Data journalism will complement traditional micro-narratives via a workflow of finding, processing and compiling significant amounts of data.

 

Big Data and cloud computing are already shaping up to be two of the biggest buzzwords of the 21st century. As an emerging means of news production, data journalism, a process by which reporters interpret the world through data, has no doubt injected vitality into the traditional news industry.  
 

Data journalism refers to a journalistic process that involves digging deep into data by scraping, cleansing and structuring it, filtering by mining for specific information, and visualizing it for the purpose of creating a news story. The concept was first formally formulated at the “Data-driven Journalism” roundtable conference held in Amsterdam in August 2010.
 

“News reporting requires constant innovation, and media as the news production hub, needs to fully facilitate technological achievement to tell untold stories, find new angles or complete stories, and innovate ways of news presentation,” said Guo Xiaoke, an associate professor at Communication University of China.
 

Guo said data journalism will complement traditional micro-narratives via a workflow of finding, processing and compiling significant amounts of data while making news more attractive and readable in visualized presentation. 

In the era of big data, journalists need to extract and compile useful information from a pool of data with the aid of computers, said Su Hongyuan, dean of the School of Journalism and Communication at South China University of Technology.
 

In light of the challenges posed by social media and technological advancement, developing data journalism is the only way to improve the core competitiveness of news agencies and professional journalists, said Shi Anbin, deputy dean of the School of Journalism and Communication at Tsinghua University.

Scholars say that data journalism has the advantage of providing large amounts of accurate information and acts as a visualized multimedia platform. It is gradually replacing traditional storytelling, which relies on texts and pictures, because data journalism is capable of deeply probing into the subject matter rather than simply describing it.
 

Shi said that data journalism can be summarized by two words—“niche” and “comparison.” The former means that it can provide personalized news after mining, analyzing and filtering large data sets in the form of interactive new media platform to allow readers access, supervise and choose the news.

Shi added that it applies the quantitative and qualitative research methods of  social sciences to generate “variables” regarding a certain theme so that data fitting specific criteria will come up, allowing readers to make horizontal and vertical comparisons and conduct rational analysis to avoid blind-sighted or biased assumptions.
 

News and data are omnipresent nowadays, but in-depth news that offers insight, analysis and prediction is rare, Shi said.
 

Su said that Western media has already begun technical and conceptual innovation. For example, detailed information maps have been made to obtain news based on audience feedback.

Though some mainstream news outlets and Internet media in China are actively promoting data journalism, the general practice is to supplement traditional stories by adding graphs, tables and some notes, which does not amount to a fundamental reform of news production, Su said. 

Guo said data journalism is still in its infancy, and more breakthroughs need to happen in terms of expanding the channels of acquiring data and creating new ways of presentation, which will be the main trend of data journalism in China.

 

 

Zhang Qingli and Zhang Jie are reporters at the Chinese Social Sciences Today.