Data Journalism

Data Journalism is another way to inspecting the world and hold the powers that be to account. With an increasing amount of data available, now more than ever it is significant that journalists are of aware of data journalism techniques (Lashmar and Hill 2014). Data journalism means information, nothing more. In the common usage, it refers to colossal amount of information, often numeric, which can be presented by the use of graphs, maps and other illustrative means (Knight and Cook 2013). Data journalism usually refers to numeric or digital data, or information that is given in such bulk as to be difficult to access or understand by average users. This should be a tool in the toolkit of any journalist; whether learning how to work with data directly, or work together with someone who can. Data journalism like investigative journalism is a rarely an “easy win”. It takes time to analyse pages of data and may involve a team of journalists working together. Most data come in the format of large tables and spreadsheets which are intimidating to our users (Lashmar and Hill 2014). Data should be gathered and processed, visualized in a format that is searchable to users and easier to interpret. Journalism is about people and not numbers. The best way to explain the importance of a story is to interview someone who has some personal experience. Knight and Cook (2013) argued that data journalism does not need most sophisticated software or qualifies programmers. Technology is getting easier and easier to use, and the stories are getting better and better. Financial data is probably the oldest form of data journalism-every newspaper of sufficient size runs graphs of stock movements and pages of fine-printed numbers, but this are intended for expert use. Although the stock pages are an important kind of journalism, most news that uses data does so in the service of telling a story, not simple presenting the numbers for analysis. The story telling is fundamental to the process of journalism. The journalist’s role must be to make sense of data journalism raw data, not simple presenting it. It is a narrative function that is essential to the process of data journalism, and distinguishes news outlets from everyone else publishing data. In the new age of social media, data itself become social. The is new wealth of data that is being created by the social media networks, as well as new sources of information and material from users. Data journalism uses “crowd sourcing” that is the practice of asking the public for input. This can be anything from soliciting pictures to asking for help in the reporting process (Knight and Cook 2013:120). Crowd sourcing, like many of the terms used, it still opens to interpretation but, in general, it refers to soliciting raw material from the users. Data is a modern word for information and, in that sense, all journalism is data journalism, since all journalism trades in information of one sort or another. T software such as MS Excel here are four critical stages for data journalism such as finding data, interrogating data, visualizing data and mashing data. Journalists need to be thorough and skeptical in their approach as they write articles for data journalism. Spreadsheet software such as MS Excel and google Spreadsheet, are at the core of data journalism. Spreadsheets are an incredibly powerful tools and worth spending few hours getting to grips with what they can do. There are added benefits to use spreadsheets to monitor income and outgoing tax.