5 takeaways:

➀ Data journalism is evolving as accountability data journalism. “For a very long time there was an assumption that somehow if journalists just published data, the democracy would happen,” said Eva Constantaras, data editor for Internews & Lighthouse Reports, who has launched data journalism projects around the world.  “And then we found out … actually, no, there’s all these steps in between to transform data into something that would actually be useful to citizens.” The lesson learned over the past decade by data journalists in countries such as Pakistan, Afghanistan and Kenya is “corruption is not really news,” Constantaras said. “If you use data just to uncover corruption, that’s not going to be enough to really affect policy, to really get citizens involved in the conversations.” The pandemic has brought that shift to Western media as well, Constantaras said. “Yes, people want data, but they want it in an accessible format in a way that allows them to push for greater accountability,” she said.

➁ Question the assumption that technology is a panacea to society — or journalism.  The belief is now under fire from journalists and scholars like Meredith Broussard, who branded it “technochauvinism.” European data journalists who documented the huge number of deaths of migrants in the Mediterranean instead saw a hardening of public attitudes against the refugees “No matter how many data dashboards we have, no matter how many cool interactive visualizations, a lot of the problems that we were seeing were not going away and our data stories weren’t having as much traction as we wanted,” Constantaras said.

➂ Use data collection and reporting as the beginning of “evergreen” projects that power ongoing investigations into the impact on people’s lives. Small newsrooms may do better to focus on datasets on education or health that can be revisited for multiple stories that explore the causes and the impact of the story on daily lives, Constantaras advised. “Yes, maybe The New York Times or The Guardian can afford to do a single data collection project for a single interactive. But what we’re looking for more and more is these evergreen projects… You can build off the database and tell a new story about environmental degradation, or about inequality that you can come back to again and again.” Data can power beat reporting that builds public understanding of why a system is failing. “One story is not going to be enough to help the public understands these really thorny issues,” she said.

➃ Share your data – and your code. Constantaras, who judges the prestigious Sigma Awards for data journalism, said judges are favoring projects that open the data for other journalists to use. Some awards – though not yet Sigma – require journalists to document their research and share their data for others to verify their reporting. “Having a GitHub account and documenting everything that you’ve done with the data is really important,” she said. So is copying the methods of projects that had an impact on public opinion in other parts of the world. “If it’s a project that worked really well in Kenya, we try in Afghanistan,” she said “If it works well in California, it might work in Iowa.”

➄ Develop a hypothesis and use data to prove or disprove it. Constantaras calls it “interviewing your data,” and rattled off a list of questions journalists might ask: Are you being very specific about what you’re measuring? Who is actually being impacted by this problem? Are some groups more vulnerable than others? What is the cause? Whose fault is it? Does the data actually show us who’s responsible for creating this problem? Who’s making it worse?  Finally, “does the data tell us anything about what a viable solution to the problem looks like?” she said. “If you have questions in all of these categories, you have a really solid well-rounded investigation.”

Speaker:

This program was funded by the Evelyn Y. Davis Foundation. NPF is solely responsible for the content.