Overview
- What is data journalism?
- Challenges
- How it helps
- My focus
- Discussion Questions
What is data journalism? - gathering, organizing, and publishing data to support the creation of acts of journalism (from reading). It’s a combination of treating data as a source that can be gathered and validated, humanizing it in a way, and the application of statistics, and visualizations to present it.
Challenges: Personal privacy, security, requires expansion of knowledge & fact-checking. One of the biggest challenges is presenting the data in a way that makes sense to the public that are truthful because not all data sources are completely factual as one would think.
Help: By using computing power and calculating algorithms data journalism allows for for new forms of delivering reports and analysis's. It enables investigative journalists to pinpoint trends, and explore them even further while also seeing how users are interacting with their stories which can in turn impact the way they implement their coverage in the future.
Focus: The public interacts with big data more than they would even think
“Data Selfie” App.
It’s pretty obvious that Facebook collects information based on your browsing habits in relation to your political, sexual, religious orientations and even personality traits. Now there’s a plug-in app created by MFA students that “crawls users Facebook activity to create a profile similar to what advertisers see, following anything the user types (even if it’s not posted) as well as scrolling patterns, likes, and other interactions with the network.”
Snapchat
A transparency report recently surfaced and it openly revealed that Snapchat complied with the majority of US government requests of user information, around 92% of 375 requests that were made in the form of subpoenas. It’s not specified what information was exactly handed over, however the company notes that it retains logs of previous messages sent and received. The logs contain meta-data about the messages but not the content.
Questions:
What are your thoughts on programs like “Data Selfie”? Is this something journalists/newsrooms could use in terms of collecting data on their users? Would it change how they cover topics?
Many news sources such as ESPN, National Geographic, Buzzfeed, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal use Snapchat. After hearing about the Snapchat story how do you feel this will effect journalism, if at all?
Sources
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