiences, improve quality and raise productivity, compared to 55% of managers.” The report also said 40 per cent of news managers believed that data journalism helped increase revenue.

This finding is also supported by a Google News Lab data journalism survey in 2017, which said, “There is a clear need for organizations to use more data and employ data more effectively in their storytelling. Eighty three percent of Google Trends respondents would like to see their organizations use more data in storytelling, and 84% would like to see their organizations use data more effectively. But the technical skills to access, clean, and analyze data remain a general barrier to using data”

“The future of data journalism will hinge on a variety of factors, from the sustainability of newsrooms to innovation in technology and the evolution of skill sets to extract value and report new insights to audiences. One thing, though, is certain: the days when data journalism was a “new” field, of use only to a select few, are over.”

Created: April 14, 2021; updated: May 8, 2021.