Journalism Studies

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“In the Beginning Were the Data”: Economic

Journalism as/and Data Journalism

Ángel Arrese

To cite this article: Ángel Arrese (2022) “In the Beginning Were the Data”: Economic
Journalism as/and Data Journalism, Journalism Studies, 23:4, 487-505, DOI:
10.1080/1461670X.2022.2032803

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JOURNALISM STUDIES
2022, VOL. 23, NO. 4, 487–505
https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2022.2032803

“In the Beginning Were the Data”: Economic Journalism as/

and Data Journalism
Ángel Arrese
School of Communication, University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article argues that the logic of data journalism has been a Economic journalism;
driving force in journalism since its beginnings, particularly in the business journalism; financial
case of economic journalism. Economic journalism has historically journalism; data journalism;
journalism history; data-
integrated five central aspects of data journalism: working with
driven news
data and databases; the development of a conceptual
infrastructure for data analysis and storytelling; the regular use of
visualization tools; the application of new technologies to the
peculiarities of economic data; and the integration of different
professional profiles in the newsrooms. By analyzing economic
journalism - the first among equals of data journalism - the article
argues that data journalism can extract some lessons from
economic news in order to improve the extension of data stories
to every news beat. Four recommendations are drawn: the
importance of a balanced management of data exuberance, their
newsworthiness, and the analytical and conceptual tools used to
interpret them; the aim of visualization should be more
conceptual than descriptive, in order to simplify and clarify
complex issues, and relationships between data, to make the
explanation of current affairs more relevant and understandable;
data journalism needs a harmonious integration of investigative
projects with day-to-day coverage; and data journalism should
avoid the perils of technological determinism.

Data journalism is one of the buzzwords of the last decade in the news world. Prac-
titioners and scholars around the world have identified this news-data culture as one
of the new frontiers of journalism, enabled by new technologies and the datafication
of society (Van Van Es and Schäfer 2018). This “quantitative turn” (Coddington 2015)
has made real what some authors, led by Philip Meyer, have defined as precision journal-
ism, computer-assisted journalism, and other related concepts since the 1960s and 1970s.
Meyer said, “Knowing what to do with data is the essence of the new precision journalism”
(Meyer 1991). Currently, this journalism has taken place in innovative projects in leading
newsrooms, such as The Guardian from 2009, and has experienced a rapid expansion
throughout the world and in all types of media (Heravi and Lorenz 2020; Mutsvairo,
Bebawi, and Borges-Rey 2019). This development has been accompanied by an intense

CONTACT Ángel Arrese [email protected]

© 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
488 Á. ARRESE

academic production that has addressed the technological, visual, conceptual, and many
other aspects of data journalism (Appelgren, Lindén, and van Dalen 2019; Ausserhofer
et al. 2020).
The expansion of data journalism comes from the confluence of the growing avail-
ability of data (known today as “big data”) and the technologies for its processing,
which are made available to journalism to improve the coverage of current affairs,
giving greater prominence to the quantifiable dimensions of these issues (Anderson
2018). However, it is worth asking what is new in data journalism that was not already
the accepted practice in current affairs reporting beyond the many other scattered ante-
cedents of quantitative practices (Martinisi and Lugo-Ocando 2020). Faced with this ques-
tion, I argue that the logic of data journalism has been a driving force in journalistic
practice since the beginnings of journalism, deployed in all its fundamental aspects in
the case of economic journalism. It has certainly been a minor force because since the
nineteenth century, the initial literary spirit of journalism and its more recent political
spirit left little room for the development of its numerical, statistical soul. But the
passion for numbers, for statistics, for data—the passion that journalism shared with
the dismal science—has always been there, although as an expert journalist recalled in
1973, economic journalism remained the Cinderella of newsrooms (Welles 1973).
By analyzing the way economic journalism has historically worked with data and con-
necting it with some current challenges of data journalism, this article argues that data
journalism can extract some lessons from economic news in order to improve the exten-
sion of data stories to other news beats.
The paper is organized as follows: The first part analyzes how the central pillars of
today’s data journalism have been essential elements of good economic journalism
from its origins. The second part highlights some peculiarities of working with data
that are typical of economic journalism and that contrast to some extent with the domi-
nant dynamics of current data journalism. Finally, this paper concludes with reflections on
the interest of continuing to work on improving the extension of data journalism to all
news beats, taking into account some ideas presented in this article. The article also pre-
sents recommendations for such an extension, based on the experience of economic jour-
nalism, dealing with data-driven news.

Elements of Data Journalism and Economic Journalism

There are frequent discussions and debates around the definition of data journalism, and
many have been proposed over the years (e.g., Lewis and Waters 2018; Westlund and
Hermida 2021; Houston 2019). Certain core elements recur in most of the definitions.
Based on them, and also taking into account other proposals to identify key features of
data journalism (Weber, Engebretsen, and Kennedy 2018), or to define the elements
usually taken into account to assess good journalism work in this field (Young,
Hermida, and Fulda 2017), this paper focuses on five central dimensions of data journal-
ism to support my thesis: data and databases; concepts, analysis and data stories; data
visualization; data and technology; and expert skills for data journalism.
These dimensions are usually the focus of research from the point of view of journal-
istic practice. When analyzing the core elements of data journalism as a process, Ausser-
hofer et al. (2020) point out that “there are common elements which essentially outline
 JOURNALISM STUDIES 489

this journalistic process (developing “data stories’ by analysing large sets of data with
(mostly) quantitative, computational methods), as well as a special form of presentation
(interactive visualizations).” (953, cursive is mine). I take this micro view of data journalism,
fully aware that there are other macro analytical lenses that can be used to complement
this study, such as the peculiarities of national journalistic cultures, the structure of media
systems and markets, or even the political and legal environments (Appelgren, Lindén,
and van Dalen 2019).
The following paragraphs will explain how these five essential dimensions of data jour-
nalism have historically formed the basis of how economic journalism has covered current
affairs and elaborated news.

Data and Databases

“In the beginning were the data.” Virtually all histories of journalism, from the classical
(Groth 1928; Weill 1934) to the recent (John and Silberstein-Loeb 2015; Pettegree
2014), recognize that one of the earliest forms of periodicals was the price currents and
other commercial newspapers that became widespread in Europe and the United
States in the 17th and 18th centuries. Several authors (McCusker and Gravesteijn 1991;
Neal 1991; Vissink 1985) have studied in detail how these publications contained
almost exclusively the most basic type of information: data—that is, data on prices of
goods and commodities, prices of stocks, ship listings, etc. This information filled their
pages, just as centuries later, stock exchange pages and prices of many other financial
products have continued to be published, whether offline or online. This was the basis
of economic journalism, with increasingly diverse types of publications (McCusker
2005) and with more and more data news being incorporated into general newspapers
and enriched by the interpretation and analysis of current affairs (Arrese 2002; Roush
2006). Of course, data, especially financial data, were also an essential element in the
development of news agencies of various kinds, which, from Havas (1835) and Reuters
(1851) to Bloomberg (1981), have always been based on the recording, analysis, and dis-
semination of quantitative information, in the best tradition of today’s data journalism
(Machin and Niblock 2010; Palmer 2003, 2016; Wells 2020).
In the seventeenth century, a weekly price current with dozens or hundreds of prices
was probably the closest thing to the big data of the time, or if not, at least the closest this
era came to a database. Searching, recording, and sorting data, and arranging them in lists
and tables, is the most basic process for building databases, from the Lloyd’s List (1734) to
today’s spreadsheets. Not surprisingly, as economic information became more abundant,
datasets from newspapers and journals allowed for more sophisticated and information-
intensive products (yearbooks, business histories, monthly statistics, etc.). Already in the
nineteenth century, typical examples of “data-driven journalism” were statistical products
of The Economist such as the “Statistical Supplement”, “Commercial History & Review”,
“The Investor’s Monthly Manual”, and “The Monthly Trade Supplement”, among others
(Anonymous 1943; Arrese 1995).
In the twentieth century, the experience of some business news media in managing
big amounts of data and information led to the creation of data-driven business news
departments; examples include, but are not limited to, the Economist Intelligence Unit
from The Economist, Dow Jones News from The Wall Street Journal, and Fintel from The
490 Á. ARRESE

Financial Times and Extel (Arrese 1995; Kynaston 1988; Wendt 1982). But again, the logic
of the informative potential of data was longstanding. It is highly symbolic that such
popular data-driven businesses as ratings agencies (Standard & Poors, Moody’s and
Fitch, among others) were born from periodicals specializing in financial information,
driven as they were by journalists/editors such as Henry Varnum Poor, John Moody and
John K. Fitch (Voznyuk 2015).
Economic, business, and financial data and databases are still the lifeblood of economic
reporting today. Few places in newsrooms outside the economics sections have such an
abundance of data waiting to be analyzed, especially when they also have access to the
exabytes of information that can be obtained from the screens of Reuters, Bloomberg, and
other commercial information services.

Concepts, Analysis and Data Stories

The development of economics and statistics, which started in the eighteenth century, but
blossomed in the nineteenth century, provided the theoretical, conceptual, and analytical
structures necessary to explain and understand the economic data published in the
press. After all, as Paul Samuelson, one of the most influential economists of the twentieth
century, once commented, “economic theory serves to make good economic journalism
possible” (cited in Solow 1999). This comment, which may not have as many followers
today, reflects well the relationship between journalism and economics until the professio-
nalization of both disciplines at the end of the nineteenth century (Arrese 2000). Historically
speaking, some “economists’ were also “journalists’—the Physiocrats and Frédéric Bastiat in
France, Friedrich List in Germany, and David Ricardo and Walter Bagehot in Great Britain,
among many others. Since that time, a few prominent figures in economics have always
been active in the media to disseminate new theories, ideas, and concepts (Parsons 1989).
From Malthus to Keynes, from Galbraith to Friedman, to current “economic stars’ such
as Stiglitz, Krugman, or Piketty, many economists have understood that Paul Samuelson’s
quoted phrase holds a great truth: it is important to explain to society how economic
institutions work and how progress in economics can contribute to the improvement
of economic policies (Mata 2011; Grisold and Hendrik 2020). Of course, this is not only
an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon. Some of the leading authors of influential economic tra-
ditions such as the Austrian, Stockholm, or Freiburg schools contributed through the
media to making sense of the economic problems of their time (Backhaus 2011; Klau-
singer 2015; Kutzner 2014). For their part, the media played an important role in the
public legitimization of economic policies derived from theoretical economics, ranging
from free trade, Keynesianism, social market economics, and monetarism to supply-side
economics (Parsons 1989).
The theoretical efforts of economics have produced and continue to produce the
metrics of the economy as well as the keys to their interpretation. Hundreds of economic
indicators (GDP, inflation, employment rates, trade statistics, etc.), business concepts
(balance sheet, profits and losses, performance metrics, etc.), and financial metrics
(stock indexes, prices of financial products, interest rates, etc.) constitute the data
bricks of the conceptual edifice of economic life. And a few of them have always struc-
tured the day-to-day coverage of economic issues in the media (see, for example, in
the case of early accountancy, Alborn 1997).
 JOURNALISM STUDIES 491

Moreover, the media themselves have historically participated in the generation of

some of these indices and indicators. It is well known how the main stable stock
market indices in many countries were initiated in business newsrooms; among the
most famous cases are the Dow Jones in The Wall Street Journal, the FTSE in the Financial
Times and the Nikkei in the Japanese daily Nihon Keizai Shimbun (Hautcoeur 2006). Also
popular are the numerous rankings produced by business magazines that followed the
example of the ranking of the 30 richest Americans that Forbes created in 1918, only
one year after its founding. Less known are other important contributions, such as the
fact that one of the first stable price indices in Europe was started by The Economist in
1864 (Clapham 1943), or that a publication such as the American Hunt’s Merchants’ Maga-
zine, around the same time, connected economic statistics with population statistics to
reflect new aspects of economic growth in different cities (Cook 2017). This “journalistic
creativity” applied to data has continued to live on in many economic publications and
media, by creating rankings, indices, etc., some as unique as the famous Big Mac index
of The Economist.
Theory, sound concepts, generally accepted indicators, indices, rankings, and so on
form the basic raw material of economic journalism understood as data journalism. It is
also what makes it possible for economic news to have a structure, a basis for comparing
events, and the historical background necessary to analyze the evolution and changes of
an economy over time. This conceptual and analytical scaffolding makes possible the
argumentative lines of everyday news stories, constructed with specialized languages
and discourses (those of the economy, business and finance), around processes, events
and changes involving people, but also “actors’ as peculiar as “the economy”, economic
growth, or the deficit, among many others (Emmison 1986; Bybee et al. 2020). These con-
ceptual constructs are characterized by the fluctuations and the evolution of data and
indicators of very different types, which occupy a prominent place in the headlines.
Faced with such an abstract argumentative framework, the economic narrative, also in
the news, has historically required special rhetorical efforts to make the explanation of
current events as understandable and attractive as possible (McCloskey 1990; Arrese
and Vara-Miguel 2016). Economic data stories, in this sense, have a more analytical and
argumentative approach than the largely descriptive that can be observed in most
examples of data journalism in other fields.

Data Visualization
Simon Rogers often recalls that as early as its first issue in 1821, The Guardian published a
piece of data journalism. It was a table of data on schools in Manchester and Salford, with
information on how many students were enrolled in each school, as well as their average
annual spending (The Guardian 2011). Certainly, the table is one of the most basic graphi-
cal forms of data visualization (Dick 2020), and was the main way of displaying economic
figures in price currents, almost from their inception. In fact, in the nineteenth century,
economic information was synonymous with data tables. Even today it is still its essential
graphical form, even though they may be composed of hundreds or thousands of rows
and columns.
The move from tables to more sophisticated graphical forms (bar, line, area, pie graphs,
etc.) and their slow incorporation into journalism is well documented (Dick 2020). So is the
492 Á. ARRESE

contextualization of these graphical forms in the set of information visualization modalities

(Tufte 2001). In all of these historical analyses, the figure of William Playfair (1759–1823) is
widely considered the inventor of most of the graphical forms used today (e.g., Friendly
2008)—first the line graph and bar chart (1786), and later the pie chart and circle graph
(1801). What is perhaps less noticed is that Playfair, “completely original” (Tilling 1975,
200), applied his creativity, above all, to the analysis of data series of economic and commer-
cial information. It was his analysis of the dynamics of the economy, and his desire to
explain it more simply in graphic form, that guided the production of his famous Commer-
cial and Political Atlas, published in 1786, 1787, and 1801 (Funkhouser 1937). In this sense,
Playfair was an economic analyst; his passions were political economy and the balance of
trade (Costigan-Eaves and Macdonald-Ross 1990), and for this reason, he has even been
described as one of the first theorists of capitalism (Grossman 1948).
The link of the most popular graphical forms to the Playfair era, and to the emergence
of political economy around the industrial revolution, was reinforced throughout the
nineteenth century with the scientific development of economics. The union of statistics
and economic science made possible a more intense use of descriptive graphs (time
series, comparisons of magnitudes between countries, etc.), and also empowered the
use of Cartesian axes to represent economic-mathematical functions, such as utility and
trade net gains (De Marchi 2003). Economists such as Jevons and Marshall relied on the
graphical method to represent their mathematical models (Maas and Morgan 2002).
Since then, the visualization of economic phenomena through “figures and economic dia-
grams’ (Blaug and Lloyd 2010) has never ceased to be intimately related to economics.
Of course, the graphical developments derived from the union of mathematics, statistics,
and economics from the eighteenth century onward have not reached the pages of news-
papers in a strict sense. However, to some extent their logic has. Topics such as correlations,
time projections, linear and non-linear functions, etc. are even taught in journalism text-
books (Livingston and Voakes 2005). Until recently, as in Marshall and Jevons’ nineteenth
century, sophisticated graphic representations were possible only in the economic and
financial pages of the newspaper (see, for example, the chartist/technical analyses in the
stock market pages). But the precedents are very old. One of the first graphs (“diagram”)
of this type was published in The Economist in 1894. In an invited article on “Bi-Metallist The-
ories’, “Professor Nicholson” (Joseph Shield Nicholson, of the University of Edinburgh) illus-
trated the divergent movement of the commodity price index and the price of silver over a
six-year period. The weekly commented that it published the graph “in deference to the
Professor’s expressed preference for the graphic method” (Nicholson 1894, 234).
In the twentieth century, economic news incorporated all kinds of data visualization
elements, although relying heavily on Playfair’s original tables and graphical forms,
driven by the search for simplicity. But as in the past, the logic of economic data also con-
tinued to produce innovative examples. Fortune, for example, began to publish consumer
survey results in the 1930s with creative visualizations, typical of a magazine that wished to
integrate art, science, and business (Anderson 2018). Today, one only has to take a visual
stroll through the economic and financial pages of newspapers and magazines, the news
screens of CNBC or Fox Business, or those of Reuters and Bloomberg, to realize the
intense use of visualization tools. Many examples that naturally accompany the majority
of news in this field are interactive, and are built from their own software, as in the case
of the global news agencies services (Boyd-Barrett and Rantamen 1998; Bartram, 2003).
 JOURNALISM STUDIES 493

Data and Technology

Gutenberg and his printing press accelerated the dissemination of data and the prolifer-
ation of price currents and other commercial periodicals in Europe and America. Strictly
speaking, what the printing press made possible was the extension and dynamization of
a practice already commonplace for a long time among merchants in Italy, Germany, the
Netherlands, and elsewhere (McCusker and Gravesteijn 1991). Private information networks
with numerous trade correspondents in different markets have strong precedents in Europe
since the 14th and fifteenth century, as do centers for public spread of such information
(fairs, coffee houses, etc.) and the practices of collecting and distributing information on
prices and other data of economic value (Pettegree 2014). Such private information
systems already existed in the sixteenth century, including notable examples like the
famous newsletters of the Fuggers in Germany (Bauer 2011) and the network of correspon-
dents of Simón Ruiz in Spain (Ribeiro 2016). This practice of intense dissemination formed
the basis for the widespread and immediate adoption of the new printing technology.
Each new technology after the printing press was exploited by purveyors of economic
and financial information (Bakker 2011). Thus, for example, telegraphy brought about a
real revolution in financial news after the founding of news agencies, making possible
the birth of financial newspapers in Europe and the United States (Arrese 2002). And
when telegraph lines in their early years did not connect some specific markets,
financial information demanded imaginative innovations with already known technol-
ogies. Paul Julius Reuter in 1850—one year before the founding of Reuters—set up a
carrier-pigeon service, using up to 200 pigeons to carry “market-moving” news and
data, especially stock market prices, between Aachen and Brussels (Read 1999, 10–11).
Putting existing technology at the service of data accuracy and speed would translate
into Reuters’ well-known motto, “follow the cable” (Long 1995).
This Reuters slogan details the relationship between journalism and technology in the
field of economic news. Disseminating economic data to markets and society through
trading rooms and newsrooms requires state-of-the-art technologies to make the
spread of data secure while preserving its quality and transmission speed. Long before
the advent of the Internet, various electronic information services (with exemplary
cases such as Reuters Time Division Multiplex (1964), Automatic Data Exchange (1967),
or Reuters Monitor (1973)) already used the computer network model as information
infrastructure (Long 1995). In the 1980s, two years before the launch of Apple’s personal
computer, Bloomberg gave life to its famous legion of “Terminals’, which would further
transform economic and financial news markets (Bloomberg 2019). Of course, the popu-
larization of the Internet from the mid-1990s onwards only facilitated and intensified the
public access to these and other economic and financial information networks, which
could be used in the media in increasingly open and innovative ways.

Expert Skills for Data Journalism

The New York Times dedicated an article in 2019 to explaining the importance of incorpor-
ating Amanda Cox, a statistician, to its data journalism team (Lucas 2019). This move
reflects how the popularization of data journalism incorporates new professional
profiles (statisticians, technologists, etc.) into newsrooms, with the aim of each media
494 Á. ARRESE

outlet having a Nate Silver, the well-known founder of FiveThirtyEight. This has also gen-
erated increasing demands for technical training for current and future journalists (Brad-
shaw 2018; Heravi 2019). However, it is often forgotten that data journalists already exist
in many newsrooms, although they are sometimes hidden in the economic and financial
section.
At least since the nineteenth century, many relevant economic journalists have been
political economists, “numbers guys’ with good statistical knowledge and skills. Just as
an example, in the second half of that century, William Newmarch and Robert Giffen,
both future presidents of the Royal Statistical Society, worked as journalists in The Econ-
omist (Dudley Edwards 1993). Without going to such extremes, in publications such as the
Financial Times or Fortune in the twentieth century, highly qualified professionals like Paul
Einzig and John K. Galbraith (Elson 1968; Kynaston 1988) played a fundamental role in the
development of economic coverage.
Numeracy and data skills are essential for good economic journalism, as they are for
data journalism. Different journalistic traditions have resolved in different ways how to
integrate these journalistic and numerical skills. A mix of balanced professional expertises
is sought, although there are also extremes. In Brazil, traditionally only qualified journalists
were allowed to fill editorial positions, and therefore, a “learning [economics] by doing”
precedent has been dominant (Neto, Antonio, and Undurraga 2018). Meanwhile, in the
case of the Swiss Neue Zürcher Zeitung, one of the oldest newspapers in Europe, almost
all economic journalists are economists, and several have PhDs.
To find the right mix of numeracy, economic knowledge and writing skills has been a
permanent challenge in economic journalism, as it has been the need to improve the
economic financial and financial training of journalists (Doyle 2006; Tambini 2010;
Knowles 2020). Henry Luce, founder of Fortune, famously commented on the leftist ten-
dency of the magazine in the 1930s and 1940s, noting that it had opted for a more
left-wing editorial staff, even if it was composed of journalists with ideas far away from
his own, since they were superior in literary skills to the more right-wing, economically
trained editors. Luce believed that “a poet could more easily be transformed into an econ-
omics journalist than an accountant into a good writer” (Elson 1968, 137). But for a
business magazine, it was essential to maintain a balance between people of letters
and people of numbers in the newsroom.
****************
So far, it has been argued that economic journalism has a long history of working on
the basic pillars of data journalism. The following section will highlight how that experi-
ence - derived from the specific reporting and writing strategies of economic journalism -
can contribute to expanding this journalistic logic naturally in other news beats.

Five Ideas for the Development of Data Journalism

Concepts, News, and Data
Data journalism can help to follow the pulse of current events in every news beat, but that
should be done without sacrificing primary values and practices of newsworthiness
(Tandoc and Ho 2017). The increasing availability of data and analytical tools must help
explain what is happening in society, but without becoming the prevailing logic of
 JOURNALISM STUDIES 495

journalistic work. To this end, as we have seen in economic journalism, it is important to

focus on the infrastructure of concepts and indicators that can help improve the news,
and only then work with the data and the technological and visual tools that are necess-
ary to achieve this. Otherwise, many data journalism efforts will result in an exercise of
formatting and translating quantitative information and technical knowledge (Boyles
and Meyer 2016), forgetting that “data is technologically, organizationally and symboli-
cally mediated through discourses and practices’ (Lesage and Hackett 2014). However,
Lowrey and Hou (2018) note that when examining the impact of “commensurative” pro-
cesses in data journalism, the “nature and origins of data categories – that is, the structure
of structured journalism, which is at the heart of data and computational journalism –
have received little attention” (36).
The Covid pandemic highlighted the importance of synchronizing concepts, news, and
data. On the one hand, coverage has relied on the knowledge of medicine and epidemiol-
ogy, with new terms for the public such as viral shedding, herd immunity, and social
bubbles. On the other hand, day-to-day life has been marked by indicators such as repro-
duction rates, deaths per 100,000/14 days, case fatality rates, maximum hospital capacity,
and so on. Perhaps due to the novelty of the situation and the enormous uncertainty, we
have all suffered from the fluctuations in figures, the impossible comparisons between
countries with different indicators, the changes in parameters and variables over time,
and the use of non-standardized concepts. All have been a breeding ground for misinfor-
mation and disinformation, in which many within the media have participated, actively or
passively (Westlund and Hermida 2021).
Economic journalism, due to the fact it often deals with complex and abstract issues
(Parker 1997), is first conceptually driven and then data-driven. Data categories (concepts)
and data (numbers) have always been the bread and butter of economics stories, in con-
trast to other news beats (Alaqil and Jairo Lugo-Ocando 2021).

The Contexts of Data

Data without context are nonsense. The value of data increases exponentially with a good
contextualization. There are at least two types of contexts that every data journalism
project should take into account. The first, which has always been important in economic
journalism, has to do with a critical attitude towards the nature of the data, its metadata
(Cushion, Lewis, and Callaghan 2016). It is necessary to assess (and explain) their limit-
ations, how they are defined, how they are obtained, what questions they answer, their
representativeness, etc.; in short, it must be clearly stated how the context affects the
quality of the data and their ability to faithfully represent reality. It was the context of
data, for example, that was the focus of enlightening columns such as “The Numbers
Guy”, written by Carl Bialik for the Wall Street Journal between 2005 and 2013.
The second contextual level considers the relationship of certain data with other data.
Context puts them into perspective when applying a temporal point of view, when com-
paring certain data with other magnitudes related to them, or when analyzing the same
type of data in different cases (countries, companies, etc.). Many of the graphical and
visual tools of data journalism are aimed at adequately representing these contexts
that give fuller meaning to current affairs. Some of these contexts are given almost by
default, such as the evolution of time with time series, which have largely dominated
496 Á. ARRESE

graphics of many issues (Tufte 2001, 48). But there are many more that are important, and
each field must determine the critical ones in its case.
Context and perspective for data are essential features of good economics reporting
and good economics. In his famous Economics in One Lesson, journalist Hazlitt (1979)
wrote: “The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at
the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that
policy not merely for one group but for all groups” (17).

Investigative Projects and day-to-day Coverage

Using the language of statistics, many of the current major data journalism projects, such
as Wikileaks and the Panama Papers, are outliers, one-time projects around news investi-
gations that cannot be reliably replicated or anticipated. However, the majority of news
on current events regresses to the mean and is both “normal” and periodical (daily,
monthly, or annually). But not many data journalists are interested in updating prior
stories, or in following the regular pulse of events (Fink and Anderson 2014). In fact,
this division of data journalism takes different forms within the same newsroom. As
stated by De Maeyer (2015) when analyzing the Belgium case, “there is, on the one
hand, “ordinary” data journalism and, on the other hand, “thorough” data journalism.
They are characterized by contrasting traits’ (441). Stalph (2018) also highlights this fact
when he comments that “the sparsity of collaborative efforts and investigative
approaches distinguishes daily data journalism from previous analyses of eclectic and
elaborate data-driven projects’ (1332).
Today, coverage of current affairs, in any news beat, requires a steady, unremitting data
journalism effort. It requires periodical and well-planned work that takes account of the
evolution of the main variables and indicators, as well as their contexts. At the same
time, both with external data sources and with the data collected and accumulated by
the media over time, journalistic creativity in this field is potentially infinite. The solid
experience of economic journalism in the generation of indicators, indices, and rankings
can be emulated in other areas of current affairs. Some have been doing so for decades,
such as the analysis of baseball data, known in the field as sabermetrics (Albert 2010). It is
no coincidence that Nate Silver, the quantitative face of political elections, came precisely
from this world (Butterworth 2014).
The process of reporting and writing about economic news is a combination of docu-
menting recurrent, seasonal, and emergent topics (Bybee et al. 2020). Changes and trans-
formations are analyzed periodically or sporadically with an intensive, synthetic and
creative use of data. And every specific field of coverage (macroeconomic issues, indus-
tries, companies, markets, etc.) reproduces the logic of the “ups” and “downs” and the
trends of an economy.

Multidisciplinarity and Transversality

Up to now data journalism in newsrooms has usually been configured as a dedicated data
desk/team/unit/section that offers, or is asked to offer, data expertise services to tackle
certain projects (Heravi and Lorenz 2020). Sometimes the unit may consist of one or
two people, especially in small newsrooms (Borges-Rey 2016; Hermida and Young
 JOURNALISM STUDIES 497

2019). But there is a logical debate about whether this is the best model for implementing
a data culture in newsrooms (Hermida and Young, 2017). The building of such teams
makes sense when data journalism is limited to special projects. But it is not clear
whether such a scheme is sustainable over time and whether it is capable of reaping
the benefits of the growing datafication in all fields of news coverage. Moreover, external
or peripheral data journalism services are becoming increasingly important to fill
resources and expertise gaps in the media (Appelgren and Lindén 2020; Porlezza and
Splendore 2019).
Specialized data journalism units are producing great journalistic results, mainly in
investigative journalism projects, and therefore it makes sense that they are still alive
in newsrooms in one way or another. However, for data journalism to have a deep
and lasting impact on the daily coverage of different topics, it seems necessary to
reinforce its transversal dimensions, so that it can be projected in a stable way, with
its particularities, in each news section. This is what economic journalism has done out
of necessity over the years. Uskali and Kuutti (2015), in an article based on interviews
with journalists from The Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, ProPublica and Helsingin
Sanomat, comment on how Martin Stabe, from The Financial Times, felt somewhat uncom-
fortable talking about data journalism, as the newspaper did not have a data desk or
special data journalists even if it did produce journalism based on large data sets. Data
journalism was “a kind of diffuse to our newsroom” (Uskali and Kuutti 2015, 83). This is
probably the ideal of a cross-disciplinary data journalism that adapts to the needs of
each news environment and becomes a natural and collaborative approach for all journal-
ists and journalism teams.
Economic journalists have always experienced the problems derived from the lack of
sufficient knowledge in economics and statistics to better cover the news (Doyle 2006;
Tambini 2010; Damstra and De Swert 2021; Van Dalen et al. 2021). The need for economics
education with journalists has been met through additional training for journalists, the
incorporation of experts in the newsrooms, and the daily work with specialized sources
(analysts, economists, statisticians, etc.). This has been one of the peculiar features of
the professionalism needed by good economic journalism.

The Balance Between Data Journalism and Data Technologies

The nature and amount of data, visualization, and interactivity are the usual criteria used
to evaluate the quality and the innovativeness of data journalism (Loosen, Reimer, and De
Silva-Schmidt 2017; Young, Hermida, and Fulda 2017; Ojo and Heravi 2018). In fact, data
journalism in many newsrooms is primarily a visual and technological undertaking. Tech-
nology has been the driving force of this new journalistic approach, and it will continue
being in the center of its future developments. Big data, algorithmic news, robot-journal-
ism, AI, and advanced interactive functions for audiences to access and interpret data all
have great potential to add value to the news (Lewis and Westlund 2015; Broussard et al.
2019; Vázquez-Herrero 2020).
However, a dominant technological logic in data journalism can intensify the tensions
between legacy and digital cultures in the newsrooms (Borges-Rey 2016) and disrupt nor-
mative journalistic practices (Hermida and Young 2019). The search for a balance between
the demands of good journalistic coverage with data and the almost unlimited availability
498 Á. ARRESE

of technological tools to process data is crucial to the healthy development of data-driven

journalism.
Although it has flaws and merits, economic journalism has a history of using technol-
ogy to tell stories, largely because it values the quality and speed of access to information
over the quantity or the innovative and attractive form in which it is presented (Strauß
2019). Rapid access to information, clarity, accuracy and value are the guiding principles
for the use of technologies in economic journalism. This is understandable given that jud-
gements among economic and financial reporters about newsworthiness are strongly
governed by perceptions about utility (Doyle 2006).

Conclusion
This article argues that economic journalism can be considered the first among equals of
data journalism, and that certain interesting lessons for the healthy development of this
new branch of journalism can be drawn from its long trajectory. This idea is developed
from a historical perspective, although the current dynamics of data journalism itself
already show that in topics such as economics, business, and finance, data journalism
comes naturally. It is significant that one of the first projects to be cited as pioneering
data journalism, that of Simon Rogers in The Guardian in 2008, dealt with a subject as
typical of economic journalism as employment and unemployment data in the United
Kingdom (Rogers 2008). It is also true that in the many content analyses carried out in
recent years on the application of data journalism to different topics (e.g., Beiler, Irmer,
and Breda 2020; Knight 2015), or in the awards for good work by data journalists
(Loosen, Reimer, and De Silva-Schmidt 2017), news on economics, business, and
finance is abundantly represented. So plentiful is economic journalism that an analysis
of data journalism in the UK excluded these topics from the study, along with sports
news, because “their use and presentation of data are both historically much more
entrenched” (Knight 2015, 59).
Economic journalism has historically been configured as data-centered journalism
because from its beginnings it has had to harmoniously integrate five central aspects
of data journalism: working with data and databases; the development of visualization
tools; the application of new technologies guided by the particularities of data recording,
analysis, and dissemination; the development of a conceptual infrastructure for data
analysis; and the integration of different professional profiles in newsrooms to address
the challenges and complexity of economic data analysis. This data-driven news culture
stems naturally from the essence of economic journalism, which involves the coverage
of abstract and complex events quantitatively, periodically, and recording many
different contexts and perspectives. Economics reporters much use their skills to make
the issues as understandable as possible, and use the available technologies for speed,
clarity and accuracy.
The accumulated experience of economic journalism in all these aspects can be pro-
jected onto some of the challenges facing today’s data journalism. Specifically, I can
draw some lessons and recommendations that could help improve the practice of data
journalism in other news beats.
First, good economic journalism shows the importance of a balanced management of
data usage, their newsworthiness, and the analytical and conceptual tools used to
 JOURNALISM STUDIES 499

interpret them. Every news beat could consider how to achieve that balance to improve
the elaboration of relevant and regular data stories. Strong contextualization (time,
relationships between concepts and data, geography, etc.) and a proper narrative
adapted to the specific news field are fundamental to the improvement of data-stories.
Creativity is also important when dealing with data, as seen in the case of the indexes
and rankings developed by economic journalism.
Second, the aim of visualization should be to simplify and clarify complex issues, and
relationships between data, to make the explanation of current affairs more relevant and
understandable. Visualization tools should be at the service of that objective, avoiding the
temptation to use unnecessary sophistication and complexity in the representation of the
growing amount of data available. As commented by Schwabish (2014, 211), “stripping
out unnecessary clutter” is a basic principle of economic data visualization. From Playfair,
the simplification of complex economic phenomena has been at the core of economic
data visualization efforts. Graham Douglas, a veteran data journalist at The Economist,
recognizes that readers compliment the British magazine for its clear, concise charts”
(Douglas 2019). The Bloomberg Way, the style guide of the news agency, is also committed
to austere and essential visualization: “A straightforward, clear graphic tells the readers a
great deal about what’s going on. (…) The same rules that guide our prose should apply
to the language of graphics. The best charts are clear and illuminating” (Micklethwait et al.
2017, 91–92).
Third, data journalism needs a harmonious integration of investigative projects with
day-to-day coverage. In these two forms of news coverage, both the regular information
on data-driven issues and the publishing of “data scoops’ that can emerge from a deep
understanding of data are important. To achieve this integration, the processes of data
journalism could be embedded into every news beat, with a multidisciplinary and anti-
silo mentality that impregnates the journalistic culture of newsrooms. As already
explained in this article, the regular collaboration in the newsroom between field special-
ists (economists), data experts (statisticians) and news professionals (journalists) can
explain the big advances that economic journalism has made in dealing with data
through history. New contents (ranking, indexes, etc.) or successful regular data sections
(see, for example, the veteran and famous The Economist “Economic & financial indi-
cators”, the pionnering (1930) cover “Barometer” of Business Week, or the Bloomberg
“Chart of the Day”) can arise thanks to that spirit of interdisciplinary collaboration.
Finally, data journalism should avoid the perils of technological determinism. New
technologies should work in the service of better journalism, especially in this era of
big data, and not the other way round. Interactivity, algorithmic journalism, artificial intel-
ligence, etc., can improve significantly how data stories are elaborated and distributed,
but they can also be big distractions and even barriers for better journalism. From the
early computerized services of Reuters to Bloomberg’s terminals, through the develop-
ment of proprietary visualization tools (see Bloomberg’s G and Toaster) or the integrated
use of standard tools (Excel, R, Python, Illustrator, etc. in The Economist), there has always
been a continuous interest in adapting technology to the efficient use of data, based on
its nature and the needs of the audiences. Alan Smith, the Financial Times data visualiza-
tion editor, has commented: “Modern computer hardware and software certainly boast
extraordinary data handling efficiency. (…) But technology can constrain our thinking.
(…) Principles first and tools second” (Smith 2017).
500 Á. ARRESE

The suggestion of having economic journalism as a reference for a natural expansion of

the culture of data and data journalism in all the news beats, acting as an agent of change
in the newsrooms, is important in this moment. It is not clear whether data journalism has
been an intense fad or a solid trend that will transform journalists’ work in a profound way
(Florian and Borges-Rey 2018). There seem to be symptoms of a certain fatigue in the
media’s strong commitment to data journalism (Appelgren and Lindén 2020). This is wor-
rying because it does not correspond to any hint that datafication in our societies will slow
down. One only has to look at what has happened with the public debate on Covid-19 to
see this (Milan and Treré 2020).
Florian and Borges-Rey (2018), who perceive this challenge, suggest three possible
future scenarios for data journalism:
(1) As a skillset, data journalism will soon be regarded as essential for every professional jour-
nalist. (2) As a genre, data journalism will remain a niche storytelling format but will ultimately
find its way into smaller newsrooms due to decreasing limitations. (3) Due to financial and
personnel limitations, data journalism will be abandoned by the mainstream media, who
will outsource data analysis to non-legacy actors (1078).

The three scenarios are possible, and will probably coexist in one way or another, but only
the first one is a reasonable long-term strategy for the media. From that perspective,
economic journalism can entrench itself in the newsroom and contribute to a solid devel-
opment of better data-driven journalism in every media. To achieve this goal, managers
and journalists need to overcome the silo mentality that exists in many sections, and of
which the economics, business and financial news desk has been no stranger, as experi-
enced during the coverage of the last Great Recession (Schifferes 2011). Of course, the
data-driven news experience of economic journalism can also contribute to further reflec-
tion in journalism on the perverse effects of the principle of “no data, no news’, although
that would require another study (Lewis and Waters 2018; Lowrey and Hou 2018). That is a
data determinism well known in a news environment - the economic news environment -
often characterized as dull, cold, dehumanized, and overly abstract (Arrese 2006).

Acknowledgement
The Author would like to thank Prof. Chris Roush at Quinnipiac University for his comments and the
editing of the final version of this article.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID
Ángel Arrese http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0586-4188

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