If I was studying [journalism] today, I would go get a master’s in statistics, and maybe do a bunch of accounting courses and then write from that perspective. I think that’s the way to survive. The role of the generalist is diminishing. Journalism has to get smarter.
As “Journalism in the Age of Data” shows, journalism isn’t just about reporting and writing well. That’s a given. Now practitioners should be able to work in a variety of platforms and mediums, even understand how to code. They really are many things: videographers, editors, storytellers, designers, coders, not just strictly reporters.
As a reader of the New York Times for many years, I got very excited when I saw infographics in the video that I had read years ago, like Netflix rentals by geography (fascinating) and the daily time breakdown. I learned a lot while watching this video, including a lot of tools used, like ProtoViz and Google Charts. I was really glad the last section in the video was specifically devoted to the tools used to crunch the data and to present it – because it’s all well and good to understand the principles behind data visualization, but how does a person actually take it and make it look pretty?
I had friends tell me not to go to journalism school because it wouldn’t be worth it. Once I actually started as a full-time journalist, however, I saw the value in journalism school, and now that I know that they learn tools like flash and basic coding – well, journalism school is nothing like what people expect. Modern journalism is not just about news value and telling a story; it’s figuring out how best to tell that story, through a combination of tools, using both text, sound, video, graphics and images, and on what platform.
Many of the professionals interviewed touched on topics that we briefly discussed in class: typography, clarity, and of course, data in context. I think this is really important, and showcases another reason why data visualization is so important. A statistic alone doesn’t mean anything because there’s nothing to compare it to, and a graph or a chart contextualizes the numbers, and readers can see why this is important.
Many of the journalists (I’ll call them journalists here) from the graphics department at the New York Times spoke of making the data useful and easy to use for users. While it can be an accessory to a story, a lot of times it’s used as a standalone, or more importantly, can be read as a standalone. I also noted, as one women pointed out, that graphics sometimes put the onus on the user for them to decipher, and it’s up to the designers to guide the users sometimes into making certain conclusions. Amanda Cox calls this “hand-holding” the audience. It’s about helping them be engaged in the data, to get them to understand the data, which can be much more successful than just reading a couple of sentences.
This movie reinforced a lot of things that I’ve experienced during my time in this program. One challenge for my group’s infographic was to make sure that it wasn’t just beautiful but also clear and legible and could accurately describe the data. Amanda Cox advocates looking at the data first. For the topic we chose for our infographic, there wasn’t a lot of data – and I found that a surprising hump. I’d rather have the raw numbers than make it up, because I could “see” the waves of the graphs and could visualize how to present it, figure out the narrative we’re trying to tell. Without having the data, we were missing a key component of the project.
In discussing some of the different types of infographics used at the New York Times, the journalists explained that different types of visualizations were used for different purposes. It’s not just about the design aesthetic, and making something look sexy or cool. Do you want the data to offer a macro read or a micro read of the individual numbers? Sometimes the larger picture or the trend is what you want and you can obscure some of the finer points, as in the flowing waveform here; other times, it’s the individual data points that tell the story. We see this in election stories, for example. Election results are drill-down to county, even precinct level. Candidates live or die by polls – collections of numbers of opinion. We talk of number of Twitter followers and Facebook likes, even though sometimes the raw numbers are meaningless. Again, it’s about figuring out the narrative.
Watching “Journalism in the Age of Data,” I could really see how everything we’re learning in all our classes so far flows together. Usability principles, just like aesthetic principles, need to be in place for users to understand how to approach a web property, and tools like Flash can be used to present the data in an interactive way.
Data is definitely hot. It’s where people think the future is. The journalists interviewed spoke of journalism moving in this direction, becoming statistically rich articles, data-driven pieces. Using resources like data.gov, data is out there – we just need people like journalists and statisticians – to parse through it, make sense of it and figure out what the story is and how to tell it.
The IBM researchers Martin Wallenberg and Fernanda Viégas that open the documentary talk about the “democratization of data” and later Wattenberg says data can “promote openness as a fact of its existence.” This applies to developments like the Quantified Self movement, where numbers can be used to motivate and educate people on changing their habits. It’s caught on particularly in the health and healthcare fields. Like Nicholas Felton, whose Feltron reports I’ve been a fan of for a few years ever since I first heard of them through the New York Times, data crunching can be about the most micro of things – the mundane details of a person’s life – turning raw data into a narrative of some sort, finding the patterns and making changes.
Liberating data can also be used to tell a larger story, which is how most people view the concept of “democratization of data.” Like the Crimespotting database spotlighted in the movie, David Carr of the New York Times wrote about similar site a few weeks ago: Homicide Watch, which tracks homicides in Washington, D.C. Either way, the tools available now means that data that’s buried in a database, or numbers that people don’t think about but could make a difference, can be liberated from their confining structures. As Eric Rodenbeck said, it’s the “idea of enabling discovery, of being able to look at the data and discover things in it that you wouldn’t necessary know what to look for.”
Watching this documentary also gave me a lead for a capstone project. I want to do original reporting, and this made me think about working in data visualizations, interactive maps or other forms of showcasing data. I can see tying this in to my literature review (the Internet as a motivational tool, using quantitative methods), as well as using many of the other principles and concepts learned throughout the Interactive Media program.