Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Executive Summary
3. I. Introduction
4. II. History
i. Overview
ii. On Data in the Media
iii. Rise of the Newsroom Machines
iv. Computer-assisted Reporting
v. An Internet Inflection Point
5. III. Why Data Journalism Matters
i. Shifting Context
ii. The Growth of the News App
iii. On Empiricism, Skepticism, and Public Trust
iv. Newsroom Analytics
v. Data-driven Business Models
vi. New Nonprofit Revenues
vii. Fuel for Robo-journalism
6. IV. Notable Examples
i. National and International Data Journalism Awards
ii. Data and Reporting Paired with Narrative
iii. Crowdsourcing Data Creation and Analysis
iv. Public Service
v. All Organizations - Great and Small
vi. Embracing Data Transparency
vii. Following the Money
viii. Mapping Power and Influence
ix. Geojournalism, Satellites, and the Ground Truth
x. Working Without Freedom of Information Laws
xi. Data Journalism and Activism
7. V. Pathways to the Profession
i. Mentorship, Numeracy, Competition, Recruiting
ii. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) to the Rescue?
iii. Hacks, Hackers, and Peer-to-peer Learning
8. VI. Tools of the Trade
i. Digging into the CAR Toolbox
ii. New Tools to Wrangle Unstructured Data
9. VII. Open Government
i. Open Data and Raw Data
ii. Data and Ethics
iii. Gun Data, Maps, and Radical Transparency
10. VIII. On to the Future
i. Recommendations and Predictions
11. IX. Appendices
i. Author’s Biography
12. Endnotes
When I started formally compiling this report in November of 2012, I asked for feedback on data journalism. I immediately
began hearing back from people around the world, with responses that continued right up until the day the final draft was
submitted for its printing. The research herein also rests upon reporting and conversations with hundreds of editors,
professors, reporters, technologists, government officials, and “hacker journalists” stretching back to 2010. In interview after
interview, I found an interest not simply in learning what data was out there, but how to get it and put it to use, from finding
stories and sources, to providing empirical evidence to back up other reporting, to telling stories with maps and
visualizations, to creating the data itself using sensors and social media. I also encountered healthy amounts of skepticism,
optimism, and everything in between. I am deeply grateful for the time of these pioneers and humbled by their work,
dedication, and demonstrated interest in sharing knowledge with me, my networks, and their colleagues. In particular, I give
thanks to my colleagues and the staff at the Tow Center, including Emily Bell, Lauren Mack, and Shiwani Neupane, for their
feedback, mentorship, editing, and support; and to Mac Slocum, at O’Reilly Media, for all of the above. Huge thanks to
Abigail Ronck for her sharp-eyed copyediting of a long, unwieldy manuscript. I am also much obliged to Brian Boyer, Scott
Klein, Alberto Cairo, Nikki Usher, Nick Diakopoulos, Jonathan Stray, Susan McGregor, and Taylor Owen for their fantastic
feedback on earlier versions of the report.Except where otherwise noted, this report has been sourced from email
correspondence, phone calls, conferences, Skype or in-person interviews. Portions of the report, although they have been
edited and adapted, were first published at the O’Reilly Radar or the Tow Center’s blog. Alexander B. Howard, May 2014.
Executive Summary
Journalists have been using data in their stories for as long as the profession has existed. A revolution in computing in the
20th century created opportunities for data integration into investigations, as journalists began to bring technology into their
work. In the 21st century, a revolution in connectivity is leading the media toward new horizons. The Internet, cloud
computing, agile development, mobile devices, and open source software have transformed the practice of journalism,
leading to the emergence of a new term: data journalism. Although journalists have been using data in their stories for as
long as they have been engaged in reporting, data journalism is more than traditional journalism with more data. Decades
after early pioneers successfully applied computer-assisted reporting and social science to investigative journalism,
journalists are creating news apps and interactive features that help people understand data, explore it, and act upon the
insights derived from it. New business models are emerging in which data is a raw material for profit, impact, and insight,
co-created with an audience that was formerly reduced to passive consumption. Journalists around the world are grappling
with the excitement and the challenge of telling compelling stories by harnessing the vast quantity of data that our
increasingly networked lives, devices, businesses, and governments produce every day. While the potential of data
journalism is immense, the pitfalls and challenges to its adoption throughout the media are similarly significant, from digital
literacy to competition for scarce resources in newsrooms. Global threats to press freedom, digital security, and limited
access to data create difficult working conditions for journalists in many countries. A combination of peer-to-peer learning,
mentorship, online training, open data initiatives, and new programs at journalism schools rising to the challenge, however,
offer reasons to be optimistic about more journalists learning to treat data as a source.
I. Introduction
Today, the world is awash in unprecedented amounts of data and an expanding network of sources for news. As of 2012,
there were an estimated 2.5 quintillion bytes of data being created daily, or 2.5 exabytes, with that amount doubling every
40 months. (For the sake of reference, that’s 115 million 16-gigabyte iPhones.) It’s an extraordinary moment in so many
ways. All of that data generation and connectivity have created new opportunities and challenges for media organizations
that have already been fundamentally disrupted by the Internet. To paraphrase author William Gibson, in many ways the
post-industrial future of journalism is already here”it’s just not evenly distributed yet.1socially connected friends, family, and
colleagues”and delivered by applications and streaming video accessed from mobile devices, apps, and tablets.
Newsrooms are now just a component, albeit a crucial one, of a dramatically different environment for news. They are also
not always the original source for it. News often breaks first on social networks, and is published by people closest to the
event. From there, it’s gathered, shared, and analyzed; then fact-checked and synthesized into contextualized
journalism.Media organizations today must be able to put data to work quickly.2during Hurricane Sandy, when public, open
government data feeds became critical infrastructure.3decision in which Chief Justice John Roberts opined that disclosure
through online databases would balance the effect of classifying political donations as protected by the First Amendment,
it’s worth emphasizing that much of the “modern technology” that is a “particularly effective means of arming the voting
public with information” has been built and maintained by journalists and nonprofit organizations.4data, computers, and
algorithms can be used by journalists in the public interest, but rather how, when, where, why, and by whom.5Today,
journalists can treat all of that data as a source, interrogating it for answers as they would a human. That work is data
journalism, or gathering, cleaning, organizing, analyzing, visualizing, and publishing data to support the creation of acts of
journalism. A more succinct definition might be simply the application of data science to journalism, where data science is
defined as the study of the extraction of knowledge from data.6journalism combines:1) the treatment of data as a source to
be gathered and validated,2) the application of statistics to interrogate it,3) and visualizations to present it, as in a
comparison of batting averages or stock prices.Some proponents of open data journalism hold that there should be four
components, where data journalists archive and publish the underlying raw data behind their investigations, along with the
methodology and code used in the analyses that led to their published conclusions.7stories with numbers, or finding stories
in them. It’s treating data as a source to complement human witnesses, officials, and experts. Many different kinds of
journalists use data to augment their reporting, even if they may not define themselves or their work in this way. “A data
journalist could be a police reporter who’s managed to fit spreadsheet analysis into her daily routine, the computer-assisted
reporting specialist for a metro newspaper, a producer with a TV station investigative unit, someone who builds analysis
tools for journalists, or a news app developer,” said David Herzog, an associate professor at the Missouri School of
Journalism. Consider four examples: A financial journalist cites changes in price-to-earning ratios in stocks over time during
a radio appearance. A sports journalist adds a table that illustrates the on-base percentages of this year’s star rookie
baseball players. A technology journalist creates a graph comparing how many units of competing smartphones have been
sold in the last business quarter. A team of news developers builds an interactive website that helps parents find nearby
playgrounds that are accessible to all children and adds data about it to a public data set.8each case, journalists working
with data must be conscious about its source, the context for its creation, and its relationship to the stories they’re
telling.“Data journalism is the practice of finding stories in numbers and using numbers to tell stories,” said Meredith
Broussard, an assistant professor of journalism at Temple University. To become a good data journalist, it helps to begin by
becoming a good journalist. Hone your storytelling skills, experiment with different ways to tell a story, and understand that
data is created by people. We tend to think that data is this immutable, empirically true thing that exists independent of
people. It’s not, and it doesn’t. Data is socially constructed. In order to understand a data set, it is helpful to start with
understanding the people who created the data set”think about what they were trying to do, or what they were trying to
discover. Once you think about those people, and their goals, you’re already beginning to tell a story.Data-driven reporting
and analysis require more than providing context to readers and sorting fact from fictions and falsehoods in vast amounts of
data. Achieving that goal will require media organizations that can think differently about how they work and whose
contributions they value or honor. In 2014, technically gifted investigators in the corner of the newsroom may well be of
more strategic value to a media company than a well-paid pundit in the corner office. Publishers will need to continue to
evolve toward a multidisciplinary approach to delivering the news, where reporters, developers, designers, editors, and
community managers collaborate on storytelling, instead of being segregated by departments or buildings.Many of the
pioneers in this emerging practice of data-driven journalism won’t be found on broadcast television or in the lists of the top
journalists over the past century. They’re drawn from the pool of people who are building collaborative newsrooms and
extending the theory and practice of data journalism. These people see the reporting that provisions their journalism as
data, a body of work that itself can be collected, analyzed, shared, and used to create insights about how society, industry,
or government are changing.9following report, I look at what the media is doing, offer insights from data journalists, list the
tools they’re using, share notable projects, and look ahead at what’s to come”and what’s needed to get there. You’ll also
find more to read and consider in the Data Journalism Handbook that O’Reilly Media published in 2012.10
II. History
Overview
As Liliana Bounegru highlighted in the introduction to the Data Journalism Handbook, this idea of treating data as a source
for the news is far from novel: Journalists have been using data to improve or augment traditional reporting for
centuries.11Guardian’s ebook on data journalism, Simon Rogers (now Twitter’s first data editor) said that the first example
of data journalism at the Guardian newspaper was back in 1821, reporting student enrollment and associated
costs.12however, is very much of the 21st century, although its origin is murky. Rogers said he heard the term data
journalism used first by software developer Adrian Holovaty,13may have originated earlier somewhere else in Europe,14in
conversations about database journalism of the kind Holovaty advocated.15term’s origins,16the patron saint of data
journalism.17talented software developer at the Washington Post and founder of EveryBlock, decried how data was
organized and treated by media organizations in a 2006 post on how newspaper websites needed to change.18inspired the
creation19Matt Waite. The fact-checking website subsequently won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009.20momentum around the
world after Tim Berners-Lee called analyzing data the future of journalism in 2010, as part of a larger conversation around
opening government data up to the public through publishing it online.21Datablog. Using structured data extracted from the
PDF that the United Kingdom’s Parliament published online,22visualized the expenses of Ministers of Parliament, launching
a public row about their spending that has continued into the present day.23journalism based on the War Logs,24of
thousands of Afghanistan war records leaked through Wikileaks. Over the following years, the use of the term data
journalism began to catch fire, at least within the media world.25adopted by David Kaplan, a pillar of the investigative
journalism community, and used as self-identification by many attendees of the annual conference of the National Institute
for Computer-Assisted Reporting (NICAR), where nearly a thousand journalists from 20 countries gathered in Baltimore to
teach, learn, and connect. 26 It was in 2014, however, that data journalism entered mainstream discourse, driven by the
highly publicized relaunch of Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com and Vox Media’s April release of general news site Vox.com,
as well as new ventures from the New York Times and Washington Post. On that count, it’s worth noting a broader
challenge that the data journalism mainstream presents: the novelty of the term has divorced it from the long history of
computer-assisted reporting that came before in public discourse. Hopefully, this report will act as a corrective on that
count. Today, the context and scope of data-driven journalism have expanded considerably from its evolutionary
antecedent, following the explosion of data generated in and about nearly every aspect of society, from government, to
industry, to research, to social media. Data journalists can now use free, powerful online tools and open source software to
rapidly collect, clean, and publish data in interactive features, mobile apps, and maps. As data journalists grow in skill and
craft, they move from using basic statistics in their reporting to working in spreadsheets, to more complex data analysis and
visualization, finally arriving at computational journalism, the command line, and programming. The most advanced
practitioners are able to capitalize on algorithms and vast computing power to deliver new forms of reporting and analysis,
from document mining applied to find misconduct,27campaigns,28trading plans, and autocompletions.Data journalists are in
demand today throughout the news industry and beyond. They can get scoops, draw large audiences, and augment the
work of other journalists in a media organization or other collaboration. By automating common reporting tasks, for
instance, or creating custom alerts, one data journalist can increase the capacity of the people with whom she works,
building out databases that may be used for future reporting. “On every desk in the newsroom, reporters are starting to
understand that if you don’t know how to understand and manipulate data, someone who can will be faster than you,” said
Scott Klein, a managing editor at ProPublica. He continued: Can you imagine a sports reporter who doesn’t know what an
on-base percentage is? Or doesn’t know how to calculate it himself? You can now ask a version of that question for almost
every beat. There are more and more reporters who want to have their own data and to analyze it themselves. Take, for
example, my colleague, Charlie Ornstein. In addition to being a Pulitzer Prize-winner, he’s one of the most sophisticated
data reporters anywhere. He pores over new and insanely complex data sets himself. He has hit the edge of Access’
abilities and is switching to SQL Server. His being able to work and find stories inside data independently is hugely
important for the work he does.There will always be a place for great interviewers, or the eagle-eyed reporter who finds an
amazing story in a footnote on page 412 of a regulatory disclosure. But, here comes another kind of journalist who has data
skills that will sustain whole new branches of reporting.29
On Data in the Media
In many ways, journalists have been engaged in gathering trustworthy data and publishing it for as long as journalism itself
has been practiced. The need for reported accuracy about the world is part of the origin story of newspapers five centuries
ago in Renaissance Europe. These newsletters had historical antecedents in the Acta Diurna (daily gazette) of the Roman
Empire and the tipao (literally, “reports from the official residences”) of the Han dynasty in China hundreds of years prior,
where governments produced and circulated news of military campaigns, politics, trials, and executions.Five centuries ago,
Italian merchants commissioned and circulated handwritten newsletters that reported news of economic conditions, from
the cost of commodities to the disruption of trade by revolutions, wars, disease, or severe weather. The printed versions
that followed in the 17th century, once the cost of paper fell and printing presses proliferated, included these same basic
lists of data, as did the printed newsbooks that circulated in the next century. After Scottish engineer and political economist
William Playfair invented graphical methods for displaying statistics in 1786, periodicals began to use line graphs, bar
charts, pie charts, and circle graphs.“As technology got better in the late 18th century and readers started demanding a
different kind of information, the data that appeared in newspapers got more sophisticated and was used in new ways,” said
Scott Klein. “Data became a tool for middle-class people to use to make decisions and not just as facts to deploy in an
argument, or information useful to elite business people.”By the end of the 19th century, statistics were a part of stories in
many newspapers, whether they appeared as figures, lists, or raw data about commodities or athletics that readers could
pore over and consult themselves. Long before stock market data systems went electronic, newspapers published prices to
investors. Dow Jones & Company began publishing stock market averages in 1884 and continues to do so today in both
print and online via the Wall Street Journal.
Rise of the Newsroom Machines
By the middle of the 20th century, investigative journalism featured teams of professional reporters combing through
government statistics, court records, and business reports acquired by visiting state houses, archives, and dusty
courthouse basements; or obtaining official or leaked confidential documents. These lists of numbers and accounts in the
ledgers and filing cabinets of the world’s bureaucracies have always been a rich source of data, long before data could be
published in a digital form and shared instantaneously around the world. Database-driven journalism arrived in most
newsrooms in a real sense over three decades ago, when microcomputers became commonplace in the 1980s”although
the first pioneers used punch cards. When computers became both accessible and affordable to newsrooms, however, the
way data could be used changed how investigations were conducted, and much more. Before the first laptop entered the
newsroom, technically inclined reporters and editors had found that crunching numbers on computers on mainframes,
microcomputers, and servers could enable more powerful investigative journalism.
Computer-assisted Reporting
While the various histories of the development of computer-assisted reporting offer context for the work of today, most
historians place its start in the latter half of the 20th century.30observers may not realize that many aspects of what is now
frequently called data journalism are the direct evolutionary descendants of decades of computer-assisted reporting (CAR)
in the United States. In fact, computing pioneer Grace Hopper, a computing pioneer, professor, and U.S. Navy rear admiral
during World War II, made prescient predictions long before Nate Silver’s electoral prognostications made him a media star.
In 1952, CBS famously used a mainframe computer, a Remington Rand UNIVAC, and statistical models to predict the
outcome of the presidential race.31with a team of programmers to input voting statistics from earlier elections into the
ENIAC and wrote algorithms that enabled the computer to correctly predict the result. The model she built not only
accurately predicted the ultimate outcome”a landslide victory for Dwight D. Eisenhower”with just 5 percent of the total vote
in, but did so to within one percent. (Their calculations predicted 83.2percent of electoral votes for Eisenhower; in actuality
he received 82.4to accomplish something quite similar to what Nate Silver does six decades later: defy the election
predictions of political pundits by using statistical modeling. In the years that followed this signal media event, change was
slow, marked by pioneers experimenting with computer-assisted reporting in investigations. It was almost two more
decades before CAR pioneers like Meyer Elliot Jaspin and Philip Meyer began putting cheaper, faster computers to work,
collecting and analyzing data for investigative journalism. After he was granted a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University
in the late 1960s to study the application of quantitative methods used in social science, Philip Meyer proposed applying
these social science research methods to journalism using computers and programming. He called this “precision
journalism, which included sound practices for data collection and sampling, careful analysis and clear presentation of the
results of the inquiry.”32to investigating the underlying causes of rioting in Detroit in 1967,33Free Press won the Pulitzer
Prize for Local General Reporting the next year. Meyer’s analysis showed that college graduates were as likely to have
participated in the riots as high school dropouts, rebutting one popular theory correlating economic and educational status
with a propensity to riot, and another regarding immigrants from the American South. Meyer’s investigations found that the
primary drivers for the Detroit riots were lack of jobs, poor housing, crowded living conditions, and police brutality.In the
following decades, journalists around the country steadily explored and expanded how data and analysis could be used to
inform reporting and readers. Microcomputers and personal computers changed the practice and forms of CAR significantly
as the tools and environment available to journalists expanded. More people began waking up to “newsmen enlisting the
machine,” as Time magazine put it in 1996.34journalists were using CAR techniques and databases in many major
investigations in the United States and beyond.Data-driven reporting increasingly became part of the work behind the
winners of journalism’s most prestigious prize: From Eliot Jaspin’s Pulitzer at the Providence Journal in 1979, to the work of
Chris Hambly at the Center for Public Integrity in 2014, CAR has mattered to important stories. 35Brant Houston, former
executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), said in an interview: The practice of CAR has changed over
time as the tools and environment in the digital world has changed. So it began in the time of mainframes in the late 60s
and then moved onto PCs (which increased speed and flexibility of analysis and presentation) and then moved onto the
Web, which accelerated the ability to gather, analyze, and present data. The basic goals have remained the same. To sift
through data and make sense of it, often with social science methods. CAR tends to be an umbrella term”one that includes
precision journalism and data-driven journalism and any methodology that makes sense of data, such as visualization and
effective presentations of data.By 2013, CAR had been recognized as an important journalistic discipline, as the assistant
director of the Tow Center, Susan McGregor, explored last year in a Columbia Journalism Review article. 36 Data had
become not only an integral part of many prize-winning investigations, but also the raw material for applications,
visualizations, audience creation, revenue, and tantalizing scoops.
An Internet Inflection Point
At the start of the 21st century, a revolution in mobile computing; increases in online connectivity, access, and speed; and
explosion in data creation fundamentally changed the landscape for computer-assisted reporting. “It may seem obvious, but
of course the Internet changed it all, and for a while it got smushed in with trying to learn how to navigate the Internet for
stories, and how to download data,” said Sarah Cohen, a New York Times investigative journalist and a former Knight
professor of the practice of journalism and public policy at Duke University. She added:Then there was a stage when
everyone was building internal intranets to deliver public records inside newsrooms to help find people on deadline, etc. So
for much of the time, it was focused on reporting, not publishing or presentation. Now the data journalism folks have
emerged from the other direction: People who are using data obtained through APIs often skip the reporting side, and use
the same techniques to deliver unfiltered information to their readers in an easier format than the government is giving us.
But I think it’s starting to come back together”the so-called data journalists are getting more interested in reporting, and the
more traditional CAR reporters are interested in getting their stories on the Web in more interesting ways.Given the
universality of computer use today among the media, the term computer-assisted reporting now feels dated, itself inherited
from a time when computers were still a novelty in newsrooms. There’s probably not a single reporter or editor working in a
newsroom in the United States or Europe today, after all, who isn’t using a computer in the course of his or her
journalism.Many members of the media, in fact, may use several during the day, from the powerful handheld computers we
call smartphones, to crunching away at analysis or transformations on laptops and desktops, to relying on servers and
cloud storage for processing big data at Internet scale. Much has changed since Philip Meyer’s pioneering days in the
1960s, offered Scott Klein: One is that the amount of data available for us to work with has exploded. Part of this increase is
because open government initiatives have caused a ton of great data to be released. Not just through portals like
data.gov”getting big data sets via FOIA has become easier, even since ProPublica launched in 2008.Another big change is
that we’ve got the opportunity to present the data itself to readers”that is, not just summarized in a story but as data itself. In
the early days of CAR, we gathered and analyzed information to support and guide a narrative story. Data was something
to be summarized for the reader in the print story, with of course graphics and tables (some quite extensive), but the end
goal was typically something recognizable as a words-and-pictures story.What the Internet added is that it gave us the
ability to show to people the actual data and let them look through it for themselves. It’s now possible, through interaction
design, to help people navigate their way through a data set just as, through good narrative writing, we’ve always been able
to guide people through a complex story.The past decade has seen the most dynamic development in data journalism,
driven by rapid technological changes. Ten years ago, “data journalism was mostly seen as doing analyses for stories,” said
Chase Davis, an assistant editor on the Interactive News Desk at the New York Times. He explained:Great stories, for sure,
but interactives and data visualizations were more rare. Now, data journalism is much more of a big tent speciality. Data
journalists report and write, craft interactives and visualizations, develop storytelling platforms, run predictive models, build
open source software, and much, much more. The pace has really picked up, which is why self-teaching is so
important.These are all still relatively new and powerful tools, which both justify excitement about their application and
prompt understandable skepticism about what difference they will make if practicing journalists or their editors don’t support
developing digital skills. Going digital first brings with it concerns about potential privacy, security, and sustainability relying
upon third parties.
III. Why Data Journalism Matters
Shifting Context
While it’s easy to get excited about gorgeous data visualizations or a national budget that’s now more comprehensible to
citizens, the use of data journalism in investigations that stretch over months or years is one of the most important trends in
media today. Powerful Web-based tools for scraping, cleaning, analyzing, storing, and visualizing data have transformed
what small newsrooms can do with limited resources. The embrace of open source software and agile development
practices, coupled with a growing open data movement, have breathed new life into traditional computer-assisted reporting.
Collaboration across newsrooms and a focus on publishing data and code that show your work differentiate the best of
today’s data journalism from the CAR of decades ago. By automating tasks, one data journalist can increase the capacity of
those with whom she works in a newsroom and create databases that may be used for future reporting. That’s one reason
(among many) that ProPublica can win Pulitzer prizes without employing hundreds of staff. “We live in an age where
information is plentiful,” said Derek Willis, a journalist and developer at the New York Times. “Tools that can help distill and
make sense of it are valuable. They save time and convey important insights. News organizations can’t afford to cede that
role.”Data journalism can be created quickly or slowly, over weeks, months, or years. Either way, journalists still have to
confirm their sources, whether they’re people or data sets, and present them in context. Using data as a source won’t
eliminate the need for fact-checking, adding context, or reporting that confirms the ground truth. Just the opposite, in fact.
Data journalism empowers watchdogs and journalists with new tools. It’s integral to a global strategy to support
investigative journalism that holds the most powerful institutions and entities in the world accountable, from the wealthiest
people on Earth, to those involved in organized crime, multinational corporations, legislators, and presidents.37explosion in
data creation and the need to understand how governments and corporations wield power has put a premium upon the
adoption of new digital technologies and development of related skills in the media. Data and journalism have become
deeply intertwined, with increased prominence given to presentation, availability, and publishing. Unfortunately, during
recent years, attacks on the press have also grown,^38^ while global press freedoms39have diminished to the lowest levels
in a decade.40Around the world, a growing number of data journalists are doing much more than publishing data
visualizations or interactive maps. They’re using these tools to find corruption and hold the powerful to account. The most
talented members of this journalism tribe are engaged in multi-year investigations that look for evidence that supports or
disproves the most fundamental question journalists can ask: Why is something happening? What can data, married to
narrative structure and expert human knowledge, tell us about the way the world is changing? Along with delivering the
accountability journalism that democracies need to provide checks and balances”speaking truth to and about the
powerful”data journalists are also, in some cases, building the next generation of civic infrastructure out of public domain
code and data. Such code might include open source survey tools,41open election database,42Census
data,43playgrounds.44principles that built the Internet and World Wide Web,45and strengthened by peer networks46between
data journalists and civil society. The data and code in these efforts”small pieces, loosely joined by the social Web and
application programming interfaces”will extend the plumbing of digital democracy in the 21st century.“I’m really hopeful that
by making data about these facets of our communities more accessible to journalists, we’ll make it easier for them to report
stories that help readers unpack the complexity,” said Ryan Pitts, a developer journalist at Census Reporter, in an interview.
“Narrative along with this kind of data is a really powerful combination. I think it’s the kind of thing a community needs
before it can get at the really important question: So what do we do about this?”47practitioners, data journalism is a
powerful tool that integrates computer science, statistics, and decades of learning from the social sciences in making sense
of huge databases. At that level, data journalists write algorithms to look for trends and map the relationships of influence,
power, or sources.As they find patterns in the data, journalists can compare the signals and trends they discover to the
shoe-leather reporting and expert sources that investigative journalists have been using for many decades, adding critical
thinking and context as they go. In addition to asking hard questions of people, journalists can now interrogate data as a
source. “What’s different about practicing data journalism today, versus 10 or 20 years ago, was that from the early 1990s
to mid 2000s, the tools didn’t really change all that much,” said Matt Waite, a journalism professor at the University of
Nebraska who co-created Politifact.com, the Pulitzer Prize-winning website: The big change was we switched from FoxPro
to Access for databases. Around 2000, with the [U.S.] Census, more people got into GIS. But really, the tools and
techniques were pretty confined to that tool chain: spreadsheet, database, GIS. Now you can do really, really sophisticated
data journalism and never leave Python. There’s so many tools now to do the job that it’s really expanding the universe of
ideas and possibilities in ways that just didn’t happen in the early days. Newsrooms, nonprofits, and developers across the
public and private sector are all grappling with managing and getting insight from the vast amounts of data generated daily.
Notably, all of those parties are tapping into the same statistical software, Web-based applications, and open source tools
and frameworks to tame, manage, and analyze this data. “Five years ago, this kind of thing was still seen in a lot of places
at best as a curiosity, and at worst as something threatening or frivolous,” said Chase Davis. He continued:Some
newsrooms got it, but most data journalists I knew still had to beg, borrow, and steal for simple things like access to
servers. Solid programming practices were unheard of”version control? What’s that? If newsroom developers today saw
Matt Waite’s code when he first launched PolitiFact, their faces would melt like Raiders of the Lost Ark.Now, our team at the
Times runs dozens of servers. Being able to code is table stakes. Reporters are talking about machine-frickin’-learning, and
newsroom devs are inventing pieces of software that power huge chunks of the Web. The game done changed.48market
for data journalists is booming. New media outlets like FiveThirtyEight.com and Vox.com are competing for eyeballs with
Appp3d.com from the Mirror, QZ.com from the Atlantic Media Group, The Economist’s Data Blog, the Guardian Datablog,
The Upshot from the New York Times, and a forthcoming data-driven site from the Washington Post. A growing number of
tools, online platforms, and development practices have transformed the field, from the use of Google and Amazon’s
clouds, to the creation and maturation of open source software and the proliferation of open data resources around the
globe.
The Growth of the News App
Traditionally, computer-assisted reporting focused on gathering and analyzing data as a means to support investigations.
Where traditional CAR focused on analysis, the data-driven journalism of today includes data publishing, reuse, and
usability.“Increasingly, I think data journalists also think about how they can provide these data sets in an easy-to-use way
for the public,” said Charles Ornstein, senior reporter at ProPublica. “I don’t think we’re in an era anymore in which
journalists can say, ”We’ve analyzed the data, trust us.’ Today, many journalists devote attention not only to finding data for
investigations, but to publishing it alongside living stories, or news apps. News applications are one of the most important
new storytelling forms of this young millennium, native to digital media and, often, accessible across all browsers, devices,
and operating systems on the open Web. ProPublica’s news app style guide lays out core principles for how they should be
built and edited.49and newsroom analytics will be a core element of the way media organizations deliver information to
mobile consumers and understand who, where, how, when, and perhaps even why they’ve become readers. Both will be a
component of successful digital businesses. In this context, a news app primarily refers to an online application or
interactive feature, as opposed to a mobile software application installed on a smartphone. At their best, news applications
don’t just tell a story, they tell your story, personalizing the data to the user.50understand the world they’re moving through,
from general topics like news, weather, and traffic, down to little league baseball scores. “I think news apps demand that
you don’t just build something because you like it,” said Derek Willis. “You build it so that others might find it useful.”News
apps help make sense of vast amounts of data for people who need to understand a complex subject but lack digital
literacy in manipulating the raw data itself. For instance, ProPublica launched Treatment Tracker in May 2014, a news app
based on the Medicare data released by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services earlier in the year.51examined
how doctors bill Medicare for office visits.52ProPublica’s data-driven analysis found that while health care professionals
classified only 4 percent of the 200 million office visits for established Medicare patients in 2012 as sufficiently complex to
earn the most expensive rates, some 1,800billed at the top rate 90 percent of the time.Charles Ornstein wrote in an
email:This took some time. The data itself is big and complex. We interviewed experts to understand which comparisons
would be most meaningful in the data. We looked for top-line numbers that could serve as easy benchmarks people could
understand quickly. One was Medicare services per patient, another was payment per patient. We also took a careful look
at intensity of established-patient office visits as a benchmark that would be interesting and easily understood by readers.
Some specialties, like psychiatry and oncology, have, on average, much more intensive and costly office visits. But in many
specialties where the typical such visit is less likely to be so intensive, doctors can vary widely from the mean. If you see
that your doctor has a lot more or a lot fewer high-intensity visits than the average doctor like him/her, it doesn’t
automatically mean there’s something wrong, but it’s one of the things worth having a conversation about.What sets our
app apart is that it allows you to compare your doctor to others in the same specialty and state. While it may satisfy your
curiosity to know how much money a doctor earns from Medicare, it tells you little. We think it’s more useful to look at how a
doctor practices medicine (the services they perform, the percentage of patients who got them, and how often those
patients got them). Our app gives you that information in context.You can easily spot which doctors appear way different
using red notes and orange warning symbols. Again, it’s worth asking questions if your doctor (or other health provider)
looks different than his/her colleagues.News apps can enable people to explore a data set in a way that a simple map,
static infographic, or chart cannot. “There are ways to design data so that more important numbers are bigger and more
prominent than less important details,” said Scott Klein. “People know to scroll down a Web page for more fine-grained
details. At ProPublica, we design things to move readers through levels of abstraction from the most general, national case
to the most local example.”Increasingly, the creators of news apps are focusing on user-centric design, a principle Brian
Boyer, the editor of NPR’s Visuals team, explained: We don’t start with the data, or the technology. Everything we make
starts with a user-centered design process. We talk about the users we want to speak to and the needs they have. Only
then do we talk about what to make, and then we figure out how we’re going to do it. It’s tempting to start with technical
choices or shiny ideas, but we try to stop ourselves and focus on what will work best for a specific group of people, the
people who would most benefit from the data.It may be useful, therefore, to differentiate between the process and the
product, as Susan McGregor has: News apps and data visualization generally describe a class of publishing formats,
usually a combination of graphics (interactive or otherwise) and reader-accessible databases. Because these end products
are typically driven by relatively substantial data sets, their development often shares processes with CAR, data journalism,
and computational journalism. In theory, at least, the latter group is format agnostic, more concerned with the mechanisms
of reporting than the form of the output.News apps “are great to tell stories, and localize your data, but we need more
efforts to humanize data and explain data,” said Momi Peralta, of La Nación. She noted:[We should] make data sets
famous, put them in the center of a conversation of experts first, and in the general public afterwards. If we report on data,
and we open data while reporting, then others can reuse and build another layer of knowledge on top of it. There are risks,
if you have the traditional business mindset, but in an open world there is more to win than to lose by opening up.This is not
only a data revolution. It is an open innovation revolution around knowledge. Media must help open data, especially in
countries with difficult access to information.This ethos, where both the data and the code behind a story are open to the
public for examination, is one that I heard cited frequently from the foremost practitioners of data journalism around the
world. In the same way that open source developers show their work when they push updated software to GitHub, data
journalists are publishing updates to data sets that accompany narrative stories or news applications.This capability to
publish data doesn’t change the underlying ethics or responsibility that journalists uphold: Not all data can or should be
published in such work, particularly personally identifiable information or details that would expose whistleblowers or put the
lives of sources at risk.Some of the data journalists interviewed expressed a clear preference for creating news apps that
are Web-native, as opposed to an app developed for an iOS or Android device. If nonprofit or public media wish to serve all
audiences, the thinking goes that means publishing in accessible ways that don’t require expensive, fast data plans or
mobile devices. News apps based upon open source and open standards can be designed to work on multiple mobile
platforms and are not subject to approval by a technology company to be listed on an app store.
On Empiricism, Skepticism, and Public Trust
While the tools and context may have evolved, the basic goals of data-driven journalism have remained the same over the
decades, observed Brant Houston, former executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors. “Sift through data and
make sense of it, often with social science methods,” he said. Today, powerful open source frameworks for the collection,
storage, analysis, and publication of immense amounts of data are integrated with rigorous thinking, sound design
principles, powerful narratives, and creative storytelling techniques to produce acts of journalism. Practiced at the highest
level, data-driven journalism can be applied to auditing algorithms or testing whether predictive policing is delivering justice
or further institutionalizing inequities in society.53responsible for mistakenly targeting an innocent citizen or denying a loan
to another, the skills required of watchdog journalism move well beyond the rapid production of infographics and maps.
“Data is at the heart of what journalism is,” said New York Times developer advocate Chrys Wu, speaking at the White
House in 2012, “and the more substantive it is, the more organized it is, the more easily accessible it is, the better we all
can understand the events that affect our world, our nation, our communities, and ourselves.”54sources, however, not all
data sets are synonymous with facts. They must be treated with skepticism, from origin to quality to hidden biases. “The
Latin etymology of ”data’ means ”something given,’ and though we’ve largely forgotten that original definition, it’s helpful to
think about data not as facts per se, but as ”givens’ that can be used to construct a variety of different arguments and
conclusions; they act as a rhetorical basis, a premise,” wrote Nick Diakopoulos, a Tow Fellow. “Data does not intrinsically
imply truth. Yes, we can find truth in data, through a process of honest inference, but we can also find and argue multiple
truths or even outright falsehoods from data.”55time, it could benefit readers and society as a whole. A managing editor
might float an assertion or hypothesis about what lies behind news, and then assign an investigative journalist to go find out
whether it’s true or not. That reporter (or data editor) then must go collect data, evidence, and knowledge about it. To prove
to the managing editor”and skeptical readers”that whatever conclusions presented are sound, the journalist may need to
show his or her work, from the sources of the data to the process used to transform and present them. That also means
embracing skepticism, avoiding confirmation bias, and not jumping to conclusions about observed correlations.“In a world
awash with opinion there is an emerging premium on evidence-led journalism and the expertise required to properly gather,
analyze, and present data that informs rather than simply offers a personal view,” wrote Cardiff University journalism
professor Richard Sambrook. “The empirical approach of science offers a new grounding for journalism at a time when trust
is at a premium.”56college of humanities and social sciences at Northeastern University, highlighted many of these issues in
a long essay on the need for openness in data journalism. 57 The pressures of deadlines and tight budgets are real:
Realistically, practices only change if there are incentives to do so. Academic scientists aren’t awarded tenure on the basis
of writing well-trafficked blogs or high-quality Wikipedia articles, they are promoted for publishing rigorous research in
competitive, peer-reviewed outlets. Likewise, journalists aren’t promoted for providing meticulously documented
supplemental material or replicating other analyses instead of contributing to coverage of a major news event. Amidst
contemporary anxieties about information overload as well as the weaponization of fear, uncertainty, and doubt tactics,
data-driven journalism could serve a crucial role in empirically grounding our discussions of policies, economic trends, and
social changes. But unless the new leaders set and enforce standards that emulate the scientific community’s norms, this
data-driven journalism risks falling into traps that can undermine the public’s and scientific community’s trust.Keegan
suggested several sound principles for data journalists to adopt: open data, open deliberation, open collaboration, and data
ombudsmen:Data-driven journalists could share their code and data on open source repositories like GitHub for others to
inspect, replicate, and extend. [This is already happening at ProPublica and other outlets.] Journalists could collaborate
with scientists and analysts to pose questions that they jointly analyze and then write up as articles or features as well as
submitting for academic peer review. But peer review takes time and publishing results in advance of this review, even
working with credentialed experts, doesn’t imply their reliability. Organizations that practice data-driven journalism (to the
extent this is different from other flavors of journalism) should invite and provide empirical critiques of their analyses and
findings. Making well-documented data available or finding the right experts to collaborate with is extremely time-intensive,
but if you’re going to publish original empirical research, you should accept and respond to legitimate critiques.Data-driven
news organizations might consider appointing independent advocates to represent public interests and promote scientific
norms of communalism, skepticism, and empirical rigor. Such a position would serve as a check against authors making
sloppy claims, using improper methods, analyzing proprietary data, or acting for their personal benefit. It now feels clichéd
to say it in 2014, but in this context transparency really may be the new objectivity. The latter concept is not one that has
much traction in the sciences, where observer effects and experimenter bias are well-known phenomena. Studies and
results that can’t be reproduced are regarded with skepticism for a reasonSuch thinking about the scientific method and
journalism isn’t new, nor is its practice by journalists around the country who have pioneered the craft of data journalism
with much less fanfare than FiveThiryEight.com. Making sense of what sources mean, putting their perspective in context,
and creating a narrative that enables people to understand a complex topic is what matters. The ultimate accomplishment
for journalists may be to integrate data into stories in a way that not only conveys information, but imparts knowledge to the
humans reading and sharing it. To do this kind of work well, journalists need “a firm understanding of public records laws, a
grasp of programs such as Excel or Access, contacts with statisticians, and a comfort level in creating data sets where
none exist,” said Charles Ornstein of ProPublica. “My colleagues and I put together a data set using Access when we were
analyzing more than 2,000Registered Nursing. It was the only way of analyzing real data and not piecing together
anecdotes. It was very time consuming but very worthwhile.”Data-driven investigative techniques can substantially augment
the ability of technically savvy journalists to master information and hold governments accountable. Applying data
journalism enables investigative journalists to find trends, chase hunches, and explore hypotheses. It can enable beat
reporters to look beyond anecdotes or a rotating cast of sources to find hidden trends or scoops. A body of empirical
evidence, based upon rigorously vetted data, can also give editors and reporters the ability to move away from “he said,
she said” journalism that leaves readers wondering where the truth lies.
Newsroom Analytics
While traffic data analytics and behavioral advertising aren’t directly involved in gathering data for investigations or
publishing visualizations, they are now an integral part of digital journalism. Understanding who is interacting with a story,
and how, informs the way future coverage can be extended and delivered. Washington, D.C. is the epicenter for all kinds of
data journalism these days, from politics to policy. Since Homicide Watch launched in 2009, it earned praise and interest
from around the digital world, including a profile by the Nieman Lab at Harvard University that asked whether a local blog
“could fill the gaps of D.C.’s homicide coverage.”58Homicide Watch has turned up a number of unreported murders.In the
process, the site has also highlighted an important emerging set of data that other digital editors should consider: using
inbound search-engine analytics for reporting.59the Poynter Institute, Homicide Watch used clues in site search queries to
ID a homicide victim.60wife team behind Homicide Watch is an important case study into why organizing beats may well
hold similar importance in investigative projects.61established media institutions like the Financial Times,62Times, however,
is still in its relatively early days.In an interview during the spring of 2014, Aron Pilhofer, associate managing editor for
digital strategy at the New York Times, told me they had just launched a newsroom analytics team. The kinds of projects
we’re doing there are entirely editorial. They are not tied to advertising at all. Right now, many newsrooms are stupid about
the way they publish. They’re tied to a legacy model, which means that some of the most impactful journalism will be
published online on Saturday afternoon, to go into print on Sunday. You could not pick a time when your audience is less
engaged. It will sit on the homepage, and then sit overnight, and then on Sunday a homepage editor will decide it’s been
there too long or decide to freshen the page, and move it lower.I feel strongly, and now there is a growing consensus, that
we should make decisions like that based upon data. Who will the audience be for a particular piece of content? Who are
they? What do they read? That will lead to a very different approach to being a publishing enterprise.Knowing our target
audience will dictate an entirely differently rollout strategy. We will go from a “publish” to a “launch.” It will also lead us in a
direction that is inevitable, where we decouple the legacy model from the digital. At what point do you decide that your
digital audience is as important”or more important”than print?As Pilhofer allowed, this is a lesson that online publishers
started applying a decade ago. It’s time to catch up. “Listening to your readers is as old as publishing letters to the editor,”
wrote Owen Thomas, editor-in-chief of ReadWrite. “What’s new is that Web analytics create an implicit conversation that is
as interesting as the explicit one we’ve long been able to have.”63
Data-driven Business Models
Data journalism and the databases that drive it also offer dramatically improved means to organize and access source
material over time. That’s not a minor issue: Newsrooms and media organizations are subject to the same challenges
around knowledge management and collaborations that other organizations are in the 21st century. The McKinsey Global
Institute estimates that knowledge workers spend 20 percent of their time trying to find information.64activity is central to the
work journalists do, improving collaboration through social software and digital source material condenses the time it takes
to get a story researched, edited, and published. As editors in the business, tech, and finance world know well, that can
mean real money”and stabilizing revenues and finding new sources of income is very much on the minds of publishers
these days. The 2013 State of the Media report from Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism painted a
picture of contraction, with newsroom closings and a digital advertising market dominated by technology giants like
Facebook and Google.65the traditional business models of newspapers has been well-documented over the past decade.
More than 166 U.S. newspapers of an estimated 1,382or closed down altogether since 2008,66than 40,000industry since
2007.67when newspapers enjoyed local advertising monopolies and 20 percent profit margins, either. Craigslist, eBay, and
Monster.com have each become platforms for the classified revenue that once sustained local newspapers. No single,
replicable business model for media in the information age has emerged since, although literally hundreds of panels,
conferences, and colloquia have been held to debate the issue. The economic pain remains most acute at the regional
level, where daily newspapers face the difficult challenge of getting consumers to pay for yesterday’s news. Just publishing
or republishing rows of data alone will not come to the rescue. For instance, one of the canonical examples of data-driven
news, EveryBlock, never quite caught on. The site, reasonably described as the “Xerox PARC of civic data,”68was acquired
by MSNBC in 2009, expanded and refocused on creating community features on top of local data over the years. In 2013,
NBC News shut down EveryBlock,69business model. EveryBlock faced other fundamental issues: Despite a 2011 redesign
that integrated more social features and topics, the local data that drove the service didn’t prove compelling enough to
attract consistent daily visitors to sustain the site. Pages of data weren’t enough to engage the public on their own.
EveryBlock needed more narratives and human interest pieces to keep people coming back for more, engaging them in
participation and creating a community. In 2014, EveryBlock relaunched70experiment, however, hopes that the platform
become the civic architecture to stitch together neighborhoods elsewhere are considerably dimmed. Instead, private social
networks like Nextdoor or Facebook, bulletin boards like Craigslist, and mobile applications that follow will more likely help
neighbors connect to one another or local services.The struggles that hyperlocal sites71Patch.com and local
news72searching for a business model have left many observers wondering what will work.73percent of staff and shifted
strategy from local advertising sales to national accounts, Patch is on path to be profitable in 2014 with 17 million unique
visitors across 906 sites in April of 2014.74tough decisions to make about where to cut and where to invest. Despite the
promise of data-driven journalism and its importance in the digital news environment, some are still choosing to close
divisions dedicated to data.Digital First Media, for instance, “shuttered its Project Thunderdome” in April of 2014.75an article
for the Nieman Lab,76promising digital startup within a much larger media company, producing solid videos and data-driven
features like “Firearms in the Family,”77Assassination”78advisor.79Thunderdome down, however, was driven more by cost-
cutting on the part of Digital First Media’s majority owner, Alden Global Capital, than the success or failure of the unit.Other
media companies would be wise not to make the same decision, argued Scott Klein, who said that publishers can afford
data journalism if they prioritize it:News organizations are contracting and budgets are going down. Times are still very
tough. That said, I suspect that some newsrooms say they can’t afford to hire newsroom developers when they really mean
that their budget priorities lie elsewhere”priorities that are set by a senior leadership whose definition of journalism is pretty
traditional and often excludes digital-native forms. I also hear a lot from people trying to get data teams started in their own
newsrooms that the advice that newsroom leaders get is that newsroom developers are unicorns, whom they can’t afford.
Big IT departments sometimes play a confounding role here.I suspect many metro papers can actually afford one or two
journalist/developers”and there’s a ton of amazing projects a small team can do. For years, the Los Angeles Times ran one
of the best news application shops in the country with only two dedicated staffers. (They still do great work, of course, and
the team has grown.) If doing data journalism well is a priority of the organization, making it happen can fit into your
budget.80alive from the Thunderdome, at least, will have many options in a booming market81startups82Media, Buzzfeed,
Gawker, Business Insider, and Mashable. According to Pew’s 2014 State of the News Media, these relatively new entrants
have created some 5,^000^ jobs.83journalism went mainstream when Nate Silver’s revamped FiveThirtyEight launched at
ESPN and the New York Times started The Upshot. Whether some of the new entrants prove commercially successful is
still in question, particularly for those pursuing explanatory journalism, seeking to help readers navigate the news. “These
publishers haven’t talked much about their revenue strategy, but this is still publishing,” noted Lucia Moses in an article on
the ad model for explainer journalism in Digiday: They’re in it for the advertising. Online publishers can build an ad-based
business one of two ways: Go the scale route by selling price-depressing ads programmatically, or focus on the long tail of
lucrative, highly custom advertising (which presumably has a better shot at getting consumers’ attention). These publishers
are making a bet on the latter, and in the case of the startups, they have the benefit of having established backers”Vox is
part of Vox Media; FiveThirtyEight has ESPN”to help with technology and ad sales.84however, more business models for
data journalism than advertising, as Mirko Lorenz, a journalist and information architect at Deutsche Welle, highlighted in
the Data Journalism Handbook: The big, worldwide market that is currently opening up is all about transformation of
publicly available data into something that we can process: making data visible and making it human. We want to be able to
relate to the big numbers we hear every day in the news”what the millions and billions mean for each of us.There are a
number of very profitable data-driven media companies that have simply applied this principle earlier than others. They
enjoy healthy growth rates and sometimes impressive profits. One example: Bloomberg. The company operates about
300,000and delivers financial data to its users. If you are in the money business this is a power tool. Each terminal comes
with a color-coded keyboard and up to 30,000analyze, and help you to decide what to do next. This core business generates
an estimated U.S. $6.3least this what a piece by the New York Times estimated in 2008. As a result, Bloomberg has been
hiring journalists left, right, and center; they bought the venerable, but loss-making Business Week, and so on.Another
example is the Canadian media conglomerate today known as Thomson Reuters. They started with one newspaper,
bought up a number of well-known titles in the United Kingdom, and then decided two decades ago to leave the newspaper
business. Instead, they have grown based on information services, aiming to provide a deeper perspective for clients in a
number of industries. If you worry about how to make money with specialized information, the advice would be to just read
about the company’s history in Wikipedia.And look at The Economist. The magazine has built an excellent, influential brand
on its media side. At the same time the “Economist Intelligence Unit” is now more like a consultancy, reporting about
relevant trends and forecasts for almost any country in the world. They are employing hundreds of journalists and claim to
serve about 1.5worldwide.85that it can provide about the world. Proprietary data is a valuable resource that can and does
drive the business models of giant companies. There’s a reason data scientists are a hot commodity from Silicon Valley to
Wall Street to intelligence agencies in Washington, D.C.: They can create valuable knowledge from vast amounts of data,
both public and private. Similarly, there’s a reason that hedge funds use the Freedom of Information Act to buy government
data:86business intelligence for investment management. Outside of Western democracies with relatively well-established
FOIA laws and governments that have been collecting and releasing data for decades, data stewardship may be even more
strategic. Justin Arenstein, a Knight International Fellow embedded with the African Media Initiative (AMI) as a director for
digital innovation, said in an interview:We’ve embedded open data strategists and evangelists into the newsrooms, backed
up by an external development team at a civic tech lab. They’re structuring the data that’s available, such as turning old
microfiche rolls into digital information, cleaning it up, and building a data disk. They’re building news APIs and pushing the
idea that rather than building websites, design an API specifically for third-party repurposing of your content. We’re starting
to see the first early successes. Four months in, some of the larger media groups in Kenya are now starting to have third-
party entrepreneurs using their content and then doing revenue-share deals.The only investment from the data holder,
which is the media company, is to actually clean up the data and then make it available for development. Now, that’s not a
new concept. The Guardian in the United Kingdom has experimented with it. It’s fairly exciting for these African companies
because there’s potentially”and arguably, larger”appetite for the content because there’s not as much content available.
Suddenly, the unit cost of value of that data is far higher than it might be in the United Kingdom or in the United
States.Media companies are seriously looking at it as one of many potential future revenue streams. It enables them to
repurpose their own data, start producing books, and the rest of it. There isn’t much book publishing in Africa, by Africans,
for Africans. Suddenly, if the content is available in an accessible format, it gives them an opportunity to mash-up stuff and
create new kinds of books.They’ll start seeing that content itself can be a business model. The impact that we’re seeking
there is to try and show media companies that investing in high-quality unique information actually gives you a long-term
commodity that you can continue to reap benefits from over time. Whereas simply pulling stuff off the wire or, as many
media do in Africa, simply lifting it off of the Web, from the BBC or elsewhere, and crediting it, is not a good business
model.87Olympics data in 2012 is a useful example of an entrepreneurial business model of this sort,88Associated
Press.89facts, and figures,” wrote Jacqui Maher, assistant editor on the New York Times Interactive team, in a post on the
“data Olympics.” She said:Just about any competition that tests the mettle of athletes can be broken down into data points,
like personal-best times crossing the finish line of a 5k race, or top career home runs in Major League Baseball. Bringing a
sport’s national champions together in international competitions”for instance, soccer’s World Cup”adds more layers of
information. And then there’s the Olympics. How much more data is that? Well, in two weeks of the Olympics over 204
gold, silver, and bronze medals were awarded after 7,000the best of 32,000took us about 30,000repository to figure out how
to show it.90
New Nonprofit Revenues
While revenue models for data-driven hyperlocal news or algorithmic reporting will continue to evolve, flourishing or
withering on the vine, nonprofits like ProPublica or the Texas Tribune operate under different metrics than profit. The
Tribune, which has emerged as a bright spot in the firmament of online media for state government, focuses on covering
the Texas statehouse. It’s now one of the most important examples of data journalism in the United States, given the
success of its data visualizations and interactives.“We turned three-years-old in November 2012, and we were profitable
last year,” said Rodney Gibbs, the Texas Tribune’s chief innovation officer. “A key to our sustainability is our diverse
revenue stream: membership, events, earned income, corporate underwriting, and grants. In other words, we’re not
dependent on any one source of income. Plus, we’ve done a good job of keeping our expenses under budget while growing
our reach and impact.”91Tribune now has over 200 different data tools and visualizations, including a Public Education
Explorer and the Higher Education Explorer, which collect and publish financial, demographic, and performance data for
every Texas public school and college.92scope and granularity of the data that the Texas Tribune has amassed is
impressive, it’s the online traffic and interest that its work has received that make the case study important to the future of
news. Notably, all of that data has proven to be a hugely popular part of what the media organization publishes: Together,
the Texas Tribune’s data library93officials94data library is still a rarity in the media world.In January of 2013, the Texas
Tribune launched95result of nine months of research by 20 different journalists. The news app draws from data on the
Texas governor, lieutenant governor, and all members of the Texas House and Senate.They have resources to apply to
growing that success, as the Knight Foundation awarded the Texas Tribune a grant of nearly half a million dollars in 2011.
Examples of the Texas Tribune’s data journalism include interactives on Texas prisons,^96^ government employee
salaries,97and gubernatorial election results.98ourselves as a tech startup that works in the news business, rather than a
news organization that uses technology,” said Gibbs. He elaborated:I believe that’s helped us stay nimble. While our tech
group is small”four full-time developers plus one contractor”it’s sufficient to not just support our primary site but also the
data apps and visualizations we release each month. Moreover, our two data journalists work across the newsroom on a
range of beats, so even reporters who aren’t data nerds can leverage data and visualizations for their stories. In other
words, no one here has to be sold on the value of data”the proof in the traffic and audience feedback has made believers of
us all.ProPublica launched its own Data Store in February of 2014,99data for free and selling premium data to those who
would pay for the additional value that it’s added.100the Data Store you’ll find a growing collection of the data we’ve used in
our reporting. For raw, as-is data sets we receive from government sources, you’ll find a free download link that simply
requires you agree to a simplified version of our Terms of Use. For data sets that are available as downloads from
government websites, we’ve simply linked to the sites to ensure you can quickly get the most up-to-date data.“It’s a setup
similar to NICAR’s Database Library, which offers journalists clean and formatted government data on things like plane
accidents, federal contracts, and workplace safety records,” wrote Justin Ellis for the Nieman Lab:For users wanting to get
their hands on a state’s worth of data from ProPublica’s “Dollars for Docs”101for instance, the cost varies: $200 for
journalists, $2,000for commercial purposes have to negotiate a (presumably higher) price with ProPublica. Like any good
business, ProPublica offers potential customers free samples of the data before they make a purchase.ProPublica has
always encouraged a level of openness with its work, often making investigations available to others by Creative
Commons,102play with data. The data store is an extension of that, but also a potential solution to a question many
newsrooms face: how to extract additional value out of an investigation.But don’t expect the store to be a significant source
of revenue, at least right away, according to Richard Tofel, ProPublica’s president. “It will take a while for us to see if that’s a
serious revenue source or not,” Tofel told me.In April of 2014, ProPublica announced plans to grow its Data Store to include
almost every data set used in its reporting, citing strong interest. “If you look at newsrooms like the AP, Bloomberg, and
Reuters, you’ll see that at their core are data products, some of which are very profitable indeed,” Scott Klein told the
Columbia Journalism Review. “There’s no question that selling data is a rich opportunity for many newsrooms.”103
Fuel for Robo-journalism
It’s certain that data will also play a role in other kinds of ventures, perhaps underpinning “robo-journalism” from services
like Narrative Science.104report on a March 2014 earthquake in Los Angeles was written by a robot105programmer for the
Los Angeles Times. It’s not the first bot “roboporter” on staff; Schwencke and the Times’ data desk modeled the “Quakebot”
on a similar algorithm that creates automatic reports about homicides in the area.106traffic, weather, high school sports, and
police blotters are inevitable, although a human editor may still play a role in publishing bot-reported stories. “Having spent
some years as a local news reporter, I can attest that slapping together brief, factual accounts of things like homicides,
earthquakes, and fires is essentially a game of Mad Libs that might as well be done by a machine,” wrote Will Oremus at
Slate. “…At the same time, Quakebot neatly illustrates the present limitations of automated journalism. It can’t assess the
damage on the ground, can’t interview experts, and can’t discern the relative newsworthiness of various aspects of the
story.”In the near term, such newsbots may be most useful as early alert systems for beat reporters and editors, finding
signal in the noise that journalists can then use as digital tips to assign, investigate, and confirm. This kind of data
journalism”powered by alerts, scrapers, and algorithms”created scoops, which should be catnip to city desk editors. Such
automation has widespread applications, from government accountability to financial reporting.“I would like to get more into
monitoring and notification,” said Aron Pilhofer. “We ingest millions of records of campaign finance contributions and
expenditures every year. If for example, a member of Congress is at risk, you see a spike in ”legal services,’ a standard
variation above the mean. That should send a notification to congressional reporters. You’d be using tech to improve the
reporter’s ability to do their job.”What Google Now,107Science, and other algorithmic approaches to local information will all
need is good data. Some data will come from municipalities, other data will come from the private sector, nonprofits, and
academia, and some will be created by media organizations themselves using sensors and scrapers. (The Omaha World-
Herald’s Curbwise is one such project, focused on real estate.)108Holovaty intended, it’s in this area that EveryBlock may
end up making the biggest contribution, in terms of making open government data more useful in an automated fashion.
“The thesis of it was not take public records and make them usable,” he told me in an interview in 2014. “It was to show
what you need to know at the level of a block or neighborhood, but because we were doing it and no one else was, people
focused on public records. People focused on things that were unique versus the purpose of what the site was.” He added,
“That’s like focusing on the Beatles because of their use of a sitar””I love the Beatles because they’re such a great sitar
band.’ It’s just something they used to the end of making great music.”The part of his vision for media organizations that is
coming to pass may be expressed in news applications and other interactives that are born digital, divorced from the
constraints of print and the daily front pages, personalized for individual users, and automatically updated with data as it
becomes available. For some time to come, however, there will be a role and need for humans to fact-check the algorithms
generating automated news from data, adding context, shaping visually compelling narratives, and conducting investigative
journalism that algorithms alone cannot. Someday, that may change, as Kristian Hammond, the CTO and cofounder of
Narrative Science, suggested to Steven Levy:Hammond believes that as Narrative Science grows, its stories will go higher
up the journalism food chain”from commodity news to explanatory journalism and, ultimately, detailed long-form articles.
Maybe at some point, humans and algorithms will collaborate, with each partner playing to its strength. Computers, with
their flawless memories and ability to access data, might act as legmen to human writers. Or vice versa, human reporters
might interview subjects and pick up stray details”and then send them to a computer that writes it all up. As the computers
get more accomplished and have access to more and more data, their limitations as storytellers will fall away. It might take
a while, but eventually even a story like this one could be produced without, well, me. “Humans are unbelievably rich and
complex, but they are machines,” Hammond says. “In 20 years, there will be no area in which Narrative Science doesn’t
write stories.”
IV. Notable Examples
National and International Data Journalism Awards
If you look around at the best data journalism in the world, you’ll see a spectrum of achievement and sophistication. On one
side, you’ll find a lot of maps and data visualizations. These interactives may be the work of a few hours or a day. On the
other side of the coin, you’ll discover complex, multi-year investigations of education, health care, environment, crime, and
government institutions. The limits of both ends of the spectrum are important, with respect to the resources and time
required. These efforts are being furthered by the efforts of many news organizations, including the Washington Post, the
Center for Public Integrity, the Associated Press, Thomson Reuters, USA Today, NPR, the Guardian, and the Chicago
Tribune. “It’s great to see journalists bravely jumping into complicated data sets, like hospital billing and
Medicare,109stories,”110academic advisor for the National Institute of Computer-Assisted Reporting.For example, he pointed
to “Million-dollar Hospital Bills in Northern California” from The Sacramento Bee,111``Patient Safety at a Dallas Hospital from
The Dallas Morning News,112Angeles Times,113Atlanta Journal-Constitution,114Flights Mostly for Routine Transport” from
the Argus Leader115work in recent years.“I’m really proud of the elections work at the Times,116said Derek Willis, who works
at The Upshot. “A project called “Toxic Waters”117to work on too. But my favorite might be the first one: the “Congressional
Votes Database” that Adrian Holovaty, Alyson Hurt, and I created at the Washington Post in late 2005.118milestone for me
and for the Post, and helped set the bar for what news organizations could do with data on the Web.”There are an
expanding number of notable data-driven journalism projects and sites around the world. The Philip Meyer Awards119find
the best of each year’s work, as are the Global Editors Network Data Journalism Awards.120following examples are chosen
because they exemplify notable qualities in the evolving practice of data journalism.
Data and Reporting Paired with Narrative
“The Prescribers,” ProPublica’s series on fraud and influence in the Medicare drug system, is a masterful use of data in
investigative reporting.121connection between data-driven investigative journalism and government or corporate
accountability. It’s far from the first at that outlet. “The project I’m most proud of is something I did before SOPA Opera,
which was our ”Dollars for Docs’ project in 2010,” said Dan Nguyen, then a developer at ProPublica. “It started off with just
a blog post I wrote to teach other journalists how Web scraping was useful.122to disclose what it paid doctors to do
promotional and consulting work. My colleagues noticed and said that we could do that for every company that had been
disclosing payments. Because each company disclosed these payments in a variety of formats, including Flash containers
and PDFs, few people had tried to analyze these disclosures in bulk, to see nationwide trends in these financial
relationships.”Nguyen explained that the ProPublica team wrote dozens of data scrapers to cross-reference their database
of payments with state medical board and medical school listings. “For the initial story, we teamed up with five other
newsrooms, including NPR and the Boston Globe, which required programmatically creating a system in which we could
coordinate data and research,” he said. “With all the data we had, and the number of reporters and editors working on this
outside of our walls, this wasn’t a project that would’ve succeeded by just sending Excel files back and forth.”123data-driven
journalism can have an impact on patients, providers, private companies and universities; in short, an entire health care
industry.“The website we built from that data is our most visited project yet, as millions of people used it to look up their
doctors,” said Nguyen. “Afterwards, we shared our data with any news outlet that asked, so hundreds of independently
reported stories came from our data. Among the results were that the drug companies and the med schools revisited their
screening and conflict of interest policies.”
Crowdsourcing Data Creation and Analysis
Today, journalists have many more options for sourcing. Newsroom reporters and developers can download, scrape, and
digitize data from a wealth of sources, from websites to document dumps. In the future, more journalists will create data
themselves using sensors, and engage their distributed audiences of readers, listeners, and watchers to help gather data
with them. In some forward-thinking media organizations, this is already happening. In 2011, ProPublica began an effort to
“Free the Files,” making the physical “public inspection documents” detailing political advertising spending at local stations
open to the public.124Commission ordered TV stations in the top 50 markets in the United States to begin posting these
documents online. The trouble is that the FCC didn’t require that publishing be done in an open, standardized format. As a
result, the stations submitted a mass of unsearchable PDFs.125enable volunteers to translate the files into structured data
and sort the files by market, amount, candidate, and political group. ProPublica later open sourced the app as
Transcribable.126was to take thousands of hard-to-parse documents and make them useful, helping to reveal hidden
spending in the election,” senior engagement editor Amanda Zamora explained.1271,000spending data to create a public
database that otherwise wouldn’t exist. We logged as much as $1 billion in political ad buys, and a month after the election,
people are still reviewing documents.”In 2013, New York City’s public radio station asked its listeners to help track the
emergence of cicadas with inexpensive sensors. WNYC’s “Cicada Tracker” project turned up some 8,000people making
trackers.128data collection129journalism130reality”not just a theoretical project”that resulted in 1,5000 collected temperature
readings. The lessons from the cicada tracker project should inform future efforts at public media to engage in public
engagement, citizen science, and data collection. For more of a deep dive into the topic, check out the proceedings of the
sensor journalism workshop at the Tow Center last year.131team released a project around accessible playgrounds. NPR
made a request of its community of listeners and readers: Help public media collect the data that drives it and make the
resource better for everyone. The NPR playgrounds app enables parents and children to search for accessible
playgrounds, taking commonly used consumer-recommendation engines and combining them with a strong public service
element.132playgrounds for kids with special needs,” said Brian Boyer, the head of NPR’s Visuals team, in an interview. “It is
the first of its kind”a nationwide database of playgrounds that are well suited to kids in wheelchairs, kids with autism, or kids
with other special needs.”NPR activated its audience to become participants in data collection, much in the same way that
Audubon’s “Christmas Bird Count” and eBird are crowdsourcing data collection about bird species.133the first 48 hours after
the app was launched, data for 336 more playgrounds was added to the database, for a total of 1,293. In May of 2014, the
playgrounds app had 1,907counting. The app is a notable case study for the power of public engagement and
crowdsourcing-data creation. There are decades of precedent where a listening or viewing audience collaborate with a
media organization in collecting images, videos, or stories. What remains relatively new is the capacity for a networked
populace to contribute data, whether it comes from sensors in droughts134geiger counters135If turning data into stories is
now a core element of investigative journalism, WNYC and NPR’s Visuals team have showed how to do it best and serve
the public in the process.136
Public Service
Internationally, the Guardian Datablog established itself early as one of the best sources of interesting, relevant data
journalism, covering topics from sports, to popular culture, to government accountability.137showing how free, open source
tools, narrative skills, and online publishing can be used by a lean team to produce excellent journalism. Notably, its editors
and contributors are not programmers: They leverage free online tools and open source software in their work.Every
Datablog post demonstrates an emerging practice wherein Datablog editors make it possible for readers to download the
data themselves. The Datablog is full of great examples, like mapping reactions to current
events,138spending,139quality,140States,141rates.142important as the British government continues to invest in open data. In
June of 2012, the United Kingdom’s Cabinet Office relaunched Data.gov.uk and released a new open data white
paper.143government has doubled down again and again on the notion that open data can be a catalyst for increased
government transparency, civic utility, and economic prosperity. While the evidence that has emerged in recent years
strongly supports the connection of open data to economic activity, the role of data journalism in delivering accountability
using the data released from these platforms and acquired by Freedom of Information Act requests is central.144
All Organizations - Great and Small
When I interviewed the founding editor of the Guardian Datablog, Simon Rogers, he praised the work of institutions and the
work of several practitioners. (While Rogers is now Twitter’s first data editor,145journalism.146amazing thing, scraping all
public data at the moment,” he said. “A lot of data journalism has to be about giving data to people and making it
accessible.”Rogers also pointed to the work of James Cheshire,147on the Bombsight project, and the use of geodata by the
Oxford Internet Institute.148journalism can be committed by much more than traditional media organizations. It was
particularly instructive to learn more about the work of large media organizations, like the Los Angeles Times and Canada’s
Global News, which have been building their capacity to practice data journalism. “As part of large broadcast organizations,
one thing that is very satisfying about data journalism is that it often puts our digital staff in the driver’s seat”what starts as
an online investigation often becomes the basis for original and exclusive broadcast content,” wrote Keith Robinson, the
senior producer for specials and interactive at Global News in Canada, in an email.Robinson highlighted several examples
of its Data Desk’s work,149from mapping and visualizing Canada’s census data to investigating water main breaks in
Toronto and the ways they’re being addressed.It’s not just big-city newsrooms or stations that can afford teams of
programmers and designers; these aren’t the only players. Important, sophisticated data-driven journalism is also possible
with smaller teams on tight deadlines. To put it another way, acts of data journalism by small teams or individuals aren’t just
plausible or possible, they’re happening”from Italy to Chile to Brazil to Africa. That doesn’t mean that the news application
teams at NPR or newspaper companies aren’t setting the pace for data journalism when it comes to cutting-edge work”far
from it, as this news app of tornado damage in Moore, Oklahoma150demonstrates”but the tools and techniques to make
something worthwhile are available to smaller organizations, even with tightened spending.
Embracing Data Transparency
The Datablog and its editor set an important standard that many other data journalists continue to embrace: Show your
work and share your data. I profiled the data journalism work of the Los Angeles Times in early 2013, when I interviewed
news developer Ben Welsh about the newspaper’s Data Desk.151reporters and Web developers specializes in maps,
databases, analysis, and visualization. For instance, its interactive visualization mapped how fast the Los Angeles Fire
Department responds to calls.152on 911 breakdowns in the LAFD153investigative journalism with data analysis to create
important, compelling narratives that held the government accountable and demonstrated significant issues existed in the
city’s data-collection practices.The investigation offered an ageless insight that will endure well beyond the “era of big data”:
Poor collection practices and aging IT will derail any institutional efforts to use data analysis to improve performance.The
Los Angeles Times found that poor recordkeeping is holding back state government efforts to upgrade California’s 911
system. As with any database project, beware of “garbage in, garbage out,” or “GIGO.”As Ben Welsh and Robert J. Lopez
reported for the L.A. Times in December of 2012, California’s Emergency Medical Services Authority has been working to
centralize performance data since 2009. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to achieve data-driven improvements or manage against
perceived issues by applying big data to the public sector if the data collection itself is flawed. 154 The L.A. Times reported
quality issues stemming from how response times were measured to record keeping on paper to a failure to keep records
at all. When I profiled Ben Welsh’s work in 2012, he told me this kind of project was exactly the sort of work he’s most
proud of doing. “As we all know, there’s a lot of data out there,” said Welsh, “and, as anyone who works with it knows, most
of it is crap. The projects I’m most proud of have taken large, ugly data sets and refined them into something worth
knowing: a nut graf in an investigative story or a data-driven app that gives the reader some new insight into the world
around them.”155applying data journalism to local government accountability in Oakland, at a website called Oakland Police
Beat that went live in the spring of 2014.156Local and the Center for Media Change”and funded by the Ethics and
Excellence in Journalism Foundation and the Fund for Investigative Journalism”was co-founded by Susan Mernit and
Abraham Hyatt, the former managing editor of ReadWrite. (Disclosure: Hyatt edited my posts there.)Oakland Police Beat is
squarely aimed at shining sunlight on the practices of Oakland’s law enforcement officers. Its first story out of the gate
pulled no punches, finding that Oakland’s most decorated officers were responsible for a high number of brutality lawsuits
and shootings.The site also demonstrated two important practices that deserve to become standard in data journalism:
explaining the methodology behind its analysis, including source notes, and (eventually) publishing the data behind the
investigation. ProPublica does it, the Datablog does it, and so does the Los Angeles Times. The Times Data Desk set a
high bar in its investigation of ambulance response times by not only making sense of the data, but also publishing the data
behind the open source maps of California’s emergency medical agencies as part of the series into the public
domain.157This wasn’t the first time the team made code available, nor the last. (Just visit the Data Desk’s Github account
for proof.)158As Welsh noted in a post about the series, 159 the Data Desk has “previously written about the technical
methods160to conduct [the] investigation, released the base layer created for an interactive map of response times, 161 and
contributed the location of LAFD’s 106 fire station to the Open Street Map.162Scott Klein:If it’s done well, people have a
really big appetite to see the data for themselves. Look how many people understand”and love”incredibly sophisticated and
arcane sports statistics. We ought to be able to trust our readers to understand data in other contexts too. If we’ve done our
jobs right, most people should be able to go to our Prescriber Checkup news application,163doctors, and see how their
prescribing patterns compare to their peers”and understand what’s at play and what to do with the information they
find.Follow-through on this kind of thinking is what really made me sit up and take notice of The Upshot164the New York
Times new data-driven website. It made editorial decisions to share how reporters found the income data165link to the data
set, and share both the methodology166behind the forecasting model and the code for it on Github.167journalism168is
practiced in 2014, and sets a high standard right out of the gate for future interactives at The Upshot and for other sites that
might seek to compete with its predictions. I was not alone in my positive assessment of the content, presentation, and
strategy of the Times’ new site: Over at the Guardian Datablog, James Ball published an interesting analysis of data
journalism, as seen through the initial foray of The Upshot; FiveThirtyEight; and Vox, the “explanatory journalism” site Ezra
Klein, Melissa Bell and Matt Yglesias, among others, launched in the spring of 2014.169with respect to his points about
audience, diversity, and personalization. The point that is particularly important is the one I’ve made repeatedly above, that
data journalists should try to be open about the difficult, complicated process of reporting on data as a source:Doing original
research on data is hard: It’s the core of scientific analysis, and that’s why academics have to go through peer-review to get
their figures, methods, and approaches double-checked. Journalism is meant to be about transparency, and so should hold
itself to this standard”at the very least.This standard is especially true for data-driven journalism, but, sadly, it’s not always
lived up to: Nate Silver (for understandable reasons) won’t release how his model works, while FiveThirtyEight hasn’t
released the figures or work behind some of their most high-profile articles.That’s a shame, and a missed opportunity:
Sharing this stuff is good, accountable journalism, and gives the world a chance to find more stories or angles that a writer
might have missed.Counterintuitively, old media is doing better at this than the startups: The Upshot has released the code
driving its forecasting model, as well as the data on its launch inequality article. And the Guardian has at least tried to
release the raw data behind its data-driven journalism since our Datablog launched five years ago.In May of 2014, the
backlash to data journalism is still growing, as more academics, economists, and statisticians read and react to the style
and format of the pieces published at Vox, FiveThirtyEight, and The Upshot. The reaction, however, is to the brand and
from of data journalism practiced there, in which data, available research, and charts are consulted by an author to
examine a question or story, combined relatively rapidly, and presented in in a series of charts or maps wrapped in
narrative text. This form departs from the slower moving investigative features and news applications produced in
proceeding years. In a survey comparing the data publishing habits of these three sites, none is meeting the standard set
by the Guardian Datablog or ProPublica.Of the 290 items published in the catch-all FiveThirtyEight RSS feed, available
since the site launched in March of 2013, 114 are features.170of these stories has been uploaded to its data directory on
Github; that’s a transparency of only 3.4percent.171and transparency regarding a story on inequality, publishing the data and
the model used to analyze it to its Github account. The Times has since published data for another story and open sourced
code for a Ruby gem that extracts press releases and statements by members of Congress.172data used in its stories,
although Vox Media has updated the code for Chorus, its content management system, over 62,000times.173released in raw
form, particularly if it contains personal or private details. Resource constraints may mean that scrubbing data properly isn’t
possible, which would argue against release. Practices can change too: The Guardian Datablog stopped publishing open
data into its data store in 2014.174
Following the Money
As David Kaplan, director of the Global Investigative Journalism Network, emphasized, huge databases, network analyses,
and code aren’t a replacement for investigative journalism.175technologies augment and extend what’s possible for media
organizations, lone muckrakers, or even teams of journalists working collaboratively across borders and time zones. This
kind of collaboration has moved from a potential to reality over the past three years, when a team of more than 80
journalists from 40 different countries worked together to map the world of secret trusts and offshore companies. The
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists analyzed 260 gigabytes of leaked corporate data, constituting text,
PDF, images, spreadsheets, and images to reveal how government officials were offshoring money, how banks were
involved in the practice, and how organized crime is using these same structures.176journalism.177applied again in the
future.
Mapping Power and Influence
Mapping the hidden or tacit connections between powerful figures in business and government has long been a focus of
investigative journalism. Today, data, software, and interactive visualizations can enable people to understand those
networks of power and influence in unprecedented ways. Reuters’ Connected China is a brilliant example of how
technology can give life and meaning to data, giving visitors the ability to explore relationships in a way that simply isn’t
possible on the printed page.178reporter Irene Jay Liu, Connected China was the outcome of 18 months of reporting,
design, development, and research.179database that resulted includes tens of thousands of people, organizations, and
events, more than 30,000between them, and some 1.5built on open standards, including HTML5, enabling people to use it
on tablets, smartphones, laptops, or desktop computers alike.The project “represents a new approach for Reuters News,”
wrote Liu, “a model to take the reporting we do every day about people, institutions, power, and relationships and put it in a
format that gives it sustained significance over time.” She added:Adhering to Reuters’ high journalistic standards, we have
structured inherently qualitative relationships”the connections between people (family, mentorship, rivalry, alliances), the
importance of particular job roles, the power dynamic between the various institutions that govern China. By quantifying
and categorizing these complex relationships, we break from the constraints of long-form text and allow new ways of
communicating and interpreting this acquired knowledge.By harnessing the collective intelligence gathered by a global
team of reporters and editors, we can derive deeper insight to the political, societal, and economic implications of these
connections.Baseball has sabermetrics; we’re trying to develop the field of sinometrics.A few months before Connected
China went live, Miguel Paz and his colleagues launched a similar data-driven approach to mapping Chile’s elite.1802011,
when Paz was still the managing editor of El Mostrador, he won a Knight News Challenge to create an interactive platform
that would map the relationships between a database of entities from investigations and crowdsourcing.181of the site went
live and then grew, with support from Startup Chile and the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ). In the months since,
Poderopedia (the platform’s name) has matured and grown beyond Chile, powering a voting platform in
Panama.182Márquez said that to talk about ”investigative journalism’ is redundant, because he assumes that any form of
journalism should be an investigative one,” said Paz in an interview. “The purpose of journalism is to show you what the
powerful want to hide. It’s the same with any form of journalism.”Now the Poderopedia Foundation, in 2014 it announced
plans to expand to Venezuela and Colombia in 2014.183
Geojournalism, Satellites, and the Ground Truth
Open data from satellites can revolutionize environmental reporting, as InfoAmazonia has demonstrated over the past two
years.184I first met Gustavo Faleiros in Brazil, where the Knight International Journalism Fellow was reporting on what was
happening to the Amazon rainforest, in partnership with Washington-based organizations the International Center for
Journalists and Internews. Faleiros is the project coordinator for InfoAmazonia.org, a beautiful mash-up of open data,
maps, and storytelling that enables people to explore how the rainforest of Brazil is changing. Since its launch in 2012,
InfoAmazonia has been training Brazilian journalists to use satellite imagery and collect data related to forest fires and
carbon monoxide. It has now published 18 interactive maps online based upon gigabytes of geographical data that show
deforestation over time, among other subjects.185been dubbed “geojournalism” by its practitioners, or the practice of telling
stories with geographic information systems’ (GIS) data generated by the earth sciences. The Environmental News Lab, a
multidisciplinary team at Brazilian nonprofit media company O ECO, has published a Geojournalism Handbook186the ICFJ,
Internews’ Earth Journalism Network, and the Flag It! Project. The online handbook explains how to use a series of open
source and/or Web-based tools to collect, organize, visualize, and publish data, with a specific focus on contributing to and
using the growing geocommons of Open Street Maps”the Wikipedia for maps.Other examples of
geojournalism187Investigative Environmental Journalism in South Africa, where journalists are tracking poaching of
rhinoceroses in the country’s national parks.188the country to increase the capacity of Kenyan journalists to report on
international development and private financing.1892014, InfoAmazonia plans to add ground reporting in Brazil, creating
applications that would enable nonprofits and residents to share data with O ECO.190
Working Without Freedom of Information Laws
Four different perspectives that I heard from journalists in Spain, Italy, Argentina, and South Africa highlighted some of the
challenges of practicing data-driven journalism in countries without strong right to information laws, noting it’s difficult but
not impossible. “Spain is a country lacking a Freedom of Information Act and an accountability culture,” wrote Javier de
Vega, communications director for Fundación Ciudadana Civio, a Spanish foundation that supports open data and data
journalism in Spain, in an email. “We are the last big country in Europe to pass a freedom of information law, though a very
unambitious text is being studied by the Congress.”Long before data journalism entered the mainstream discourse, La
Nación was pushing the boundaries of what was possible in Argentina, reporting on a country without a Freedom of
Information Act Law. If you start exploring La Nación’s efforts to go online and treat data as a source, you’ll find Angélica
“Momi” Peralta Ramos, the multimedia development manager who originally launched LaNacion.com in the 1990s and now
manages its data journalism efforts.191an antidote to budget crises in newsrooms.192perspective is grounded in experience:
Peralta’s team at La Nación is using data journalism to challenge a FOIA-free culture in Argentina, opening up data for
reporting and reuse to holding government accountable.193data-driven stories to date, including:

Argentina’s Official Advertising Funds Distribution 2009”2013: Friends, Politicians, and a Stylist.194
Public Officials’ Salaries and Assets for Reporting and Accountability.195
Monitoring the New Media Law in Argentina 2009”2013.196
VozData: The Senate Expenses (II).197
2013: Legislative Elections in Argentina.198
Argentina’s Senate Expenses 2004”2013.199 Peralta has seen the context for La Nación’s work change in recent
years:To take just one example, consider the inflation scandal in Argentina. Even The Economist removed our
[national] figures from their indicators page. Media that reported private indicators were considered as opposition by
the government, which took away most official advertising from these media, fined private consultants who calculate
consumer price indices different than the official, pressed private associations of consumers to stop measuring price,
and releasing price indexes, and so on.Regarding official advertising, between 2009 and 2013, we managed to build a
data set. We found out that 50 percent went to 10 media groups, the ones closer to the government. In the last period,
a hairdresser (stylist) received more advertising money than the largest newspapers in Argentina. Last year,
independent media suffered an ad ban, as reported in the Wall Street Journal: “Argentina imposes ad ban, businesses
said.”200Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index. We still are without a freedom of information
law.Journalists in Italy face a similar information landscape. Elisabetta Tola, an Italian data journalist, wrote in to share
her work on a series of Wired Italy articles that featured data on seismic risk assessment201schools.202for schools, a
feature that embodies service journalism and offers more value than a static map.203Risk for Schools]Guido Romero,
the science editor at Wired Italy who published the work, shared more of the backstory behind the project via email.“In
Italy there are some 50,000said Romero. “Protezione Civile, the Italian FEMA, estimates about 22,500overall Italian
school population is about eight million (students + teachers + personnel) so you can do the math of how relevant this
problem is.”The backstory behind the Wired Italy project highlighted a key challenge in Italy that exists in many other
places around the world: How can data journalism be practiced in countries that do not have a Freedom of Information
Act or a tradition of transparency on government actions and spending?The Italian government, while well behind the
pace set by the United Kingdom, has made more open data available2042011.205Italian Ministry of Education released
was a list of school buildings published online.As I recounted earlier, Tola and her team aggregated or created the rest
of the data used in the project, from scraping and processing PDFs of spending data from regional government
websites, then adding geolocation in cooperation with a local developer.Romero said in our interview:When we started
looking into this last June [2012], the first door we knocked on was the Ministry of Education, notably their Office for
School Buildings and Safety, as our sources inside the Ministry had told us they did have the data. Their non-response
turned into a bitter attack to the magazine when we wrote that the very same ministry advertising itself as a
groundbreaking pioneer of open data did not release information relevant for millions of families. Mario Di Costanzo,
the Director of the Office for School Safety, did give us an interview.206but would personally oppose any release of
parts or all of them as “revealing which schools are at risk would be dangerous.”As is the case around the world,
culture and freedom of information laws matter, particularly with respect to access to data needed to hold governments
accountable and audit their programs. Proactive, selective open data initiatives by government focused on services
that are not balanced by support for press freedoms and improved access can fairly be criticized as “openwashing” or
“fauxpen government.” Data journalists who are frequently faced with heavily redacted document releases or reams of
blurry PDFs are particularly well placed to make those critiques. That currently appears to be the case in Italy.Romero
said, “Data journalism is not impossible over here”in fact, Elisabetta and myself believe there are great opportunities,
but having a very poor access law and, even worse, a deep rooted culture of non-disclosure in the public
administration makes data journalists’ work pretty hard.” He continued, “That said, there is a growing movement for
reforming our access law (I’m personally engaged in that with www.dirittodisapere.it) but ópen data' is a word very
much frowned upon by reporters, as it’s led to little relevant work.”
Data Journalism and Activism
Media throughout Africa face all of these challenges and more, fighting obstinate public officials, paper records, no access
to information laws, and outright threats and physical violence directed at journalists. Building the capacity of African media
to practice data-driven journalism has now taken on new prominence, as the digital disruption that has permanently altered
the models of more developed countries bears down on countries in the continent.207The challenges that data journalism in
West Africa faces are significant, though these are not unique from elsewhere on the continent.208investigative journalist, is
a fierce advocate for data-driven journalism that not only makes sense of the world for readers and viewers, but also
provides them with tools to become more engaged in changing the conditions they learn about in the work. For instance,
data journalism boosted voter registration in Kenya,209creating a simple website using modern Web-based tools and
technologies.A “data boot camp” in Kenya in 2012 led to another excellent example of this dynamic. Arenstein
explained:NTV, the national free-to-air station, had been looking into why young girls in a rural area of Kenya did very well
academically until the ages of 11 or 12”and then either dropped off the academic record completely or their academic
performance plummeted. The explanation by the authorities and everyone else was that this was simply traditional; it’s
tribal. Families are pulling them out of school to do chores and housework, and as a result, they can’t perform.As it turned
out, that was an incorrect conclusion. Irene Choge, a Kenyan journalist who attended the data journalism training, started
mining the available data and public records. Choge first looked at medical records to see if cholera was involved. Then,
she examined water records and physical infrastructure. It was there that she found a key correlation: The schools that saw
the worst drop-offs in academic performance by teenage girls were the ones that didn’t have sanitation facilities.Choge
subsequently worked with developers to create a simple SMS-based phone application that enabled parents to determine
how schools compared and, notably, to advocate for change. Her work in reporting school sanitation woes has led officials
to shift resources to building sanitation facilities.210While such applications move further into the realms of political
advocacy and citizen engagement than many journalists may find comfortable, the growth of services that span the
intersection of open government and data journalism will continue to be an important, fertile ground in the years ahead.
V. Pathways to the Profession
Mentorship, Numeracy, Competition, Recruiting
While data journalism has gone mainstream in recent years, significant challenges lie ahead for traditional media and news
organization to take full advantage of advances in technology.211McKinsey identified a gap between available analytic talent
and the demand created by big data, there is a data science skills gap in journalism.212useless without the skills to analyze
them, whatever the context.213exclude some of the best candidates for these jobs”but there will need to be training to bring
them onboard.214universities have noticed the need to build capacity in these areas. In May of 2012, the Knight Foundation
gave Columbia University $2 million for research215gap.216said Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism
at Columbia University, in 2012. “Lots of people teach at the very low level, very few at the elevated level. Nobody teaches
the algorithmic, advanced courses that you’d see in computational journalism. There aren’t many people who can do the
latter, either professionally or [on the] teaching side.”In the United States, I’d estimate that the headcount of working data
journalists numbers well under a thousand across all newsrooms and media organizations. Their ranks are growing,
especially given clear demand in both traditional and startup media companies. Globally, there may be thousands of data
specialists in the media, but not many more, unless we expand what practicing data journalism means. If creating and
generating charts or tables from financial or sport statistics qualifies as data journalism, there are many more people who
could be fairly said to be practitioners. The number of people applying data science to journalism or practicing high-level
computational journalism, however, is clearly far smaller.The New York Times, for instance, has fewer than 10 staff working
at that level in the entire organization, according to Aron Pilhofer, of which three are in editorial. “We have data scientists on
the business side,” he said. “R&D has a couple, like Mike Dewar, who used to be at Bitly. These are people who are
applying data science techniques to actual journalism, stories, infographics, and data visualizations.”In the United States,
much of the top talent in the field is split between the New York Times, ProPublica, NPR, the Washington Post, the Chicago
Tribune, the Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times, although there are many smaller shops doing great work. In
many ways, the New York Times’ growing data and interactive teams look a lot like the New York Yankees of data
journalism”while they do grow their own players, they also find and acquire the best talent available. Given the growth of
news applications and online interactives in media, investment in this area is looking like a strategic imperative”and
developing core competencies in creating them should be a preoccupation of university professors and journalism school
deans around the world. When I interviewed academics and some of the leading practitioners of data journalism over the
past two years, several obstacles to closing this gap emerged. The first, mentorship, is common to any profession, but less
of an issue in this field. Most data journalists had a mentor or two who guided them early in their development and helped
them to get started. A capacity for self-motivation and self-guided learning is important: While mentors played an important
role as data journalists developed, in many cases people have picked up the skills on the job or in their free time, learning
online and in workshops, not in their undergraduate or graduate educations. In each of the profiles of data journalists that
I’ve published over the years, mentors were an important part of development.Said John Keefe, the data editor at WNYC: I
could not have done so much so fast without kindness, encouragement, and inspiration from Aron Pilhofer, Scott Klein, Al
Shaw, Jennifer LaFleur, Jeff Larson, Chris Groskopf, Joe Germuska, Brian Boyer, and Jenny 8. Lee. Each has unstuck me
at various key moments and all have demonstrated in their own work what amazing things were possible. And they have
put a premium on sharing what they know”something I try to carry forward. The moment I may remember most was at an
afternoon geek talk aimed mainly at programmers.217of a phone app called Twilio, I turned to Al Shaw, sitting next to me,
and lamented that I had no idea how to play with such things.“You absolutely can do this,” he said. He encouraged me to
pick up Sinatra,218programming language. And I was off.Sisi Wei, a news application developer at Propublica,219different
people for specific skills and ways of thinking: Tom Giratikanon showed me that journalists could use programming to tell
stories and exposed me to ActionScript and how programming works. Kat Downs taught me not to let the story be
overshadowed by design or fancy interaction, and Wilson Andrews showed me how a pro handles making live interactive
graphics for election night. Todd Lindeman taught me how to better visualize data and how to really take advantage of
Adobe Illustrator. Lakshmi Ketineni and Michelle Chen honed my JavaScript and really taught me SQL and PHP.Now at
ProPublica, my teammates are my mentors.220news app development really works and how to handle large databases with
first ActiveRecord and now ElasticSearch.New York Times news developer Derek Willis started working with databases in
graduate school at the University of Florida:I had an assistantship at an environmental occupations training center and part
of my responsibilities was to maintain the mailing list database. And I just took to it. I really enjoyed working with data, and
once I found Investigative Reporters and Editors, things just took off for me. A researcher [at the Palm Beach Post],
Michelle Quigley, taught me how to find information online and how sometimes you might need to take an indirect route to
locating the stuff you want. Kinsey Wilson, now at NPR, hired me at Congressional Quarterly and constantly challenged me
to think bigger about data and the news. Willis’ experience was not unique: The trend that leapt out of the research was the
degree to which peer-to-peer learning and peer networks are crucial in the practice and growth of data journalism. (He and
other IRE members continue to pay it forward.)The NICAR listserv is a busy, daily reminder of the generosity of the
connected community of over 1700 subscribers. Given the reality of many working journalists who never attended
journalism school, mentorship and networked learning will continue to be important factors in the development of more data
journalists.Second, there’s improving the level of fundamental numeracy in the media, according to Pilhofer:Journalism
programs need to step up and understand that we live in a data-rich society, and math skills and basic data analysis skills
are highly relevant to journalism. The 400+ journalists at NICAR still represent something of an outlier in the industry, and
that has to change if journalism is going to remain relevant in an information-based culture. Journalism is one of the few
professions that not only tolerates general innumeracy, but celebrates it.I still hear journalists who are proud of it, even
celebrating that they can’t do math, even though programming is about logic. It’s hard to get a journalist to open up a
spreadsheet, much less open up a command line. It is just not something that they, in general, think is held to be an
important skill.It’s baffling to me. Look at the Sun-Sentinel, which just won another Pulitzer for a story on speeding cops that
you could only do with data analysis. You would think you wouldn’t have to make the case that this is core to what
journalists should know. It’s a cultural problem. There is still far too much tolerance for anecdotal evidence as the
foundation for news stories.Like many data journalists I interviewed, Pilhofer originally learned to program because he
needed to do something, in this case while he was at the Center for Public Integrity:I can thank an IRS story on 527
committees, which were then the campaign finance loophole du jour. They were previously unregulated and Congress, in
its wisdom, put the IRS in charge of regulating them. It was idiotic. The IRS is not a disclosure agency. They put together
the world’s worst disclosure website. There was basic data there, but you couldn’t aggregate it or access it in a meaningful
way. It would have taken thousands of mouse clicks to get all of it.I talked to a public information officer, after they denied
my FOIA request for the database underlying the site. He said it was all on the website. So, I created the world’s worst Web
scraper in PHP. It ran from the browser. I didn’t know the command line well.Cultural changes will need to start before
journalists leave school. “I wish that no j-school ever reinforces or finds acceptable, actively or passively, the stereotype that
journalists are bad at math,” said Wei. “All it takes is one professor who shrugs off a math error to add to this stereotype, to
have the idea pass onto one of his or her students. Let’s be clear: Journalists do not come with a math disability.” Chase
David agreed, saying, “Most journalism students can’t code or do math, while most computer science students don’t know
storytelling. Hybrids on either side are rare, and we’re scooping them up as fast as we can.”Third, students with the most
aptitude for data journalism have data science skills that are in high demand in the private sector. In 2013, Indeed.com
found that job postings for data scientists had jumped 15,000McKinsey & Company predicted in 2011 that there would be a
50 to 60 percent shortfall in data scientists by 2018.221data science skills that are useful in media, from programming, to
statistics, to data cleaning, to analytical thinking are directly transferable to finance, business, or technology jobs, with a
much bigger paycheck at the end of the week. In some cases, they’re transferable into media as well. Many data journalists
didn’t go to journalism school, said Chris. W. Anderson, assistant professor of media culture at the City University of New
York. For example, people like NPR’s Brian Boyer or the AP’s Jonathan Stray developed programming skills elsewhere and
then entered ”journalism” because of their interest in public interest work. Organizations are now competing for talent with
more than prestigious outlets or broadcast news.“The best people who could help media organizations are getting hired
away by Silicon Valley” or ”Silicon Alley”’before they finish j-school,” said Anderson. “The top-of-the-line programs at NYU
and Columbia are beautiful recruiting grounds for Google or Facebook.” Finally, media companies and journalism schools
need to value and fund training in digital skills, from teaching journalists how to use spreadsheets to thinking algorithmically.
While not every journalist needs to code, everyone who works in the media does need to be digitally literate, numerate, and
understand how technology relates to sourcing, storytelling, and audience development and relationships. The good news
is that many journalists have been learning how to use these tools for decades, aided by the experiences and support of
others.“I discovered that I really enjoyed the coding part in addition to reporting,” said Aron Pilhofer, associate managing
editor for digital strategy at the New York Times. “The art of it. That’s how I ended up shifting into my current job.” Before,
he reported about politics:I was a political reporter, but always used data in my reporting. I just started doing it in college. I
just started messing around. I had a history professor who was not well known then. Now, he’s borderline famous from
doing quantitative methods in history. He’d do statistical sampling of historical census data that had just been paper records
before that. Suddenly, you could do queries on the 1930 Census. You were not just basing a historic analysis on papers or
on interviews with people, or what you could glean from anecdotes. You were looking at data. It was incredible. That’s not
that different from a data journalist does, on the CAR side. Instead of a person, you’re using data as a source.Jeremy
Bowers, a news developer at the Wall Street Journal, started on the tech side:I started in data journalism at the St.
Petersburg Times. I’d been working as the blog administrator for our online team and was informally recruited by Matt Waite
to help out with a project that would turn into “MugShots.”I have no special degrees or certificates. I was a political science
major and I had planned to go to law school before a mediocre LSAT performance made me rethink my priorities. I did have
a background in server administration and was really familiar with Linux because of a few semesters spent hacking with a
good friend in college, so that’s been pretty helpful.News app developer Dan Hill learned both journalism and computer
science at Medill:I’ve always wanted to be a reporter, but the work of Phillip Reese at The Sacramento Bee and the
Chicago Tribune’s news apps team222I was a student fellow for the Northwestern University Knight Lab223an internship with
the Washington Post taught me how to apply what I was learning in a newsroom.AP data journalist Serdar Tumgoren, co-
creator of the Knight News Challenge-funded OpenElections project,224and picked up new skills as he went:The document
chase quickly broadened to include data, and led me down a traditional “CAR path” of spreadsheets, to databases, to
programming languages and Web development. When I first started programming around 2005, I took a Perl class at a
community college. …You don’t need a computer science degree to master the various skills of data journalism. I learned
how to apply technology to journalism through lots of late-night hacking, tons of programming books, and the limitless
generosity of NICARians, who shared technical advice, provided moral support, and taught classes at NICAR
conferences.Mother Jones interactive editor Tasneem Raja also picked up data skills in journalism school: I was a staff
writer at the Chicago Reader in the mid-2000s, which was, of course, a scary time to be in news. When a bunch of my
senior mentors there, all writers, got canned in 2007, I decided to reevaluate my career and went to j-school at Berkeley to
learn new skills. I was lucky enough to be there while Josh Williams was teaching Web development (he left for the NYT,
where he worked on “Snowfall” and tons of other big interactive pieces), and essentially attached myself at the hip. It turned
into a year-long independent study, and got me a job on the launch team at The Bay Citizen, where I created a news apps
team that made some really cool data projects for the Bay Area. (RIP, TBC.)Culture really matters here, said Scott
Klein:People with the right mindset, who feel valued for their editorial judgment and creativity, and who are given real
responsibility over their work, will learn whatever they need to learn in order to get a project done. The people on my team
focus on telling great journalistic stories and don’t let not knowing how to do something stop them from doing so. They learn
whatever skills, techniques, and expertise they need to learn. In terms of journalists learning how to program, I think there
are some myths about what programming means. It doesn’t have to mean a computer science degree and it doesn’t have
to mean what Google does. I know journalists who make incredibly complex scrapers for their reporting work who will tell
you they don’t know how to program. Really, making tools to automate tasks is what a programmer does. There’s no magic
threshold you have to pass between programmer and not-programmer.Of course, there is a difference between knowing
how to code and being a computer scientist. If you’ve learned about algorithmic efficiency and can express it
mathematically, and if you’ve studied how compilers work, all under the guidance of a person who knows the subject very
well in an academic environment, you’ve got skills that will help you write better, faster, more efficient code. That’s different
than learning how to use a high-level programming language to get a task done.Much of what we do in newsrooms is on
deadline and meant to be put behind a caching system that makes efficient code much less important, so computer science
is not a prerequisite for being a great newsroom coder. In newsrooms, most of us rely on frameworks like Rails or Django
that already make great low-level programming decisions anyway.“I suspect it is possible that a journalism degree will
become a bolt-on for most of this kind of work,” said David Johnson, a journalism professor at American University. “People
will probably get their main degrees in hardcore fields, either doing minors in journalism or getting a degree like the
Columbia 2-year or the Medill program.”Historically, only a few journalism schools have done a good job teaching data-
driven journalism, said Anderson. (That’s changing, as I explain later.) Much of what’s cutting-edge today in data
”journalism”, extending into data science, he suggested, goes well beyond traditional CAR and is being shared through
peer-to-peer learning online and in person, at meetups, hackathons, and workshops. One clear exception, however, lies
along the Missouri River, in the center of North America. For decades, the National Institute for Computer-Assisted
Reporting (NICAR) has been one of the most important institutions training journalists to use information technology.
Founded in 1989, NICAR is a program of the Missouri School of Journalism and the Investigative Researchers and Editors
(IRE). Since NICAR was created, the use of data analysis and statistics has evolved into a core component of investigative
reporting, augmenting and extending what journalists can do. If you want to find the people doing the best work, look to
NICAR’s extended community around the globe, subscribe to the email newsgroup, or attend its annual conference, which
has become the preeminent gathering of practicing data journalists in the world.225demand for more tutorials and
workshops on data-driven journalism tools and best practices beyond those offered in classrooms or at NICAR’s annual
conference. One of the most common questions I heard from members of the media over the past three years has been,
“Where can I go to learn more?” As time has gone on, I’ve been able to point to more.Interest in the industry as a whole is
present: In the spring of 2013, the University of California at Berkeley’s free online data journalism training226create data
journalism educational materials was fully funded.227campaign were taught by leading practitioners in the field. “For
Journalism” endures as a free online resource for anyone who wants to learn more, including webinars, ebooks, code
repositories, and forums.228
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) to the Rescue?
In the spring of 2014, over 21,000than 170 countries have registered for the online data journalism course offered by the
European Journalism Centre, beginning on May 19.229for free to anyone in the world who has an Internet connection,”
wrote Liliana Bounegru, project manager on data journalism at the European Journalism Centre, in an email. “We’re proud
to have been able to get support from Google, the Dutch Ministry of Education, and the African Media Initiative for this
course and to get some of the best people in the business to teach and provide guidance to the course,” she said, including
“the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, the New York Times, ProPublica, Wired, Twitter, La Nación, the Chronicle of
Higher Education, Zeit Online, and others.”Will the thousands of participants get the skills that they need? A data journalism
massive open online course (MOOC) that wrapped in 2013 suggests that many of them will find the EJC’s course valuable.
Last fall, more than 3700 people from 140 countries participated in a MOOC, hosted by the University of Texas, focused on
building data journalism skills.230reviews from participants and instructors were generally good.Journalist Anna Li took the
online course on data-driven journalism and really enjoyed it, save for some frustrations with the software design.231heard
about the MOOC through the Knight Center’s account on Twitter and enrolled. Meave, who has now participated in four
MOOCs (two in English and two in Spanish), had not taken classes online previously.“It’s great for me because I’m studying
at my own pace at my computer,” she related in an email interview. Meave pursued and achieved certificates for all four of
the MOOCs. “I wanted to get the certificates because these have been great courses,” she said. “I’ve learned too much and
it’s good for my curriculum vitae.”The data-driven journalism MOOC offered Meave an opportunity to obtain training that
wasn’t otherwise as easily accessible. “The only way to take this kind of training in Mexico is to enroll in on-site seminars at
the university, but I know these topics are not managed at my university yet,” she said.The views I found on the other side
of the screen were decidedly positive. “I thought it was pretty effective,” said Derek Willis in an interview.232Willis, who was
one of the instructors, told me that this was his first experience teaching or participating in a MOOC:We were able to put a
lot of material in front of the students, with specific, concrete tasks for them to do. My week of it was particularly skills-
based, in terms of spreadsheet skills. That can be tricky with two or three thousand students. Not everyone has the same
background. The people who really want to stick with them are probably going to power through it, and that was our
experience.Willis’ success was aided by the fact that this wasn’t the first MOOC from the Knight Center for Journalism at
the University of Texas. As I learned, it’s managed to conduct 5 MOOCs in 10 months.233explained at PBS MediaShift, was
engaging good instructors and doing a lot of planning.234School of Journalism & Media Studies at San Diego State
University, offered practical advice for anyone who might try to follow in their footsteps:Any online course, whether it is a
MOOC or not, takes a lot of time to plan and maintain once it launches. Be prepared to spend twice or four times as much
of your time on the course. Be available to the students. As the online medium creates an imaginary distance between
people, students crave interaction with the instructor to know they are there. Try to be as present as possible in the course.
Don’t take on too much. Don’t try to put everything into the MOOC about the given subject. I started out in the planning
phase by including a lot of information and ended up reducing it by half to make sure it would be a manageable amount of
course material for the students.When I interviewed Weiss in December of 2013, she emphasized again how much of a
difference thorough preparation made for making the MOOC work. “We planned for two and a half months to put it
together,” she said. “Planning and organization takes a big chunk of time. Once you have that set, you don’t go on autopilot,
but it makes the overall course flow much better allows the instructor to focus on teaching and the students.”Weiss shared
Willis’ positive assessment of the outcome:Given the topic itself, the approach we took at addressing the basics went really
well. Having the right people and right content makes a difference in any kind of course you do, whether face-to-face,
online, or if it’s a MOOC. For me, I consider it a success if students came away with skills they wouldn’t have before and a
learning community was formed. Knowing both were achieved makes me very happy.She was also bullish about what she
saw on social media. “The forums were fantastic, seeing the conversations, sharing ideas and examples of data-driven
journalism around the world,” said Weiss. “Seeing the challenges people had was quite eye-opening, as was seeing them
help each other out was great. We have social media channels set up, so that those who wanted to go further could.”So are
MOOCs the secret to unlocking data journalism’s secrets,235the demand for people who can build news apps and data
visualizations, and crunch government data sets around the world? In a word, no. While the results and experiences of the
students and instructors I interviewed are promising, these kinds of online courses will only be a part of the answer, not the
singular solution to people’s needs for skill development on their own.“This kind of MOOC was focused on basics, for
someone new to it or a citizen who wanted to know how data journalism worked,” said Weiss. “More experienced people
did sign up, and felt they weren’t getting a lot of mileage. We assigned more reading to people who wanted to build those
skills.”Given the amount of vehement criticism about the potential downsides of MOOCs for students and
professors,236such instruction, any positive recommendation for these online courses should be leavened with a heavy
dose of caution.As Tamar Lewin reported at the New York Times, after setbacks, such online courses are being
rethought.237a partnership between Udacity and San Jose State University, has flopped: The students who participated in
the MOOC in the spring of 2012 actually fared worse than students who took classes on campus. 239 Many students will
benefit from in-person interaction with teachers and peers, from the ability to ask timely questions, and receive immediate
follow-up on problems. As more schools experiment with inverted classrooms, more classroom time may be maximized in
new, more effective ways. 240 Cheng, a journalism student who logged on from Vancouver, reflected on a challenge that
online courses pose in general: It’s great to have direct contact with people. I’m finding that with just an online course, if
there’s no meeting with the teacher beforehand, even if there’s just one day if I get to see the classmates, it’s harder.I’m
doing that for Intro to Urban Politics. I have all these other journalism courses and deadlines and I’m constantly reminded of
them. With this online course, it gets pushed off, because there’s no reminder. I find it a bit of a struggle. I was on top of
everything for data journalism because it was something I was personally invested in learning.The remarks of Stanford
professor Sebastian Thrun and challenges that Udacity and other early MOOCs have faced suggest that the current
approaches to distance learning are unsuccessful for most students, 241 with a 7 percent completion rate. 242 In Tanzania,
MOOCs are seen as “too Western.”243doesn’t mean, however, that online courses for data-driven journalism or other
subjects aren’t worth experimenting with further, particularly as network capacity and video conferencing technology
improve.“I think it’s having an open mind to new ways of incorporating digital technology to education,” said Rosental Alves,
a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and founder of the The Knight Center there, in an interview with
“MOOC News and Reviews:244think there is a lot of hype about MOOCs now, and there is a lot of negative energy and
approach about the impact of the MOOCs, etc. And I think people should calm down and just be open minded to adopt
technology in ways that break what we have been doing for centuries in one specific way and be open to check what is
effective. It should be brought from the bottom up, not from us who teach and our own interests, but what is the interest of
people who are the beneficiaries of the educational process. …There are people out there who play an important role for
democratic society, who are in trouble because the world is changing so rapidly in their area, and they need instruction.
They need guidance. It’s based on [their interests] that we are doing this.”When I called Alves, he told me that the
University of Texas’ College of Education has been looking at participants’ evaluations and thinking through their approach
to MOOCs. “The MOOCs that we do are different from the big movement,” he said. “We are not transforming college
classes. In our case, it’s more professional training, where we are creating a massive course out of what would be a
workshop. It’s short and very specific.”The Knight Center launched this particular program in 2012 and is now working on
more MOOCs. One course focused on entrepreneurial journalism is offered in Spanish and, according to Alves, has
5,015broad types of registrants in their classes. The first includes people who register but don’t do anything. The second
defines people who log-in and take something away, either by watching some videos or downloading some material. The
third category is the people who are getting something more from the MOOC. “It’s hard to tell how many finish, because the
concept of ”finishing’ an open course is not very well defined,” said Alves.Cheng, who did not apply for a certificate, fell into
this category. “By the third week, I just read everything,” she told me. “I watched videos, but when it came to homework or
forum questions, I didn’t do them any more. It was free, I wanted the information, and I wanted structure.”The fourth
category includes the people who pay for their certificates. According to the Knight Center, 278 people paid and earned
certificates in University of Texas’ data journalism MOOC, out of a total of 3,777registered for the course.That ratio is in line
with other MOOCS: “It has been around 5”10certificates, which helps us financially,” said Alves. “We charge $30 if someone
wants us to verify in the logs of the platform if they pass the course.”Research suggests those participation rates are
roughly similar to other MOOCs. A study of one million MOOC users published by the University of Pennsylvania Graduate
School of Education in December of 2013 found that about 4 percent of users completed the courses, with around half of
people who registered for a given course never even signing in to view a lecture. 245The upcoming European Journalism
Center’s MOOC is very similar to what the Knight Center offered, said Alves. “It’s the same structure, same duration, same
topic, and same style, with five different instructors with each one.” Whether it gets the same results remains to be seen. A
broader way to assess success, he suggested, is to think in terms of connecting peers and mentors, and increasing global
access to specialized education:The beauty of this program is to create a learning community. Each of the six MOOCs that
we’ve done has created a sort of a virtual community with people all over the world interested in the same topic. People
help each other a lot. I think people learn from each other as much as from the instructors. We think that’s an exciting new
opportunity and are very happy to offer these [online classes] to people who wouldn’t have any other access to training. We
don’t want to put any barriers in front of them.If MOOCs are compared to huge, in-person lectures, they fare better. When it
comes to seminars or boot camps, however, their limitations become more apparent.Jonathan Groves, a journalism
professor at Drury University, recommended the boot camps from Investigative Reporters and Editors for “great hands-on
experience, which is the best way to dig into this stuff.”246important differences between a MOOC and the IRE classes,
noted Willis. “In person, you should get more individual instruction,” he said. “They are broadly comparable. It can be a
good experience. Get the right instructors, do a good job defining the scope of things...”One concern Willis had turned out
better than he expected. “I thought that it would be really tricky to do skills-based learning at scale,” he said. “It turned out
not to be as big or as bad. I think you can do it, but you’re going to need to be very specific, very detailed, and there’s only
so much you can cover.”On the other hand, instructors can’t freelance as they might in a live, in-person lecture. “It’s tough
to do, and somewhat risky,” said Willis. “If someone asks a question in person, you can seize on it and use it to explain
some concept to the class. Doing that in person is much easier than doing it in a classroom environment where people
aren’t all paying attention in the same time and place.”The feedback the University of Texas received from students
indicated that the majority of the participants in the MOOC enjoyed it and liked having five instructors. Weiss told me that
many students wanted to know when the next course would be offered and to retain access to the materials for a while. A
few even wanted to use them to transfer these skills in their newsrooms or hometowns.Weiss was adamant about
continuing to improve the experience. “The MOOC model is something we can experiment with, and challenge ourselves to
be better teachers and contribute to society,” she said. “It’s a way to scaffold learning, and to learn how to do it better. We
can’t afford not to take the risk as educators. We owe it to the students to keep experimenting and trying it out.”
Hacks, Hackers, and Peer-to-peer Learning
MOOCs and online resources like “For Journalism” will offer those already in the industry a better, more flexible place to get
started, along with those looking to break in a place to enter. Some journalists, however, won’t be comfortable learning from
a book or online alone: They need someone to answer questions and explain analogies. In other words, there’s going to be
continuing need for in-person, human-to-human interaction around learning. “Journalism schools still teach journalism as a
very hierarchical, often solitary pursuit,” said Tasneem Raja. “That’s not the way it works in data journalism, and the best
learning is still gonna be on the job. That requires cross-pollination between folks with different skill sets. We need a pairing
model across newsrooms, not just in the nerd corner.”People who want foundational skills need to get hands-on with dirty
data and the tools needed to clean, organize, and present it. There are a number of non-governmental organizations that
provide such forums, workshops, classes, and education, including DataKind,247Foundation,^248^ the World
Bank,249Knowledge Foundation,^250^ Code with Me,251and Hacks and Hackers,252chapters and thousands of members
around the world. Many “hacker journalist” projects and classes require collaboration with people outside of the journalism
school, said Anderson, especially if professors don’t have the needed skills to teach the students. d. Journalism Schools
Rise to the ChallengeWhile many data journalists enter the profession without a journalism degree, as is true for many
people writing and reporting today, industry demand for data skills is leading to changes in the academy. In 2014, the
University of Missouri is far from alone in teaching journalists how to treat data as a source. For instance, if the Knight Lab
at Northwestern University’s Medill School can guide promising young data journalists like Dhrumil Mehta into journalism,
they’re doing something right.253with the graduate school offering classes on enterprise reporting with
data254JavaScript,255with programming backgrounds.256pairing journalism and computer science students together to
develop interactive projects.257building capacity to teach in these areas by collaborating with computer science
departments. For instance, in England, Cardiff University will introduce a masters in computational journalism.258the
Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, the Lede Program259post-baccalaureate certification course that offers
training in data, code, and algorithms to journalists.260students with the technical skills required to enroll in the dual
Journalism/Computer Science master’s program that Columbia began to offer in 2010.261practitioners with data journalism
skills onto the faculty. At Missouri, Chase Davis teaches students how to apply data science to all the news that’s fit to
print.262schools could be doing more to adjust to the changing needs of students, he emphasized that the current situation
is not all educators’ fault:It takes intellectual agility and natural curiosity to effectively develop hybrid skills. I don’t think that’s
something we can teach solely through curriculum. That’s why I don’t think every journalism student should learn how to
code. Being able to write a few lines of JavaScript is great, but if you let your skills dead end with that, you’re not going to
be a great newsroom developer.Folks on our interactive and graphics teams at the Times have remarkably diverse
backgrounds: journalism and computer science, sure, but also cartography, art history, and no college degree at all. What
makes them great is that they have an instinct to self-teach and explore.That’s what journalism schools can encourage:
Introduce data journalism with the curriculum, then provide a venue for students to tinker and explore. Ideally, someone on
faculty should know enough to guide them. The school should show an interest in data journalism work on par with more
traditional storytelling. Oh, and they should require more math classes.In Philadelphia, Temple is helping to ensure the
future of data journalism263professor Meredith Broussard, a computer scientist-turned-reporter. She starts her students by
grounding them in the social sciences, a context that recalls Philip Meyer’s formative approach to precision journalism:We
read Joel Best’s Damned Lies and Statistics and talk about how data comes into being. Then, we go on to data analysis
and we practice different ways of representing data. This might be infographics, or data visualization, or pivot tables in
Excel. I focus on teaching the students how to use technological tools in the service of doing a story. We cover a variety of
digital tools, and we analyze examples of journalists and scholars who are doing intellectually exciting work.Broussard said
that data journalism is now part of the curriculum at Temple at every level:At Temple, our students have a well-rounded
education that includes essential reporting skills, critical thinking, multimedia storytelling skills, visual analysis, and much
more. In our intro class this year, the students learned about Journalism++, Vox, FiveThirtyEight.com, and a handful of
other exciting journalism projects. We had Aron Pilhofer from the New York Times as a guest speaker to talk with the
students about what it’s like to do data journalism in a world-class newsroom. Students encounter data journalism again as
curriculum units in mid-level classes: Our multimedia storytelling class does a unit about online data journalism, and our
journalism research class introduces students to data analysis using Excel. Everyone has to fulfill a quantitative
requirement, ensuring that all the students have basic statistical literacy. I teach an upper-level class called “Data
Journalism” in which the students do advanced data analysis with Excel, create data visualizations, work with databases,
and create an original data journalism project. This semester, I had amazing student projects. Innovative news apps,
visualizations I never imagined, infographics that were playful yet powerful. My students always impress me.In Florida, the
University of Miami is now deeply integrating data and visualization into its curriculum as well, explained Alberto Cairo,
director of the visualization program at the Center for Computational Science at the university and professor of practice in
the journalism department. Visualization classes are now part of the core program for undergraduate journalism majors and
in the university’s master’s degree program, along with mandatory introductions to design and Web design. He said in an
interview:We have hired two professors to teach data journalism and Web development classes. These classes are closely
tied to the current Web design and visualization courses. Besides our journalism programs, we have an MFA in Interactive
Media, and also a minor for undergrads. Journalism students can take classes in those programs as part of their electives
(and vice versa). That is leading to strengthened ties with science departments across the university.In California, veteran
data editor Cheryl Phillips was named a lecturer at Stanford,264experience as an award-winning investigative reporter to
teaching classes on relational data, basic statistics, investigative reporting tools, and mapping at Stanford’s Computational
Journalism Lab. She spoke of evolution in education in an interview:I think it’s no secret that a lot of change is starting to
take place in schools. Cindy Royal had an interesting piece about platforms just the other day.265We need to take a more
integrated approach. Classrooms and their teachers should collaborate on work. For example, a multimedia class produces
the visualizations and videos that go with the stories being written in another class. Stanford already does this.Like
Broussard and Davis, Phillips says that data journalism shouldn’t be limited to just one class but infused into every part of
the university curriculum:Every type of journalist can learn data-related skills that will help them, whether they end up as a
copyeditor, a reporter, a front-line editor, or a graphics artist. In general, I want to make sure the students are telling stories
from data that they analyze. [They should be] not only learning the technical stack, but how to apply the technical
knowledge to real-world journalism. I am hoping to create some partnerships with newsrooms as well.
VI. Tools of the Trade
Digging into the CAR Toolbox
As is true in the trades, the arts, and the sciences, the tools data journalists choose are driven by the needs of a given
project, available resources, expertise, training, and time. These can be divided into five rough categories: data collection,
cleaning, analysis, presentation, and publishing. Cleaning data “is often the most time consuming part of the data
journalism process,” said Jonathan Stray, an instructor at Columbia Journalism school, who has highlighted the widespread
problem of governments publishing data locked up in the Portable Document Format (PDF) and the heroic measures
needed to deal with the challenge.266data journalism, however, has little to do with tools and technology and everything to
do with perspective and critical thinking. “You need a mindset which is about putting this in the context of the story and
spotting stories, as well as having creative and interesting ideas about how you can actually collect this material for your
own stories,” said Emily Bell. “It’s not a passive kind of processing function if you’re a data journalist: It’s an active
speaking, inquiring, and discovery process. I think that that’s something which is actually available to all journalists.”If you
look at data journalism and the big picture, more recent technologies are part of a continuum of technologically enhanced
storytelling that traces back decades.267canonical suite of tools for computer-assisted reporting ran on desktops and
servers, spreadsheets, databases, text editors, and statistics software. Spreadsheets were the first “killer app” for data
journalism, just as VisiCalc was the first killer app for the Apple computer. In many ways, they still are, even if the
spreadsheets have become Web-based. Chris Amico and Laura Norton Amico’s work on Homicide Watch started as a
spreadsheet and expanded over time. “No matter how advanced our tools get, I always find myself coming back to Excel
first to do simple work,” said Minkoff, a data journalist at the Associated Press. “It helps us get an overall handle on a data
set.”After spreadsheets, the second most common tool applied in the field is database software, in particular, Microsoft
Access, MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQLite. A text editor, like TextMate or BBEdit, and statistics software, like SPSS Statistics,
round out the basic suite of tools that have been used for CAR for many years.Today, data journalists leverage Web-based
tools for data collection, manipulation, analysis, and visualization, like Open Refine, Google Fusion Tables, and Tableau.
They’re also working with modern programming languages, like Python, Ruby, and Javascript, as well as d3, a Javascript
library. “We love tools that don’t need a developer every time to create interactive content,” said Momi Peralta. “These are
end user’s tools. Google Docs, spreadsheets, Open Refine, Junar’s open data platform, Tableau Public for interactive
graphs, and now Javascript or D3.js for reusable interactive graphs tied to updated data sets.”Tool choice brings with it the
thorny issue of newsroom culture, as previously referenced, right down to organizational DNA that venerates narrative
writing and mistrusts the messy news environment online that is slow to adopt new technologies. It wasn’t so long ago that
the people in charge of a newspaper’s website worked in different departments or even buildings than reporters working a
story. (That’s still true in some media companies.)The integration of the Internet into the collection and production of the
news demonstrates that traditional media institutions can and will adapt and adopt new technologies and practices. That
will continue to accelerate globally, once the advantages of data-driven storytelling become apparent.
New Tools to Wrangle Unstructured Data
The rapid expansion in the amount of unstructured data,268need for this kind of expertise in-house. When the Guardian’s
data team was faced with making sense of the Wikileaks cables, it took months to work through them.269hammering
governments to give us data in columns and rows,” said Cohen. “I think we’re increasingly seeing that stories just as likely
(if not more likely) come from the unstructured information that comes from documents, audio and video, tweets, other
social media”from government and non-government sources.”Making sense of all of that data is both a huge opportunity
and an immense challenge for newsrooms. Once upon a time, it was difficult for investigators to find information relevant to
answering a question. Today, in many (if not all) scenarios, the opposite is true, particularly in a world where readers have
access to search engines. That has shifted the value that journalists can add”from finding information to making sense of
what’s actually happening, processing, analyzing and vetting data, and finding signal in the digital noise.That new
landscape is precisely why the Knight News Challenge gave $1.5examine data.270Project,271newsroom with a set of open
source,272oriented at making it easier for journalists to use and analyze data, and Overview,273cleaning, visualizing, and
interactively exploring large documents and data sets, acting as a kind of “editorial search engine.”274Stray, Overview’s
project manager and a research fellow at the Tow Center, describes it as a organizational structure for data.275bread-and-
butter issues for newsrooms struggling to manage data. As of March 2014, PANDA has been installed in 25 newsrooms
around the United States.“It’s a pain to search across data sets, but we also have this general newsroom content
management issue,” said Brian Boyer, the product manager for PANDA and head of NPR’s News Applications team. “The
data stuck on your hard drive is sad data. Knowledge management isn’t a sexy problem to solve, but it’s a real business
problem. People could be doing better reporting if they knew what was available. Data should be visible internally.”Boyer
thinks the trends toward big data in media are clear, and that he and other hacker journalists can help their colleagues to
not only understand it, but to thrive. “There’s a lot more of it, with government releasing its stuff more rapidly,” he said in

1. “This city of Chicago is releasing a lot of it. We’re going for increased efficiency, to help people work faster and write
better stories. Every major news org in the country is hiring a news app developer right now. Or two. For smaller news
organizations, it really works for them. Their data apps account for the majority of their traffic.” Once such databases
are up and running, journalists can apply analytical tools to produce evidence-driven reporting. The difficulty
ProPublica had with building the “Dollars for Docs” project puts the scale of that work into perspective, from converting
PDFs to dirty data, to fact-checking correlations within the massive databases.276read Dan Nguyen’s guide to scraping
data,277Klein’s style guide for news apps,278exploration of “how data sausage is made.”279journalists start working
more with data, they have more choices for tools than ever before. There is also powerful new data-journalism
software coming online, from analysis to visualization tools. As Eric Newton highlighted at the Knight Foundation, many
of these new tools help journalists gather, clean, analyze, and publish data and do not require sophisticated
programming knowledge to use.280the head of the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership for Mozilla, wrote last
year, journo-coders are now taking social coding “to a whole new level.” 281 Just as civic software282baked into
government, open source is playing a pivotal role in the practice of data journalism. 283 While many news developers
are agnostic with respect to which tools they use to get a job done, the people who are building and sharing tools for
data journalism are often doing it with open source code.While some of that open source development has been driven
by the requirements of the Knight News Challenge, which funded the PANDA and Overview projects, there’s a broader
collaborative spirit evidenced in the interstitial communication on Twitter, GitHub, and mailing lists that connect the
data-driven journalism community around the world.Members of newsrooms that compete on beats are working
together on code. For instance, New York Times and Washington Post developers are teaming up284database. 285
Data journalists from WNYC, the Chicago Tribune and the Spokesman-Review are collaborating on building a better
interface for Census data.286helped build the Internet are building out civic infrastructure.287newsroom stack,288be
fiercely committed to “showing your work.” For data journalists, that means sharing your source data, methodology,
and code, not just a notebook. To put it another way, “code, don’t tell.”289
VII. Open Government
Open Data and Raw Data
Building capacity in data journalism is directly connected to the role the Fourth Estate plays in democracies around the
world. There are important stories buried in that explosion of data from government, industry, media, universities, sensors,
and devices that aren’t being told because the perspective and skills required to do it properly aren’t widespread in the
journalism industry. The need for data-driven journalism comes at a time, unfortunately, when the news organizations that
have housed them over the past centuries are contracting.As that’s happening, the demand for information about
government is growing, in the areas of service, performance, and spending. Every day, more citizens turn to the Internet for
government information,290services. Research on community information systems from the Pew Internet and Life Project
shows strong citizen interest in online resources for government and civic information.291citizens are both aware of
government information being released and can find it, open government policies can lead to higher levels of community
satisfaction.292budgets and technical ability will make opening data difficult. This situation may grow worse as more local
newspapers close. That trend was one of the drivers for the landmark Knight Commission on the Information Needs of
Communities in a Democracy.293empowering citizens to be more informed about their communities includes a
recommendation to create local online hubs based upon open government data.294platforms have grown around the globe,
including in a number of big cities, providing more raw material for data journalism.295government movement is happening.
We must be ready to receive and process open data, and then tell all the stories hidden in data sets that now may seem
raw or distant. To begin with, it would be useful to have data on open contracts, statements of assets, and salaries of public
officials, ways to follow the money and compare, so people can help monitor government accountability. Although we
dream in open data formats, we love PDFs against receiving print copies.The rewards that cities like New York have reaped
from adopting a platform strategy are no longer theoretical, given that public open government data feeds become critical
infrastructure during natural disasters.296faced heavy demand when residents went to its hurricane evacuation finder in
advance of Hurricane Sandy, residents could also go and consult WYNC’s lightweight, mobile device-friendly evacuation
map. WNYC data news editor John Keefe was responsible for the map, which put the city’s open government data in
action.297Map]“We estimate that collectively we served and informed 10 times as many individuals by embracing an open
strategy,” wrote Rachel Haot, then New York City’s chief digital officer, in a blog post for the Open Government
Partnership.298of people.”If the evolutionary descendants of EveryBlock are ever going to be a meaningful replacement for
local newspapers, however, they’ll need to be sustainable, independent from government’s influence, deliver a valuable
information product and be interesting. They’ll have to feature compelling storytelling that’s citizen-centric, uses adaptive
design, and provides information that’s relevant to what people need to know, now. That’s a tall order but there’s hope:
Hundreds of entrepreneurial journalists are working on creating versions of that future today, with more to come.
Data and Ethics
In recent years, more local, state, and national governments have begun proactively releasing public sector data in hopes
of stimulated economic effects, improving services, or enhancing transparency and accountability. When these data sets
detail performance, spending, budgeting, or services, if they do not include deliberations or policy decisions”which is to say
how power or influence is exercised”journalists have to keep digging, scraping, and investigating.There are good reasons
for journalists to be careful about a complete embrace of open government data, at least with respect to the data’s
relationship to government transparency. There’s now considerable ambiguity regarding open government, as a 2012 paper
on “The New Ambiguity of ”Open Government’ ” by Princeton scholars David Robinson and Harlan Yu explored. From their
abstract:Open technologies involve sharing data over the Internet, and all kinds of governments can use them, for all kinds
of reasons. Recent public policies have stretched the label “open government” to reach any public sector use of these
technologies. Thus, “open government data” might refer to data that makes the government as a whole more open (that is,
more transparent), but might equally well refer to politically neutral public sector disclosures that are easy to reuse, but that
may have nothing to do with public accountability. Today a regime can call itself “open” if it builds the right kind of
website”even if it does not become more accountable or transparent. This shift in vocabulary makes it harder for
policymakers and activists to articulate clear priorities and make cogent demands. 299As skeptical data journalists know,
there’s a difference between open data that’s proactively disclosed by governments and data buried in PDFs released in
response to the Freedom of Information Act or lawsuits by media companies and advocates.That said, there’s much to be
gained by pitching a big tent for open government, as Joshua Goldstein and Jeremy Weinstein argued in a response to Yu
and Robinson in the UCLA Law Review, including benefits for data journalists. They wrote:It is difficult to disagree with Yu
and Robinson’s narrowest claim. Greater clarity about the complementary but distinct objectives of these different
movements”and the likely impact of the specific governmental policies they advocate”is undoubtedly a good thing.But
saying that open data and open government can exist without the other, is not the same as saying that they should.
Drawing on our respective experiences as a partner in Kenya’s Open Data effort and as a key architect of President
Obama’s multilateral Open Government Partnership, we argue that the growing ties between the open data and open
government movements, particularly in developing countries, can benefit both agendas.300releases was prevalent among
most data journalists interviewed for this report, although it was coupled with ample caution and caveats.“I can’t find any
downsides of more data rather than less,” said Sarah Cohen, of the New York Times, “but I worry about a few things.” First,
emphasized Cohen, there’s an issue of whether data is created open from the beginning”and the consequences of
“sanitizing” it before release. “The demand for structured, nicely scrubbed data for the purpose of building apps can result
in fake records rather than real records being released,” Cohen said. “USASpending.gov is a good example of that”we don’t
get access to the actual spending records like invoices and purchase orders that agencies use, or the systems they use to
actually do their business. Instead we have a side system whose only purpose is to make it public, so it’s not a high priority
inside agencies and there’s no natural audit trail on it. It’s not used to spend money, so mistakes aren’t likely to be
caught.”Second, there’s the question of whether information relevant to an investigation has been scrubbed for release,
said Cohen:We get the lowest common denominator of information. There are a lot of records used for accountability that
depend on our ability to see personally identifiable information (as opposed to private or personal information, which isn’t
the same thing). For instance, if you want to do stories on how farm subsidies are paid, you kind of have to know who gets
them. If you want to do something on fraud in Federal Emergency Management Agency claims, you have to be able to find
the people and businesses who get the aid. But when it gets pushed out as open government data, it often gets scrubbed
of important details and then we have a harder time getting them under the Freedom of Information Act because the
agencies say the records are already public.To address those issues, Cohen recommends getting more source documents,
as a historian would. “I think what we can do is to push harder for actual records, and to not settle for what the White House
wants to give us,” she said. “We also have to get better at using records that aren’t held in nice, neat forms”they’re not born
that way, and we should get better at using records in whatever form they exist.”Much of the time, government data is often
“dirty,” with missing metadata, incorrect fields, or gaps in collection. Journalists have to extract data from PDFs, validate it,
and clean up data sets301out, and then present it in context.If the capacity to practice is there, data journalism can deliver
notable results. For instance, ProPublica’s “Recovery Tracker”302projects is one of the best examples of the practice in
action. Another gold standard for data journalism is the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Toxic Waters”303that project makes it a
difficult act to follow, though Times developers are working hard with projects like “Inside Congress.”304doing and what data
journalists are working on is inescapable. Both are focused on putting data to work for the public good, whether it’s in the
public interest, for profit, in the service of civic utility or, in the biggest crossover, government accountability.305Peralta:The
open data movement and hacktivism can accelerate the application of technology to ingest large sets of documents,
complex documents, or large volumes of structured data. This will accelerate and help journalism extract and tell better
stories, but also bring tons of information to the light, so everyone can see, process, and keep governments
accountable.The way to go for us now is use data for journalism but then open that data. We are building blocks of
knowledge and, at the same time, putting this data closer to the people, the experts and the ones who can do better work
than ourselves to extract another story or detect spots of corruption.It makes lots of sense for us to make the effort of
typing, building data sets, cleaning, converting, and sharing data in open formats, even organizing our own “datafest” to
expose data to experts. Open data will help in the fight against corruption. That is a real need, as here corruption is killing
people.To do so will require that data journalists and civic coders alike apply the powerful tools to the explosion of digital
bits and bytes from government, business, and our fellow citizens. The need for data journalism, in the context of massive
amounts of government data being released, could not be any more timely, particularly given persistent quality
issues.“Open government data means that more people can access and reuse official information published by government
bodies,” said Bounegru. “This in itself is not enough. It is increasingly important that journalists can keep up and are
equipped with skills and resources to understand open government data. Journalists need to know what official data
means, what it says, and what it leaves out.”That requires journalists to possess both numeracy and digital literacy, if
they’re going to interrogate the data. “Only by equipping journalists with the skills to use data more effectively can we break
the current asymmetry, where our understanding of the information that matters is mediated by governments, companies,
and other experts,” said Bounegru. “In a nutshell, open data advocates push for more data, and data journalists help the
public to use, explore, and evaluate it.”Open data needs to find people, not vice versa. For that to happen, supporting and
extending the capacity of the media to practice data-driven journalism is a fundamental part of the equation. The role that
the Fourth Estate plays in holding governments to account in the 21st century is no less pressing than in decades past. If
anything, given how power is gathered and exercised in secret around the world, it’s more so. There’s a long history of
elected officials or government staff who want to prevent information that shows fraud, undue influence, embarrassing
behavior, or outright criminality from coming to the public’s attention. That’s true today as well. To preserve such evidence,
data journalists will also need to securely protect data, just as editors have historically protected human sources. When
great investigative work is paired with data journalism, remarkable outcomes bloom.“We took narrative reports from nursing
home inspections and made them searchable306government doesn’t allow,” said Ornstein, a senior reporter at ProPublica.
The resulting data-driven tool, which enables people to shop for nursing homes online,307service journalism, giving people
a way to make more informed decisions and adding an accountability mechanism for businesses and government in the
process.At ProPublica, the data journalism team is conscious of deep linking into news applications, with the perspective
that the visualizations produced from such apps are themselves a form of narrative journalism. With great data
visualizations, readers can find their own way and interrogate the data themselves. Moreover, distinctions between a news
story and a news app are dissolving as readers increasingly consume media on mobile devices and tablets. One approach
to providing useful context is the “Ion” format at ProPublica.org, where a project like “Eye on the Stimulus” 308 is a hybrid
between a blog and an application. On one side of the Web page, there’s a news river. On the other, there are entry points
into the data itself. The challenge to this approach is that a media outlet will need data specialists to work closely with the
investigators”or that they become one and the same.While that’s true regardless of the context, building data-driven
capacity will necessarily start in different levels in different media cultures and climates. “Investigative journalism in Africa,
like in many other places, tends to be scoop-driven, which means that someone has leaked you a set of documents,” said
Justin Arenstein, a Knight International fellow embedded with the African Media Initiative (AMI)309very few systematic,
analytical approaches to analyzing broader societal trends,” he said. “You’re still getting a lot of hit-and-run reporting. That
doesn’t help us analyze the societies we’re in, and it doesn’t help us, more importantly, build the tools to make
decisions.”The strategy that Arenstein and the AMI is pursuing diverges from the news applications and data visualizations
that are common outcomes of data journalism in Europe and the United States. They don’t just tell a story but give people a
tool to understand a specific area, make a decision, and then take action. Arenstein emphasized the need to think deeply
about how journalists use data in investigations, as opposed to raw material for a visualization. The strongest
commonalities between the work Code for Kenya is doing and ProPublica in the United States, in fact, lie in their use of
data to support and augment investigative work, mapping the relationships of the powerful, and funding projects on
extractive industries.“We’re finding something that maybe you’re starting to see inklings of elsewhere as well: Data
journalism doesn’t have to be the product,” he said. “Data journalism can also be the route that you follow to get to a final
story. It doesn’t have to produce an infographic or a map.”
Gun Data, Maps, and Radical Transparency
The confluence of public data, digital media, and democratized publishing technology is going to lead media and advocacy
organizations into challenging, uncomfortable places. Many of the issues data journalists face will be long-standing ones,
like intransigent public officials or huge paper document dumps.For instance, in the 1990s the District of Columbia water
authority refused to publish the results of lead testing after it showed widespread contamination. “We got the survey from a
source, but it was on paper,” said Cohen. “After scanning, parsing, and geocoding, we sent out a team of reporters to
neighborhoods to spot check the data, and also do some reporting on the neighborhoods. We ended up with a story about
people who didn’t know what was near them.”In a harbinger of tensions to come, the Washington Post team chose not to
publish the addresses of people identified in the data set. “The water authority called our editor to complain that we were
going to put all of the addresses online”they felt that it was violating privacy, even though we weren’t identifying the owners
or the residents,” said Cohen. “It was more important to them that we keep people in the dark about their blocks. Our editor
at the time, Len Downie, said, ”You’re right. We shouldn’t just put it on the Web.’At the end of 2012, similar questions arose
when The Journal News, a newspaper in New York, displayed the names and addresses310holders in an online map that
was based upon the government’s regulatory data. The outrage311data was public and subject to a Freedom of Information
law. Did that make it ethically sound to publish the names and addresses of permit holders?The question of what to do
about guns, maps, and disturbing data312legislature and senate, when it passed legislation that created an anonymity
exemption313this situation raised, however, will be central to data journalism in every state and country around the
world.The conflict over guns and data showed how government data could be used by journalists in ways that could make
many citizens quite uncomfortable.314highlighted an issue with data quality and journalism: More than three quarters of the
data in the gun map was inaccurate.315The Journal News took the map offline3162013, although a version of it endures with
zooming and data access disabled.The reality is that government data is already consulted and used daily by media. Given
the increased reach and velocity of digital media, data journalists must be more conscious of ethics than ever. “Journalists
broadcast and publish criminal records, drunk driving records, arrest records, professional licenses, inspection records, and
all sorts of private information,” wrote Al Tompkins,317a senior faculty member at the Poynter Institute. “But when we publish
private information we should weigh the public’s right to know against the potential harm publishing could
cause.”Journalists need to know how to turn data into journalism in a way that serves the public interest without harming
it.318lens, as Jeff Sonderman highlighted at the Poynter Institute, you’ll need to ask a series of basic questions. He wrote:In
every situation you face, there will be unique considerations about whether and how to publish a set of data. Don’t assume
data is inherently accurate, fair, and objective. Don’t mistake your access to data or your right to publish it as a legitimate
rationale for doing so. Think critically about the public good and potential harm, the context surrounding the data, and its
relevance to your other reporting. Then decide whether your data publishing is journalism.319journalism’s potential harms
came up when Wikileaks released data from the U.S. Department of Defense and Department of State to multiple news
organizations in 2010 and 2011. Every media organization that reviewed classified cables or logs from the Pentagon and
State Department had to decide not only whether to publish them but how, balancing redacting the names of people who
might be put at risk with the public’s right to know what was done on its behalf by government. The technical capacity to
move through millions of lines of messy data in proprietary formats, however, only rests with a limited number of news
organizations. If the capacity to do data journalism at scale isn’t democratized, this dynamic could enshrine traditional
media power structures. “I helped out with the Wikileaks War Logs reporting,” said Jacob Harris, a data journalist at the
New York Times. “We built an internal news app for the reporters to search the reports, see them on a map, and tag the
most interesting ones. One of the unique things I figured out was how to extract MGRS [Military Grid References System]
coordinates from within the reports to geocode the locations inside of them. From this, I was able to distinguish the
locations of various homicides within Baghdad more finely than the geocoding for the reports. I built a demo, pitched it to
graphics, and we built an effective and sobering look at the devastation on Baghdad from the violence.”320and Press
FreedomIn the United States, data journalists often run into bureaucracy, obfuscation, or years of drawn-out wrangling over
Freedom of Information Act requests, fees, and redactions. Journalists trying to acquire or use data in countries without
freedom of information laws or democratic institutions have an even harder time gaining the raw material for their
stories.Charles Andersen said that the issue of open government is hugely important to questions of data journalism’s
future and relevance. Andersen, who co-authored a landmark report on post-industrial journalism with Emily Bell and Clay
Shirky,321which increasingly includes efforts to open data”is probably the biggest factor in the success of data journalism in
developing countries. “Data journalists have a very hard time existing in countries where there isn’t open data,” he said.
“For instance, there’s a huge difference between Germany and the United States. Germany has relevant laws but a culture
of not sharing.”The United States, at least by contrast, has a tradition of openness and government disclosure, said
Andersen. Their research suggests that data journalism cannot exist in a given country without open government laws and
policies. If elected officials, legislators, and staff want to see media using open data, they should also take substantive
steps to ensure that policies, licenses, laws, and regulations are in place to permit that reuse. Similarly, if public services
based upon open data feeds are performed by private parties, freedom of information laws in many countries may well
need to be extended to the entities that deliver those services. Open data initiatives that aren’t accompanied by freedom of
the press or freedom of information laws are unlikely to deliver on political rhetoric promising increased transparency or
accountability.
VIII. On to the Future
Recommendations and Predictions
The world needs journalists with these skills more than ever. The same trends changing journalism and society322potential
to create significant social change throughout the world, as nation states move from conditions of information scarcity to
abundance, causing vast disruptions to governance and governments.Journalists have always needed to be able to write,
interview, and fact-check their work. Today, photography, social media, video editing, and mobile devices have already
become integral elements of the toolkits of many journalists. Whether news developers are rendering data in real
time,323improving news coverage with data,325journalism still must tell a story, solve a problem, or speak truth to power.
Smartphones, notebooks, cameras, social media, and data sets can extend investigations in important ways.In the near
future, expect basic data-science skills to become baked into how investigative journalists gather sources, find evidence,
and present their findings”from building databases, to creating visualization, to applying powerful analytical software. Along
with those skills, journalists will still need to apply critical thinking and show how they reached conclusions. While the need
is acute and journalism schools are responding, significant cultural, fiscal, and technical barriers to the adoption of data
journalism and digital skills remain. In May of 2014, a new report326the Duke Reporters’ Lab at the DeWitt Wallace Center
for Media and Democracy in the Sanford School of Public Policy surveyed 20 newsrooms to find which digital tools are still
missing. The top-line conclusions from Mark Stencel, Bill Adair, and Prashanth Kamalakanthan painted a sobering picture
of an industry in flux. The report found that many U.S. newsrooms aren’t taking advantage of new, low-cost digital tools for
reporting and presenting journalism, instead continuing to use familiar methods and practices. Its authors suggest that
journalism awards and popular media conferences have created the perception that the adoption of digital tools and data
journalism is more prevalent than it is. While local newsroom leaders told the researchers that budget, time, and people
were their primary constraints, deeper infrastructure and cultural issues are hindering adoption. The report describes an
industry with a gap between “have and have-nots,” with national organizations experimenting with data journalism and new
digital tools while local newsrooms are not. “The local newsrooms that have made smart use of digital tools have leaders
who are willing to make difficult trade-offs in their coverage,” write the authors. They prioritize stories that reveal the
meaning and implications of the news over an overwhelming focus on chasing incremental developments. They also think
of the work they can do with digital tools as ways to tell untold stories”not “bells and whistles,” wrote the authors.Writing at
Poynter.com,327report’s conclusions support findings of Poynter’s recent “Core Skills for the Future of Journalism” report,
which was based on a broader sample of the industry”that is, more than 2,900from media organization professionals,
independent or freelance journalists, educators, and students. “Professional journalists in legacy media rated new digital
skills as much less important than traditional skills,” he wrote. “Educators, students, and independent journalists rated
digital skills as much more important than the professionals.”Finberg’s discussion of the report’s finding and data journalism
is a reality check on the challenges that remain for its adoption, revealing a schism between educators and professionals:
The ability to find and make sense of information is almost the definition of newsgathering, so it seems safe to call this an
essential skill for the beginning journalist. We asked professionals and educators to rate the importance of two key aspects
of newsgathering that require this ability. Both the ability to analyze and synthesize large amounts of data and the ability to
interpret statistical data were rated as more important by educators than by professionals.When it comes to the ability to
analyze and synthesize large amounts of data, a little more than half (55that this was important to very important. Almost
three-fourths (73important to very important.The response to the question about the ability to “interpret statistical data and
graphics” was similar: 59 percent of professionals and 80 percent of educators called this skill important to very
important.Given the large amounts of data available on the Internet and the growing importance of presenting information in
a pleasing and informative visual manner, the gap between educators and professionals is disturbing. The ability to make
sense of our complex world by distilling meaningful information from the vast river of data is one of the great values
professional journalists can offer their audience.The third report, on innovation at the New York Times,328an internal
audience, not public consumption. After the document leaked online in May of 2014 to Buzzfeed and Mashable, however, it
was hailed by Joshua Benton, the director of Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab, as “one of the key documents of this media
age.”329tremendous amount of insight and introspection in the 97-page report, which surveyed the media landscape of
today in depth, drawing on interviews with dozens of staff at the New York Times and dozens more with outside observers,
including this author. I spoke with a researcher from the Times’ team last year about the paper’s approach to digital
journalism, editorial analytics, social media and data, along with my own reading, sharing, and commenting habits. The
report paints a picture of an extraordinary organization housed within an institution and business grappling with the same
fundamental shifts that broader society is enduring in the 21st century, struggling at times to escape a 20th century legacy
of tools, infrastructure, and culture. Even though the digital audience of the New York Times is larger than its print
readership 31 million unique visitors a month to nytimes.com versus 1.6 million total daily circulation), the daily editorial
workflow described remains focused on the paper, not the pixel. The report described the routine of a newsroom focused
upon Page One and an incentive structure in which reporters are measured against their A1 stories. Instead of going
“digital first” over the last decade, the publisher and leadership have continued to focus on the print edition. As the report
notes, the paper currently derives three quarters of its revenues from print. That focus, however, cites a failure to convert
the 14.7 million articles in the Times’ archive into structured data. Not doing so has meant that the newspaper is not
capitalizing on one of its primary assets by making it more discoverable through search, sharing through social media, and
data mining. There are many reasons to think that “The Gray Lady” could become much more than she used to be in the
years ahead. The first redesign of nytimes.com in eight years went live in January of 2014, optimized for mobile devices
and integrating native advertising. The parent company was profitable in the first quarter of 2014. In March of 2014, the
Times expanded its digital offerings330include NYT Now, a lower-priced mobile app sold to iPhone users that summarizes
the day’s top stories, and Premier, which offers expanded access to behind-the-scenes stories, ebooks, videos, and
crosswords. The Times may also explore events, a lucrative concern for other media companies. As noted earlier, The
Upshot launched in April of 2014, to general acclaim. The Upshot’s team includes the graduate student in statistics who
helped to build the news quiz on dialect while he was an intern at the Times.331most read and shared content in the history
of nytimes.com. In May of 2014, the Times launched a lovely closed beta332cooking Web application with more than 16,000
recipes. If the outlet can build a personalized recipe recommendation engine on top of its decades of dining and cooking
archives, the platform could have tremendous potential. The new executive editor of the New York Times, Dean Baquet,
endorsed the report and the digital-first strategy contained in it, both internally and publicly, once it leaked online. Whether
he and his colleagues can execute against its recommendations remains to be seen.The conclusions of these three
reports, however, should still be sobering. The Times may be fine, but other papers will not be. Newsrooms face tight
budgets, deep set cultural challenges, liabilities and debt, and historic lows in public trust. On the positive side, there is a
tremendous upside for adoption and use of current tools and vast green fields for digitally native media organizations to
experiment, create, and find audiences, as billions of people come online for the first time globally.So what should we watch
for next, and where? The following list of recommendations and predictions sketch out what to expect in the next decade
and where publishers will need to adjust.1) Data will become even more of a strategic resource for media.If text is the next
frontier in data journalism,333telling stories more effectively, enabling digital journalism and digital humanities to merge in
the service of a more informed society.334sources for trusted data.335will be hosted by media organizations and leveraged
as an asset. In some cases, media companies may be able to sell access to their archives and APIs. Given the sensitivity
of some data sets and the responsibility news organizations hold to confidential sources and whistleblowers, the media will
need to improve its security practices. Recent widespread hacking incidents at major newspapers around the United States
highlight the need for improvement.336that democratize data skills.Even though the resources to learn data journalism are
improving daily, there’s still a high barrier to entry for people with no experience practicing it. That’s changing as more
powerful resources come online. Many of these tools for creating or presenting data-driven journalism will come from
startups or nonprofits, like CartoDB, DocumentCloud, Timeline.js, Mapbox, Frontline SMS, Zeega, Kimono, Enigma.io,
Amara, Plot.ly, DataWrapper, and Graf.ly. Other tools will be provided by technology giants, like Google, Amazon, and Esri,
as free Web services and open source code, or with enterprise licensing and API fees. Uncertainty about sustainability will
drive foundations to fund tools and platforms, including pilot projects, entrepreneurial ventures, or components of open
source civic infrastructure. The rest of the tools will be built by independent news hackers, university students, and data
journalists as passion projects aimed at scratching someone’s itch; these may well end up helping many other people solve
similar problems as well. Just as publishing text and editing photography or videos became accessible to hundreds of
millions of people, analyzing and presenting data in maps, apps, and visualizations will become easier to do as well.3)
News apps will explode as a primary way for people to consume data journalism.There have been hundreds of millions of
iPhones, iPads, and Android devices sold in recent years, with billions of lower cost devices to follow as more of humanity
goes online on mobile broadband networks. According to the Pew Internet and Life Project, 42 percent of American adults
over 18 years old owned a tablet in January of 2014.337stories, videos, and news applications for the growing number of
readers using smartphones, phablets (a new class of mobile phones designed to straddle the functionality of phone and
tablet), tablets, and laptops will only become more important to media organizations. That puts a premium on data
journalists who can create apps, lightweight data visualizations, and story presentations that are optimized for mobile
devices. Increasing demand for apps, quizzes, and interactive games will make news application developer a highly
sought-after specialty at media companies. Despite the growth in news apps, the narrative story format will endure as a
complement to the news app, the summary for a blog, and access to the underlying data and model. 4) Being digital first
means being data-centric and mobile-friendly.As more and more people access the Internet and consume media on mobile
devices, adopting a data-centric approach to collecting and publishing journalism will only grow in importance. The need to
flexibly deliver content to multiple platforms and formats means that applications’ programming interfaces that can supply
data to any platform will continue to be a smart investment for organizations, particularly if they seek to be digital first. The
Washington Post, NPR, and the New York Times have already moved in this direction. Others will follow, or lead. Media
companies will be competing for attention, and advertising and subscription dollars, with technology giants like Google,
Yahoo, Facebook, and startups that publish or curate user-generated content, along with vast amounts of data
underpinning information services like mapping, shopping, or search. Facebook’s Paper app, Google Play, Yahoo’s News
Digest, Narrative Science, Flipboard, and the automated information services yet to be created will be strong competition
for media companies in the future.5) Expect more robo-journalism, but know that human relationships and storytelling still
matter.We will see wunderkinds apply computational journalism to finding secrets and creating knowledge at vast scale, just
as data scientists do in Silicon Valley, quants do on Wall Street, or spooks do at the National Security Agency. “Robo-
journalism” for commodity news from services like Narrative Science is already in the wild and will grow in use, particularly
for areas that might have been previously uncovered by a beat reporter or for which a full time journalist is no longer
economically viable. Wearable computers, drones, sensors, and algorithms are going to play a bigger role in the gathering
of data and consumption of media.Despite changes in technology, humans will still matter in building relationships and
making data into stories relatable to people. While the platforms and toolkits for journalism are evolving and the sources of
data are expanding rapidly, many things haven’t changed. The ethics that have long guided the choices of the profession
remain central to the journalists working today, as NPR’s new ethics guide makes clear.338learn how to hide their actions
from open data,” said Stray. “Personal relationships and skepticism will continue to be extremely important.”6) More
journalists will need to study the social sciences and statistics. “Philosophically, I think data journalism shares something
with social science and also there’s a real connection with the digital humanities,” said Jonathan Stray, who teaches the
subject at Columbia. “The emphasis is not just algorithms, but what do these algorithms tell us? How should we interpret all
this fancy output?” These questions have been integral to how sociologists, anthropologists, and ethnographers have
conducted research for decades, particularly with respect to data collection and statistics. This means that if members of
the media seek to practice data journalism, they’ll need to be numerate, ethical, and thoughtful about the biases embedded
in the data they’re interrogating. This is not a new idea, given how deeply Philip Meyer’s “precision journalism” is grounded
in applying social science to investigative reporting, but everyone who wishes to practice and publish sound data journalism
is going to need to understand it. Social scientists and biologists alike know that the sources for data and conditions under
which it is collected will shape and bias any subsequent research conclusions made from it. To serve broad audiences,
data journalists have to go beyond acquiring and cleaning data to understanding its provenance and source. Then, they’ll
need to make sure that its presentation doesn’t tell a different story than the data itself allows.None of that is easy for
people trained as scientists, much less journalists. Some projects and analyses may exceed technical competence or
subject matter expertise of select members of the media. Collaborating with academia and technologists will be preferable
to flawed journalism, analyses, maps or visualizations that mislead readers, given the impact that inaccurate conclusions
would have upon trust in the authors or publications.7) There will be higher standards for accuracy and corrections.Getting
a fact wrong or screwing up a quote can sink a news story, leading to a correction or even retraction. Making a mistake in
an algorithm or interpretation of data can similarly undermine the entire premise of an act of data journalism. The mistakes
and errors made in a post at FiveThirtyEight.com that sought to map kidnappings in Nigeria offer an instructive case
study.339sourced from the Global Database of Events, Language and Tone (GDELT). As the correction to the story
acknowledged, the journalism that was published was fundamentally flawed because the journalist failed to see that the
data represented the rate of media stories as a proxy for the rate of kidnappings, did not account for duplicated reports, and
used a default location if none was given. Decontextualizing the GDELT data led to a flawed post.340numerate readers who
are not only interested in the data behind stories and the analysis used to arrive at conclusions, but with the interest to try
to reproduce them. For instance, a FiveThirtyEight story on the Bechdel test in movies earned in-depth scrutiny from
Brendan Keegan, who was able to replicate the findings. What that means in practice is that any media company that
publishes such work should have a corrections policy in place for data journalism.341economist at Nesta, upon
encountering examples of bad data journalism,342improve upon the form:1. Choose the right stories: In cases like this, a
well-written review of the scholarly literature is likely to better inform public debate. Otherwise, stick to (a) lightweight but fun
topics or (b) fast-moving topics yet to attract academic attention. 2. Embrace complexity: No interesting causal relationship
involves only two variables.3. Use statistics intelligently: A scatterplot of two variables with a least-squares regression line is
not “doing statistics.” Bad statistics is worse than no statistics. 4. Finally, be modest: If you have so many caveats as to
completely undermine any conclusion, then don’t offer a conclusion.8) Competency in security and data protection will
become more important. In the United States, email hosted on private sector servers outside of a media company’s control
does not have the same legal protections as email within an office. Until the Electronic Communications Privacy Act is
reformed, journalists should be cautious about hosting sensitive email or data on other platforms. People practicing data
journalism or civic hacking need to know about the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA),343along with proposals for its
reform.344members of the public who are unsure of the legality of data access or use, and don’t have the legal resources of
major media organizations behind them, should think twice or thrice before clicking.In general, journalists must consider
when it’s appropriate to scrape data, access data, store it”or not. Does the story require storing personal information? If so,
such sensitive data will need to be protected with the same vigor that journalists have protected confidential sources.
Unfortunately, the information security practices of many media companies are not as robust as they will need to be to
prevent determined intrusions by organized crime or nation states. For more on data security, ethics, privacy, and
journalism, consult the Tow Center’s white paper on the subjects.9) Audiences will demand more transparency on reader
data collection and use.Automated, personalized advertising or native advertising will be part of some living stories and
news apps. The creators of these platforms it will have to carefully consider the context for matching ads with content.
Editorial and business departments are going to run up against difficult conversations about data access and sharing, with
respect to audience analytics. Nonprofit organizations may not rely on advertising, instead taking underwriting or
sponsorships, but they too will face pressure from funders and foundations to quantify their audiences and the impact of
their journalism with data. As editors, reporters, and publishers learn more about who is reading, sharing, and commenting
on journalism through gathering data, they’ll have to decide how transparent they’ll be with readers about data collection
and usage. 10) Conflicts over public records, data scraping, and ethics will surely arise.For good or ill, we’re likely to see
more controversial online maps and interactive apps that show donations, votes, contributions, permits, convictions, and
other public records. Along with voluntary disclosures, the data will be scraped, FOIA’ed or otherwise sourced from
government publications, agencies, and websites. Over time, much more of this data will end up in private hands, along
with media, nonprofits, foundations, snarky online media outlets, and hacker collectives like Anonymous. Some of the
resulting maps and charts will no doubt be found to be incorrect, made so by incompetence or malicious intent, resulting in
misidentified people who will be subject to harassment or worse.In turn, governments will try to deny access to data,
heavily redacted documents, demand takedowns, and criminalize scraping or API calls. They will apply filtering, or extra-
legal censorship through pressure on payment processors, seize servers or even direct denial of service attacks.
Companies may deny access to their platforms for apps or services that use controversial data, similar to when Apple
rejected an app showing drones strikes,345hackers if they find data breaches or unprotected data online.346with more
closed governments and constricted information flows is likely to be explosive. Open data is not enough:347Investigative
journalism will remain essential.In the United States we’ll run into more difficult First and Fourth Amendment issues as a
result of all of this. It’s going to be be extremely messy. The chilling effects of mass surveillance on digital journalism will
continue to be an issue for years to come. Just as sources may not trust the idea of a private conversation with a reporter,
the provenance of data may be difficult to mask. As a public comment348Group on Intelligence and Communication
Technologies convened by President Barack Obama from Columbia Journalism School and the MIT Center for Civic Media
highlighted, mass surveillance makes investigative journalism much harder:Put plainly, what the NSA is doing is
incompatible with the existing law and policy protecting the confidentiality of journalist-source communications. This is not
merely an incompatibility in spirit, but a series of specific and serious discrepancies between the activities of the intelligence
community and existing law, policy, and practice in the rest of the government. Further, the climate of secrecy around mass
surveillance activities is itself actively harmful to journalism, as sources cannot know when they might be monitored, or how
intercepted information might be used against them.11) Collaborate with libraries and universities as archives, hosts, and
educators.The government shutdown in the United States in the fall of 2013 demonstrated the need for media
organizations and civil society to back up government data. At the time, many nonprofits, foundations, and individuals acted
to preserve and mirror what they could. Around the rest of the globe, data sources may be even more tenuous. In the years
to come, journalists, universities, tech companies, businesses, and local governments will share a messy ecosystem of
APIs, public, and private databases. There’s already an emerging geocommons around OpenStreetMap, supported by
rapidly improving open source tools and an emerging geojournalism speciality. One strategy that may be fruitful is for city,
county, and state governments to engage local media, universities, and libraries in public or civic data hosting and
preservation.349been stewards of knowledge, in the forms of books and periodicals. As such, they and their institutions are
well placed to host data for the public good, although legislators and executives will have to think through the economics of
them doing so.12) Expect data-driven personalization and predictive news in wearable interfaces.In 2013, the most popular
online content at the BBC was an economic class calculator. User-centric apps and services will enable people to
understand how a given story or policy applies to them, their children, or their business. These kinds of news apps and
data-driven platforms like Homicide Watch hint at what lies ahead. The current state of the art only scratches the surface of
the ways that data will be personalized for individual readers as the use of analytics grows in media companies, helping
editors get smarter. As people express their interests through searches, clicks, saves, and shares, algorithms will use the
data generated to suggest related editorial content and match advertising algorithms for relevant businesses or services
with it. Recommendation engines will improve, across media companies, and be followed by predictive news that using
social network analysis to suggest stories to users. Over the next decade, a new wave of mobile computing will provide
new platforms for nimble media companies to publish stories, from iWatches, to Google Glass, to smart appliances and
wearable interfaces connected to an Internet of Things. Some of these wearables won’t just display data: They’ll collect it.
Such will include health data, geolocation, and air quality, which can then be used in citizen science and monitoring
projects. They’ll be part of a rich fabric of connected devices that, when combined with people, cellphones, and civic media,
will enable citizens to monitor infrastructure350water quality in China, extending into networked civil society. The data
generated from them will be rich source material for journalists to investigate and share. Drones and sensors are both part
of this picture and represent rich topics for more experimentation and inquiry, as explored by my colleague Fergus Pitt in his
own research and workshops at the Tow Center.13) More diverse newsrooms will produce better data journalism.Diversity
has been a challenge in the media for decades. Although far more minorities and women work in professional journalism
than a century ago, a 2013 survey of American Society of News Editors (ASNE) found that of the 38,000working at 1,^400^
U.S. newspapers, 4,700are minorities.351organizations found that 63 percent of them had no minorities at all.352First Look
Media, and other news startups garnered criticism in the spring of 2014,353National Association of Black Journalists
expressing concern regarding the lack of diversity.354particularly relevant in the data journalism space, given the broader
issues with women in technology that have become evident in recent years. Online and off, misogyny and discrimination
endure in the industry, along with subtler sexism and racism. The challenge that editors face in hiring a diverse team of data
journalists is structural, reflecting broader societal issues. As of 2010, 18 percent of undergraduates receiving degrees in
computer science were women, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology.^355^ In 2013, just
0.4of all female college freshmen said they intended to major in computer science.356come as a surprise when Nate Silver
said that 85 percent of the applicants to FiveThirtyEight were men. There are reasons, however, to be cautiously optimistic
about diversity in data journalism: Interviews with women and minorities in the United States suggest that the communities
that have grown up around computer-assisted reporting over the decades may be more accepting of different faces than
others in the technology world, perhaps because of the culture focused on peer-to-peer learning that celebrates
mentorship. “NICAR is a pretty healthy place to be a non-white, non-male person working in journalism,” said Tasneem
Raja. “I can’t speak to issues of class, ability, gender identity, and other types of difference, other than to say we’re almost
definitely less good at them, and that needs to change.” She went on:I don’t have experience with the way folks in this
community handle issues of inclusion issues when they come up, but I have seen evidence of folks working preemptively to
create environments that are less exclusionary than the norm in Web development, quantitative analysis, the visual arts, or
journalism. Maybe it’s because there haven’t been that many of us webby data journos till recently. Data journalists are
pragmatic by nature, and maybe it just didn’t make sense to alienate potential swaths of new recruits.That’s not to say
everything is rainbows and sunshine, but I’m gonna take a rare moment of optimism here and say that I’m proud to
represent this community, because in my experience, it’s genuinely committed to inclusion.No matter the country in which a
media company operates, making an effort to include more women; minorities; gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender
individuals; and people from multiple socioeconomic backgrounds will improve the work product and work environment. A
diverse staff diminishes stereotypes and produces second-order reflection on unconscious biases, which in turn can lead to
improved, more equitable evaluation of work, performance, promotion, and compensation. The absence of women,
minorities, or GLBT persons in startups, media organizations, development teams, and in editorial or product leadership
positions can signal to others that they aren’t welcome. Recruiting and hiring differently pays off: Media organizations that
have diverse staffs are likely to produce better journalism, from story choice to source selection. Research suggests that
teams with both men and women on them are more profitable and innovative. According to the National Center for Women
and Information Technology, mixed gender teams produced information technology patents that are cited 26 percent to 35
percent more often than the norm. As the demographics of the United States shifts, stories and data that focus upon
minorities, women, and the GLBT community will also gain more audience share, which in turn will create a business
opportunity for media companies. That’s true around the globe as well. Given the opportunity, women and minorities have
produced world-class data journalism. The world needs more of them, along with anyone else who wants to treat data as a
source.14) Be mindful of data-ism and bad data. Embrace skepticism.Journalism will survive the death or diminishment of
its institutions, as the Tow Center’s report on post-industrial journalism explored.357technology, data, and narrative skills into
their work will play critical roles in societies around the world, from holding the powerful accountable to connecting people
with information. As people struggle to make sense of what matters or is true in a tsunami of new media, data journalism
will be held up as a way to provide trustworthy insights to debunk pseudoscience, propaganda, misinformation, and online
rumor. Just as yellow journalism, penny papers, and tabloids created a market opportunity that led to the creation of a more
rigorous, ostensibly objective brand of journalism at the New York Times 160 years ago, today’s fast-moving, chaotic media
environment creates opportunities to publish data journalism as a corrective to punditry.There are rocks and stormy waters
ahead here, however, created by bad data journalism. The early 21st century has seen the growth of “data-ism,”358where
knowledge can be derived through analysis of huge amounts of data now generated by various sources.359antecedents in
variants of positivism, the philosophy of science that holds information derived from logical (algorithmic) and mathematical
analysis of data and sensory experience is the source of authoritative knowledge; and scientism, the belief that that the
scientific method can be applied universally. All have a critical weakness: Bad data, biased data, and flawed experiments
can and will be used ignorantly or cynically to twist the truth, mislead, or misinform, even by journalists who wish to do the
opposite. Even good data and solid research may be misrepresented or mistaken, a risk that will grow if journalists are
pushed to create data visualizations or analyses without training in information design, statistics, and social science. Data
has led many numbers-driven executives astray, in business, government, media, or academia.360journalists to interrogate
data just as they would human sources, checking facts and assumptions, comparing results, and documenting the process
and results of their investigations as a social scientist or biologist would. Complemented by human wisdom and intuition,
data journalism still won’t save the world or news, but it will help us all understand it better.
IX. Appendices
Author’s Biography
Alexander B. Howard is a writer and editor based in Washington, D.C. From August 2013 to May 2014, he was a fellow at
the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. He is a columnist at TechRepublic; the founder of “E Pluribus
Unum,” a blog focused on open government and technology; and a contributor to TechPresident, among other publications.
In 2013, Howard was a fellow at the Networked Transparency Policy Project in the Ash Center for Democratic Governance
and Innovation at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Previously, he was the Washington
correspondent for Radar at O’Reilly Media, where he chronicled the emergence of open data and open government
movements around the world. Howard has been recognized by Washingtonian Magazine as one of Washington’s
“TechTitans,” a “respected trend-spotter and chronicler of government’s use of new media.” He has appeared on air as an
analyst for Al Jazeera English, WHYY, NPR, Washington Post TV, and a guest on The Kojo Nnamdi Show multiple times.
Howard is a member of the government of Canada’s independent advisory panel on open government. Prior to joining
O’Reilly, he was the associate editor of SearchCompliance.com and WhatIs.com at TechTarget, where he wrote about how
the laws and regulations that affect information technology are changing, spanning the issues of online identity, data
protection, risk management, electronic privacy and IT security, and the broader topics of online culture and enterprise
technology.Howard has also contributed to the National Journal, The Daily Beast, NextGov, Forbes, Buzzfeed, Slate, The
Atlantic, Huffington Post, Govfresh, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable,TechPresident, CBS News’ What’s Trending, Govloop,
Governing People, and the Association for Computer Manufacturing, amongst others.Howard has been a keynote speaker,
moderator, and panelist at numerous conferences in Washington and beyond, including the Web 2.02.0Strata, GOSCON,
AMP Summit, National Democratic Institute, Tech@State, CAR/IRE, the State of the Net, and the Open Government
Partnership’s annual conference, among others. In 2011, he was Visiting Faculty at the Poynter Institute.He also delivered
remarks and/or moderated discussions at Harvard University, Stanford University, Columbia University, New York Law
School, Alfred University, the Mona School of Business at the University of The West Indies, the American Association for
the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the U.S. National Archives, NIST, the Club de Madrid, the Cato Institute, the New
America Foundation, the World Bank, the U.S. Department of State, and the U.S. Social Security Administration. Howard, a
graduate of Colby College in Waterville, ME, lives in the District of Columbia with his wife, young daughter, old greyhound,
and a growing collection of pots and cast iron pans.
Endnotes
1 C. Andersen, E. Bell, and C. Shirky, “Post Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present,” Tow Center for Digital
Journalism, 27 Nov. 2012, http://towcenter.org/research/post-industrial-journalism/ (accessed 21 May 2014).

2 A. Howard, “Knight Winners Are Putting Data to Work,” O’Reilly Media, 26 Sep. 2012,
http://strata.oreilly.com/2012/09/knight-news-challenge-data-winners.html (accessed 21 May 21 2014).

3 A. Howard, “Tracking the Data Storm Around Hurricane Sandy,” O’Reilly Media, 29 Oct. 2012,
http://strata.oreilly.com/2012/10/real-time-data-storm-in-hurricane-sandy-open-data.html (accessed 21 May 2014).

4 Sunlight Foundation, “No Justice Roberts, the Internet Can’t do Government’s Job,” Sunlight Foundation Blog, 12 Apr.
2014, http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2014/04/02/no-justice-roberts-the-internet-cant-do-governments-job/ (accessed 21
May 2014).

5 A. Howard, “Data for the Public Good,” O’Reilly Media, 22 Feb. 2012, http://strata.oreilly.com/2012/02/data-public-
good.html (accessed 21 May 2014).

6 M. Loukides, “What is Data Science?” O’Reilly Radar, 2 Jun. 2010, http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/06/what-is-data-

science.html (accessed 21 May 2014).

7 S. Rogers, “Data Journalism Only Matters When it’s Transparent,” Mother Jones, 24 Apr. 2014,
http://www.motherjones.com/media/2014/04/vox-538-upshot-open-data-missing (accessed 21 2014).

8 A. Howard, “ NPR News App Team Experiments With Making Data-driven Public Media With the Public,” Tow Center for
Digital Journalism, 30 Aug. 2013, http://towcenter.org/blog/npr-news-app-team-experiments-with-making-data-driven-public-
media-with-the-public/ (accessed 21 May 2014).

9 M. Slocum, “The Work of Data Journalism: Find, Clean, Analyze, Create…Repeat,” O’Reilly Media, 15 Sep. 2011,
http://strata.oreilly.com/2011/09/data-journalism-process-guardian.html (accessed 21 May 2014).

10 L. Bounegru, L. Chambers, and J. Gray, eds., The Data Journalism Handbook (Sebastopol, Calif.: O’Reilly Media,
2012), http://datajournalismhandbook.org/ (accessed 21 May 2014).

11 Ibid.

12 S. Rogers, “Facts Are Sacred: the Power of Data,” Guardian, 6 Jan. 2012,
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/jan/06/facts-sacred-guardian-shorts-ebook (accessed 21 May 2014).

13 Ibid.

14 J. Townend, “#DataJourn Part 1: A New Conversation (Please Re-tweet),” Editors Blog, Journalism.co.uk, 8 Apr. 2009,
http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/2009/04/08/datajourn-part-1-a-new-conversation-please-re-tweet/ (accessed 21 May 2014).

15 P. Bradshaw, “Model for the 21st Century Newsroom pt.6: New Journalists for New Information Flows,” Online
Journalism Blog, 4 Dec. 2008, http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2008/12/04/model-for-the-21st-century-newsroom-pt6-new-
journalists-for-new-information-flows/ (accessed 21 May 2014).

16 T. Hirst, “Personal Recollections of the ”Data Journalism’ Phrase,” OUsefulInfo, 29 Apr. 2014,
http://blog.ouseful.info/2014/04/29/personal-recollections-of-the-data-journalism-phrase/ (accessed 21 May 2014).

17 M. Ingram, “The Golden Age of Data Journalism?” Nieman Journalism Lab, May 2009,
http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/05/the-golden-age-of-computer-assisted-reporting-is-at-hand/ (accessed 21 May 2014).

18 A. Holovaty, “A Fundamental Way Newspaper Sites Need to Change,” adrianholovaty.com, 2006,

http://www.holovaty.com/writing/fundamental-change/ (accessed 21 May 2014).
19 M. Waite, “Announcing PolitiFact,” mattwaite.com, 22 Aug. 2007,
http://www.mattwaite.com/posts/2007/aug/22/announcing-politifact/ (accessed 21 May 2014).

20 “PolitiFact Wins Pulitzer,” PolitiFact, 20 April 2009, http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2009/apr/20/politifact-

wins-pulitzer/ (accessed 21 May 2014).

21 C. Arthur, “Analysing Data is the Future for Journalists, Says Tim Berners-Lee,” Guardian, 22 Nov. 2010,
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/nov/22/data-analysis-tim-berners-lee (accessed 21 May 2014).

22 UK Parliament, “Pay and Expenses for MPs,” Parliament.uk, April 2014, http://www.parliament.uk/about/mps-and-
lords/members/pay-mps/ (accessed 21 May 2014).

23 C. Arthur, “Visualising MP Expenses,” Guardian, 1 Apr. 2009,

http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2009/apr/01/mps-expenses-houseofcommons (accessed 21 May 2014).

24 S. Rogers, “Wikileaks’ Afghanistan War Logs: How our Data Journalism Operation Worked,” Guardian, 27 Jul. 2010,
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/jul/27/wikileaks-afghanistan-data-datajournalism (accessed 21 May
2014).

25 A. Howard, “In the Age of Big Data, Data Journalism has Profound Importance for Society,” Radar, O’Reilly Media,
March 2012, http://strata.oreilly.com/2012/03/rise-of-the-data-journalists.html (accessed 21 May 2014).

26 D. Kaplan, “Data Journalists from 20 Countries Gather for Cutting-Edge NICAR14,” Global Investigative Journalism
Network, 3 Mar. 2014, http://gijn.org/2014/03/03/data-journalists-from-20-countries-gather-for-cutting-edge-nicar14/
(accessed 21 May 2014).

27 Associated Press, “The Overview Project,” May 2014, http://overview.ap.org/completed-stories/ (accessed 21 May
2014).

28 N. Diakopoulas, “Algorithmic Accountability Reporting: On the Investigation of Black Boxes,” Tow Center for Digital
Journalism, February 2014, http://towcenter.org/algorithmic-accountability-reporting-reverse-engineering-practice/
(accessed 21 May 2014).

29 A. Howard, “Publishers Can Afford Data Journalism, Says ProPublica’s Scott Klein,” Tow Center for Digital Journalism,
23 April 2014, http://towcenter.org/blog/publishers-can-afford-data-journalism-scott-klein-propublica/ (accessed 21 May
2014).

30 M. Cox, “The Development of Computer-Assisted Reporting,” School of Communication, University of Miami,

http://com.miami.edu/car/cox00.htm (accessed 22 May 2014).

31 A. Bochannek, “Have You Got a Prediction for Us, UNIVAC?” Computer History Museum, December 2012,
http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/have-you-got-a-prediction-for-us-univac/ (accessed 22 May 2014).

32 P. Meyer, The New Precision Journalism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), http://www.unc.edu/
pmeyer/book/ (foreword accessed 22 May 2014).

33 G. Younge, “The Detroit Riots of 1967 Hold Some Lessons for the UK,” Guardian, 5 Sep. 2011,
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/sep/05/detroit-riots-1967-lessons-uk (accessed 22 May 2014).

34 E. Bowen, “Press: New Paths to Buried Treasure,” Time, 7 July 1986,

http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,961680-1,00.html (accessed 22 May 2014).

35 Pulitzer.org, “The Pulitzer Prizes, 2014,” 2014, http://www.pulitzer.org/citation/2014-Investigative-Reporting (accessed

22 May 2014).

36 S. MacGregor, “CAR Hits the Mainstream,” Columbia Journalism Review, 18 Mar. 2013,
http://www.cjr.org/data~p~oints/computer~a~ssisted~r~eporting.php?page=all (accessed 23 May 2014).

37 D. Kaplan, “Global Investigative Journalism: Strategies for Support,” Center for International Media Assistance, National
Endowment for Democracy, 13 Jan. 2014, http://cima.ned.org/publications/global-investigative-journalism-strategies-
support (accessed 23 May 2014).

38 Committee to Protect Journalists, “Attacks on the Press,” https://www.cpj.org/2014/02/attacks-on-the-press-in-2013.php

(accessed 22 May 2014).

39 Reporters Without Borders, “World Press Freedom Index 2014,” http://rsf.org/index2014/en-index2014.php (accessed
22 May 2014).

40 L. Haddou, “Press Freedom 2014: The Global Picture,” Guardian, 1 May 2014,
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/may/01/press-freedom-2014-the-global-picture (accessed 22 May 2014).

41 Newsday Media Group LLC, “An Open-source Django App to Survey Politicians,”
https://github.com/newsday/newstools-checkup (accessed 22 May 2014).

42 A. Howard, “Knight Winners are Putting Data to Work: Open Elections,” O’Reilly Media, 22 Sep. 2012,
http://strata.oreilly.com/2012/09/knight-news-challenge-data-winners.html\#openelections (accessed 23 May 2014).

43 A. Howard, “Knight Winners are Putting Data to Work: Census Reporter,” O’Reilly Media, 22 Sep. 2012,
http://strata.oreilly.com/2012/09/knight-news-challenge-data-winners.html\#censusIRE (accessed 23 May 2014).

44 A. Howard, “ NPR News App Team Experiments With Making Data-driven Public Media With the Public,” Tow Center for
Digital Journalism, 30 Aug. 2013, http://towcenter.org/blog/npr-news-app-team-experiments-with-making-data-driven-public-
media-with-the-public/ (accessed 21 May 2014).

45 S. Johnson, “The Internet? We Built That,” New York Times, 21 Sep. 2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/magazine/the-internet-we-built-that.html (accessed 23 May 2014).

46 S. Johnson, “Peer Power, from Potholes to Patents,” Wall Street Journal,

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10000872396390444165804578008511493789642 (accessed May 23, 2014).

47 A. Howard, “Knight Winners are Putting Data to Work: Census Reporter,” (22Science to All the News That’s Fit to Print,”
Tow Center for Digital Journalism, 7 Apr. 2014, http://towcenter.org/blog/applying-data-science-to-all-the-news-thats-fit-to-
print/ (accessed 23 May 2014).

49 S. Klein, “ProPublica News Apps Style Guide,” GitHub, 27 Apr. 2014,

https://github.com/propublica/guides/blob/master/news-apps.md (accessed 23 May 2014).

50 H. Vinter, “Scott Klein: News Apps Don’t Just Tell a Story, They Tell Your Story,” World Association of Newspapers and
News Publishers, 24 Aug. 2011, http://www.wan-ifra.org/articles/2011/08/24/scott-klein-news-apps-dont-just-tell-a-story-
they-tell-your-story (accessed 23 May 2014).

51 ProPublica, “Treatment Tracker,” 15 May 2014, http://projects.propublica.org/treatment/ (accessed 23 May 2014).

52 R.G. Jones and C. Ornstein, “Top Billing: Meet the Docs who Charge Medicare Top Dollar for Office Visits,” ProPublica,
15 May 2014, http://www.propublica.org/article/billing-to-the-max-docs-charge-medicare-top-rate-for-office-visits (accessed
23 May 2014).

53 N. Diakopoulas, “Algorithmic Accountability Reporting: On the Investigation of Black Boxes,” Tow Center for Digital
Journalism, February 2014, http://towcenter.org/algorithmic-accountability-reporting-reverse-engineering-practice/
(accessed 21 May 2014).

54 C. Wu, “White House Safety Datapalooza: Bicoastal Safety Data Journalist Workshop,” WhiteHouse.gov, 12 Sep. 2014,
http://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/video/2012/09/14/white-house-safety-datapalooza-bicoastal-safety-data-
journalist-wo (accessed 23 May 2014).

55 N. Diakopoulas, “The Rhetoric of Data,” Tow Center for Digital Journalism, 25 July 2013, http://towcenter.org/blog/the-
rhetoric-of-data/ (accessed 23 May 2014).
56 R. Sambrook, “Journalists Can Learn Lessons From Coders in Developing the Creative Future,” Guardian, 27 April
2014, http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/apr/27/journalists-coders-creative-future (accessed 23 May 2014).

57 B. Keegan, “The Need for Openness in Data Journalism,” briankeegan.com, 7 April 2014,
http://www.brianckeegan.com/2014/04/the-need-for-openness-in-data-journalism/ (accessed 23 May 2014).

58 S. Owens, “A Place for Homicide Watch: Can a Local Blog Fill Some of the Gaps in Washington, D.C.’s Crime
Coverage?” Nieman Journalism Lab, 5 May 2011, http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/05/homicide-watch-can-a-local-blog-fill-
in-the-gaps-of-dcs-homicide-coverage/ (accessed 23 May 2014).

59 L. Amico, “Reporting From Analytics: Example,” One Reporter’s Notebook, 4 May 2011,
http://lauraamico.tumblr.com/post/5196806316/reporting-from-analytics-example (accessed 23 May 2014).

60 S. Myers, “Homicide Watch D.C. Uses Clues in Site Search Queries to ID Homicide Victim,” Poynter, 12 Oct. 2011.
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/149294/homicide-watch-d-c-uses-clues-in-site-search-queries-to-id-homicide-
victim/ (accessed 23 May 2014).

61 L. Amico, “On Deadline: Why Organizing Beats is Just as Important as Large Investigations,” Online News Association,
21 Feb. 2012, http://journalists.org/2012/02/21/on-deadline-why-organizing-beats-is-just-as-important-as-large-
investigations/ (accessed 23 May 2014).

62 L. Indvik, “The Financial Times Has a Secret Weapon: Data,” Mashable, 2 April 2013,
http://mashable.com/2013/04/02/financial-times-john-ridding-strategy/ (accessed 23 May 2014).

63 O. Thomas, “The Data-Driven Future Of Journalism,” ReadWrite, 6 Sep. 2013, http://readwrite.com/2013/09/06/data-

journalism-future (accessed 23 May 2014).

64 McKinsey Global Institute, “The Social Economy: Unlocking Value and Productivity Through Social Technologies,”
McKinsey & Company, 2012, http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/high~t~ech~t~elecoms~i~nternet/the~s~ocial~e~conomy
(accessed 23 May 2014).

65 Pew Research Center, “State of the Media 2013,” Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, 18 May 2013,
http://stateofthemedia.org/2013/overview-5/ (accessed 23 May 2014).

66 Ibid.

67 “Paper Cuts,” 28 Apr. 2013, http://newspaperlayoffs.com/.

68 D. Sinker, “We’re All Living in an EveryBlock World,” dansinker.com, 7 Feb. 2013,

http://dansinker.com/post/42525273840/were-all-living-in-an-everyblock-world (accessed 23 May 2014).

69 J. Sonderman, “NBC Closes Hyperlocal, Data-driven Publishing Pioneer EveryBlock,” Poynter, 2 Feb. 2013,
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/top-stories/203437/nbc-closes-hyperlocal-pioneer-everyblock/ (accessed 23 May 2014).

70 R. Graff, “Journalism’s Biggest Data Experiment, EveryBlock, Relaunches,” Knight Lab, Northwestern University, 31 Jan
2014, http://knightlab.northwestern.edu/2014/01/31/journalisms-biggest-data-experiment-everyblock-relaunches/ (accessed
23 May 2014).

71 A. Chavez, “Why Some Hyperlocal Sites Struggle to Attract Audiences, Generate Revenue,” Poynter, 12 Mar. 2012.
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/top-stories/166190/why-some-hyperlocal-sites-struggle-to-attract-audiences-generate-
revenue/ (accessed 23 May 2014).

72 W. Huntsberry, “Why Hyperlocal Websites Like New Raleigh Can’t Make Money Online,” indyweek.com, 23 Jan. 2013,
http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/why-hyperlocal-websites-like-new-raleigh-cant-make-money-online/Content?
oid=3250659 (accessed 23 May 2014).

73 H. Ji, M. Jurkowitz, and T. Rosenstiel, “The Search for a New Business Model,” Pew Research Journalism Project, 5
Mar. 2012, http://www.journalism.org/2012/03/05/search-new-business-model/.
74 L. Kaufman, “Patch Sites Turn Corner After Sale and Big Cuts,” New York Times, 19 May 2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/19/business/media/patch-sites-turn-corner-after-sale-and-big-cuts.html (accessed 23 May
2014).

75 J. Paxton, “Moving On From Thunderdome,” John Paxton, 2 April 2014,

http://jxpaton.wordpress.com/2014/04/02/moving-on-from-thunderdome/ (accessed 23 May 2014).

76 K. Doctor, “The Newsonomics of Digital First Media’s Thunderdome Implosion (and Coming Sale),” Nieman Journalism
Lab, 2 Apr. 2014, http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/04/the-newsonomics-of-digital-first-medias-thunderdome-implosion-and-
coming-sale/.

77 D. Freid and B. Prieto, “Firearms in the Family,” Digital First Media, 2013, http://data.digitalfirstmedia.com/guns/
(accessed 23 May 2014).

78 “Decoding the Kennedy Assassination,” Digital First Media, 2013, http://data.digitalfirstmedia.com/jfk/ (accessed 23 May
2014).

79 “Bracket Advisor,” New Haven Register, 2014, http://www.bracketadvisor.com/ (accessed 23 May 2014).

80 A. Howard, “Publishers Can Afford Data Journalism Says ProPublica’s Scott Klein,” 23 Apr. 2014,
http://towcenter.org/blog/publishers-can-afford-data-journalism-scott-klein-propublica/ (accessed 23 May 2014).

81 R. Yu, “Booming Market for Data-driven Journalism,” USA Today, 17 Mar. 2014,
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/03/16/data-journalism-on-the-rise/6424671/ (accessed 23 May 2014).

82 Pew Research Center, “The Growth of Digital Reporting,” Pew Research Journalism Project, 26 Mar. 2014,
http://www.journalism.org/2014/03/26/the-growth-in-digital-reporting/ (accessed 23 May 2014).

83 Pew Research Center, “State of the Media 2014,” (26May 2014). 84 L. Moses, “Is There an Ad Model for Explainer
Journalism?” Digiday, 22 Apr. 2014, http://digiday.com/publishers/ad-model-explainer-journalism/ (accessed 23 May 2014).

85 L. Bounegru, L. Chambers, and J. Gray, eds., 2012.

86 B. Mullens and C. Weaver, “Open-Government Laws Fuel Hedge-Fund Profits,” Wall Street Journal, 23 Sep 2013,
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324202304579053033444112314 (accessed 23 May 2014).

87 A. Howard, “As Digital Disruption Comes to Africa, Investing in Data Journalism Takes on New Importance,” Radar,
O’Reilly Media, 29 Nov. 2012, http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/11/justin-arenstein-africa-data-journalism.html (accessed 23 May
2014).

88 S. Myers, “New York Times News Apps Team Ventures into Product Development with Olympics Syndication,” Poynter,
8 Aug. 2012, http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/top-stories/184315/new-york-times-news-apps-team-ventures-into-
product-development-with-olympics-syndication/ (accessed 23 May 2014).

89 Associated Press, “AP Products and Services: New Media,” http://www.ap.org/products-services/new-media (accessed
23 May 2014).

90 J. Maher, “London Calling: Winning the Data Olympics,” Source, OpenNews, 25 Apr. 2013,
https://source.opennews.org/en-US/learning/london-calling-winning-data-olympics/ (accessed 23 May 2014).

91 E. Smith, “T-Squared: Three More Years!” Texas Tribune, 5 Nov. 2012. http://www.texastribune.org/2012/11/05/t-
squared-three-more-years/ (accessed 23 May 2014).

92 “The Texas Tribune Higher Education Explorer,” Texas Tribune, http://www.texastribune.org/higher-ed/explore/

(accessed 23 May 2014).

93 “Data Pages | The Texas Tribune,” Texas Tribune, http://www.texastribune.org/library/data/ (accessed 23 May 2014).

94 “Elected Officials Directory | The Texas Tribune,” Texas Tribune, http://www.texastribune.org/directory/ (accessed 23
May 2014).

95 E. Smith, “T-Squared: It’s Only Bidness,” Texas Tribune, 14 Jan. 2013, http://www.texastribune.org/2013/01/14/t-
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141 S. Rogers, “Gun Crime Statistics by U.S. State: Latest Data,” Guardian Datablog, 10 Jan. 2011,
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142 S. Rogers, “The Gun Ownership and Gun Homicides Murder Map of the World,” Guardian Datablog, 22 Jul. 2012,
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143 A. Howard, “UK Cabinet Office Relaunches Data.gov.uk, Releases Open Data White Paper,” Radar, O’Reilly Media, 29
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156 Oakland Police Beat, 2014, http://oaklandpolicebeat.com/ (accessed 23 May 2014).

157 “Open-source Maps of California’s Emergency Medical Agencies,” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 2012,
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162 B. Welsh, “The Times Contributes LAFD Fire Stations to OpenStreetMap,” Los Angeles Times, 6 Dec. 2012,
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163 “Prescriber Checkup,” ProPublica, https://projects.propublica.org/checkup/ (accessed 23 May 2014).

164 The Upshot, New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/upshot/ (accessed 23 May 2014).

165 D. Leonhardt, “Back Story: How We Found the Income Data,” New York Times, 23 Apr. 2014,
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166 A. Cox and J. Katz, “Senate Model Methodology,” New York Times, Apr. 2014,
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168 J. Bourgault, “How the Global Open Data Movement is Transforming Journalism,” Wired, May 2013,
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173 Vox Media, GitHub, https://github.com/voxmedia (accessed 23 May 2014).

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175 D. Kaplan, “Why Open Data Isn’t Enough,” Global Investigative Journalism Network, 2 Apr. 2013,
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176 D. Campbell, “How ICIJ’s Project Team Analyzed the Offshore Files,” International Consortium of Investigative
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178 “Connected China,” Reuters, 2013, http://connectedchina.reuters.com/ (accessed 23 May 2014).

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180 A. Heim, “Poderopedia, a Data Journalism Project to Map the Chilean Elite,” The Next Web, 16 Mar. 2012,
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185 “NASA Satellite Measures Deforestation,” NASA Earth Observatory, 14 Sep. 2005,
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186 G. Faleiros, “Geojournalism Handbook Shows How to Capture Earth Science Knowledge for Reporting,” 24 Sep. 2013,
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188 Oxpeckers Center for Investigative Environmental Journalism, http://oxpeckers.org/ (accessed 23 May 2014).

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190 J. Dorroh, “Data Journalism Site InfoAmazonia Will Add Ground Reporting to its Environmental Coverage,” IJNet, 8
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192 K. Witkin, “La Nación Multimedia Editor: Innovation is the ”Antidote’ to Journalism Crisis,” World News Publishing
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207 A. Howard, “As Digital Disruption Comes to Africa, Investing in Data Journalism Takes on New Importance,” Radar,
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208 “The Challenges Facing Data Journalism in West Africa · Global Voices,” Global Voices, 27 Mar. 2014,
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210 P. Butler, “Data ”Boot Camp’ Helps Kenyan Reporter Expose School Sanitation Woes,” International Center for
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211 R. Miller, “Data Journalism: From Eccentric to Mainstream in Five Years,” Strata Blog, O’Reilly Media, 21 Dec 2012,
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212 McKinsey Global Institute, 2012,

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214 M. Loukides, “Overfocus on Tech Skills Could Exclude the Best Candidates for Jobs,” Radar, O’Reilly Media, 20 Jul.
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215 A. Howard, “Knight Foundation Grants $2 Million for Data Journalism Research,” Radar, O’Reilly Media, 24 May 2012,
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216 A. Howard, “Data Journalism Research at Columbia Aims to Close Data Science Skills Gap,” Radar, O’Reilly Media, 22
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220 ProPublica Nerd Blog, http://www.propublica.org/nerds (accessed 23 May 2014).

221 J. Manyika, et al., “Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity, McKinsey,” Global
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223 Northwestern University Knight Lab, http://knightlab.northwestern.edu/ (accessed 24 May 2014).

224 A. Howard, “Knight Winners Are Putting Data to Work: Open Elections,” 22 Sep. 2012,
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225 A. Howard, “2014 NICAR Conference Highlights Data Journalism’s Past, Present and Future,” Tow Center for Digital
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226 Free Online Training Series in Data Journalism, Knight Digital Media Center at UC Berkeley, 2013,
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229 “Data Driven Journalism Course (MOOC)”Doing Journalism with Data,” European Journalism Centre,
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233 R. McGuire, “The Modest MOOC: How the Knight Center For Journalism Put On 5 Classes In 10 Months,” MOOC
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235 H. Fallas, “Data-Driven Journalism’s Secrets,” ProPublica, 4 Nov. 2013, http://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/data-

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236 J. Rees, “Massive Online Courses Are Terrible for Students and Professors,” Slate, 25 Jul. 2013,
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237 T. Lewin, “After Setbacks, Online Courses Are Rethought,” New York Times, 11 Dec. 2013,
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238 T. Lewin and J Markoff, “California to Give Web Courses a Big Trial,” New York Times, 14 Jan. 2013,
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239 E. Collins, “PRELIMINARY SUMMARY SJSU+ AUGMENTED ONLINE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT PILOT
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240 R. Talbert, “What’s Different About the Inverted Classroom?” Chronicle of Higher Education, 6 Aug. 2013,
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241 R. Schuman, “If Even the Genius Godfather of MOOCs Can’t Make Them Work, Can Anyone?” Slate, 13 Nov. 2013,
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243 A. Sperber, “In Tanzania, MOOCs Seen as Too Western,” TechPresident, 22 Nov. 2013,
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244 R. McGuire, “The Modest MOOC: How the Knight Center For Journalism Put On 5 Classes In 10 Months,” MOOC
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258 R. Bartlett, “Cardiff University Introduces ”Computational Journalism’ Masters,” Journalism.cok.uk, 16 Apr. 2014,
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263 J. Cronin, “How Temple is Helping Ensure the Future of Data Journalism,” Temple University, Apr. 2014,
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266 J. Merrill, “Heart of Nerd Darkness: Why Updating Dollars for Docs Was So Difficult,” ProPublica, 25 Mar. 2013,
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276 J. Merrill, 25 Mar. 2013.

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281 D. Sinker, “Journo-Coders Take NICAR 12 to a Whole New Level,” PBS Idea Lab, 29 Feb 2012,
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282 Civic Apps, Code for America, http://commons.codeforamerica.org/apps (accessed 24 May 2014).

283 M. Sill, “The Case for Open Journalism Now,” USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, Dec. 2011,
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284 A. LaFrance, “New York Times, Washington Post Developers Team up to Create Open Elections Database,” Nieman
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286 A. Howard, “Knight Winners are Putting Data to Work: Census IRE,” 22 Sep. 2012,
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302 “Recovery Tracker,” ProPublica, http://projects.propublica.org/recovery/ (accessed 24 May 2014).

303 “Toxic Waters,” New York Times, http://projects.nytimes.com/toxic-waters (accessed 24 May 2014).

304 “Congressional Bills and Votes,” New York Times, http://politics.nytimes.com/congress (accessed 24 May 2014).

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307 P. Span, “Shopping for a Nursing Home? There’s a Tool for That,” New York Times, 6 Sep. 2012,
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308 “Eye on the Stimulus,” ProPublica, http://www.propublica.org/ion/stimulus (accessed 24 May 2014).

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312 D. Carr, “Guns, Maps and Data That Disturb,” New York Times, 14 Jan. 2013,
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313 S. Roudman, “When it Comes to Disclosure, New NY Gun Control Law is Shooting a Blank,” TechPresident, 16 Jan.
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315 L. Incalcaterra, “Many Handgun Permits in N.Y. County Have Outdated Data,” USA Today, 27 Jan. 2013,
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316 J. Goodman, “Newspaper Takes Down Map of Gun Permit Holders,” New York Times, 19 Jan. 2013,
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317 A. Tompkins, “Where the Journal News Went Wrong in Publishing Names, Addresses of Gun Owners,” Poynter, 7 Jan.
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318 J. Sonderman, “Programmers Explain How to Turn Data into Journalism & Why That Matters,” Poynter, 13 Jan. 2013,
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319 Ibid.

320 J. Harris, et al., “A Deadly Day In Baghdad,” New York Times, 24 Oct. 2010,
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321 C. Andersen, E. Bell, and C. Shirky, 27 Nov. 2012.

322 A. Howard, “Four Key Trends Changing Digital Journalism and Society,” Radar, O’Reilly Media, 28 Sep. 2012,
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323 J. McClure, “Rendering Real-time,” IRE, 25 Feb. 2012, http://ire.org/blog/2012-car-conference-

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324 A. Boiko-Weyrauch, “From Where? Validating Data in the Real World,” IRE, 25 Feb. 2012, http://ire.org/blog/2012-car-
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325 M. Cruz, “Improving News coverage with Data,” IRE, 25 Feb. 2012, http://ire.org/blog/2012-car-conference-
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326 B. Adair, P. Kamalakanthan, and M. Stencel, “The Goat Must Be Fed,” Duke Reporters’ Lab at the DeWitt Wallace
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327 H. Finberg, “Journalism Needs the Right Skills to Survive,” Poynter, 13 Apr. 2014, http://www.poynter.org/how-
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330 R. Somaiya, “With App and Premium Plan, The Times Expands Online Offerings,” New York Times, 27 Mar. 2014,
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331 “How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk,” New York Times, 20 Dec. 2013,
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332 J. Benton, “The New York Times has a (lovely) new cooking site,” Nieman Journalism Lab, 14 May 2014,
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333 T. Bouza, “Text is a ”New Frontier’ in Data Journalism, Says Head of the IRE,” Computational Reporting, 2 Feb. 2012,
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334 D. Cohen, “Digital Journalism and Digital Humanities,” 8 Feb. 2012, http://www.dancohen.org/2012/02/08/digital-
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335 M. Lorenz, N. Kayser-Bril, and G. McGhee, “News Organizations Must Become Hubs of Trusted Data in a Market
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336 N. Perlroth, “Hackers in China Attacked The Times for Last 4 Months,” New York Times, 21 Jan. 2013,
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337 L. Rainie and K. Zuckuhr, “E-Reading Rises as Device Ownership Jumps,” Pew Research Centers Internet American
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338 “NPR Ethics Handbook,” http://ethics.npr.org/ (accessed 25 May 2014).

339 M. Chalabi, “Mapping Kidnappings in Nigeria (Updated),” DataLab, FiveThirtyEight, 13 May 2014,
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340 D. Solomon, “GDELT and the Problem of Decontextualized Data,” Source, OpenNews, 14 May 2014,
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341 B. Keegan, “The Need for Openness in Data Journalism,” briankeegan.com, 7 Apr. 2014,
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343 C. Donovan, “Hacking in the Newsroom? What Journalists Should Know About the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,”
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344 A. Zeng, “Hack or Hacker? Know When it is Appropriate to Access Data and When it is Not,” Knight Lab, Northwestern
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346 S. Gallagher, “Reporters Use Google, Find Breach, Get Branded as ”Hackers,’ ” Ars Technica, 21 May 2013,
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350 E. Zuckerman, “What Comes After Election Monitoring? Citizen Monitoring of Infrastructure,” My Heart’s in Accra, 26
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353 R. Prince, “Diversity Protests Get Startups’ Attention,” Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, 14 Mar. 2014,
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354 “An Open Letter to News Media Startups,” National Association of Black Journalists, 13 Mar. 2014,
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355 “An Analysis of Women’s Participation in Information Technology Patenting,” National Center for Women in Information
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356 C. Rampell, “I Am Woman, Watch Me Hack,” New York Times, 27 Oct. 2013,
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358 D. Brooks, “The Philosophy of Data,” New York Times, 5 Feb. 2013,
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