Journalism

J Journalism methodologies to achieve the objectives of jour- nalism. Although big data offer many opportuni- Brian E. Weeks1, Trevor Diehl2, Brigitte Huber2 ties for journalists to report the news in novel and and Homero Gil de Zúñiga2 interesting ways, critics have noted data journal- 1 Communication Studies Department, University ism also faces potential obstacles that must be of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA considered. 2 Media Innovation Lab (MiLab), Department of Communication, University of Vienna, Wien, Austria Origins of Journalism and Big Data Contemporary data journalism is rooted in the The Pew Research Center notes that journalism is work of reporters like Philip Meyer, Elliot Jaspin, a mode of communication that provides the public Bill Dedman, and Stephen Doig. In his 1973 verified facts and information in a meaningful book, Meyer introduced the concept of “precision context so that citizens can make informed judg- journalism” and advocated applying social sci- ments about society. As aggregated, large-scale ence methodology to investigative reporting prac- data have become readily available and the prac- tices. Meyer argued that journalists needed to tice of journalism has increasingly turned to big employ the same tools as scientific researchers: data to help fulfill this mission. Journalists have databases, spreadsheets, surveys, and computer begun to apply a variety of computational and analysis techniques. statistical techniques to organize, analyze, and Based on the work of Meyer, computer- interpret these data, which are then used in con- assisted reporting developed as a niche form of junction with traditional news narratives and investigative reporting by the late 1980s, as com- reporting techniques. Big data are being applied puters became smaller and more affordable. to all facets of news including politics, health, the A notable example from this period was Bill economy, weather, and sports. Dedman’s Pulitzer Prize winning series “The The growth of “data-driven journalism” has Color of Money.” Dedman obtained lending sta- changed many journalists’ news gathering rou- tistics on computer tape through the federal Free- tines by altering the way news organizations inter- dom of Information Act. His research team act with their audience, providing new forms of combined that data with demographic information content for the public and incorporating new from the US Census. Dedman found widespread # Springer International Publishing AG 2017 L.A. Schintler, C.L. McNeely (eds.), Encyclopedia of Big Data, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-32001-4_124-1 2 Journalism racial discrimination in mortgage lending prac- visuals can also accompany and buttress news tices throughout the Atlanta metropolitan area. articles that rely on traditional reporting methods. Over the last decade, the ubiquity of large, Nate Silver writes that big data analyses pro- often free, data sets has created new opportunities vide several advantages over traditional journal- for journalists to make sense of the world of big ism. They allow journalists to further explain a data. Where precision journalism was once the story or phenomenon through statistical tests that domain of a few investigative reporters, data- explore relationships, to more broadly generalize driven reporting techniques are now a common, information by looking at aggregate patterns over if not necessary, component of contemporary time and to predict future events based on prior news work. News organizations like The Guard- occurrences. For example, using an algorithm ian, The New York Times’ Upshot, and The Texas based on historical polling data, Silver’s website, Tribune represent the mainstream embrace of big FiveThirtyEight (formerly hosted by the New York data. Some websites, like Nate Sliver’s Times), correctly predicted the outcome of the FiveThirtyEight, are entirely devoted to data 2012 US presidential election in all 50 states. journalism. Whereas methods of traditional journalism often lend themselves to more microlevel reporting, more macrolevel and general insights can be How Do Journalists Use Big Data? gleaned from big data. An additional advantage of big data is that, in Big data provide journalists with new and alterna- some cases, they reduce the necessary resources tive ways to approach the news. In traditional needed to report the story. Stories that would journalism, reporters collect and organize infor- otherwise have taken years to produce can be mation for the public, often relying on interviews assembled relatively quickly. For example, and in-depth research to report their stories. Big WikiLeaks provided news organizations nearly data allow journalists to move beyond these stan- 400,000 unreleased US military reports related dard methods and report the news by gathering to the war in Iraq. Sifting through these docu- and making sense of aggregated data sets. This ments using traditional reporting methods would shift in methods has required some journalists and take a considerable amount of time, but news news organizations to change their information- outlets like The Guardian in the UK applied com- gathering routines. Rather than identifying poten- putational techniques to quickly identify and tial sources or key resources, journalists using big report the important stories and themes stemming data must first locate relevant data sets, organize from the leak, including a map noting the location the data in a way that allows them to tell a coher- of every death in the war. ent story, analyze the data for important patterns Big data also allow journalists to interact with and relationships, and, finally, report the news in a their audience to report the news. In a process comprehensible manner. Because of the complex- called crowdsourcing the news, large groups of ity of the data, news organizations and journalists people contribute relevant information about a are increasingly working alongside computer pro- topic, which in the aggregate can be used to grammers, statisticians, and graphic designers to make generalizations and identify patterns and help tell their stories. relationships. For example, in 2013 the One important aspect of big data is visualiza- New York Times website released an interactive tion. Instead of writing a traditional story with quiz on American dialects that used responses to text, quotations, and the inverted-pyramid format, questions about accents and phrases to demon- big data allow journalists to tell their stories using strate regional patterns of speech in the US. The graphs, charts, maps, and interactive features. quiz became the most visited content on the These visuals enable journalists to present website that year. insights from complicated data sets in a format that is easy for the audience to understand. These Journalism 3 Data Sets and Methodologies be designed to automatically write news stories, without a human author. These automated “robot Journalists have a multitude of large data sets and journalists” have been used to produce stories for methodologies at their disposal to create news news outlets like the Associated Press and The stories. Much of the data used is public and orig- Los Angeles Times. Algorithms have also changed inates from government agencies. For example, the way news is delivered, as news aggregators the US government has created a website, data. like Google News employ these methods to col- gov, which offers over 100,000 datasets in a vari- lect and provide users personalized news feed. ety of areas including education, finance, health, jobs, and public safety. Other data, like the WikiLeaks reports, were not intended to be public Limitations of Big Data for Journalism but became primary sources of big data for jour- nalists. News organizations can also utilize publi- Although big data offer numerous opportunities to cally available data from private Internet journalists reporting the news, scholars and prac- companies like Google or social networking titioners have both highlighted several potential sites such as Facebook and Twitter to help report general limitations of these data. As much as big the news. data can help journalists in their reporting, they Once the data are secured, journalists can apply need to make an active effort to contextualize the numerous techniques to make sense of the data. information. Big data storytelling also elicits For example, at a basic level, journalists could get moral and ethical concerns with respect the data a sense of public interest about a topic or issue by collection of individuals as aggregated informa- examining the volume of online searches about tion. These reporting techniques also need to bear the topic or the number of times it was referenced in mind potential data privacy transgressions. in social media. Mapping or charting occurrences of events across regions or countries also offers basic descriptive visualizations of the data. Jour- nalists can also apply content or sentiment ana- Cross-References lyses to get a sense of the patterns of phrases or tone within a set of documents. Further, network ▶ Big Data Storytelling (Digital Storytelling) analyses could be utilized to assess connections ▶ Computational Social Sciences between points in the data set, which could pro- ▶ Data Visualization vide insights on the flow or movement of infor- ▶ Information Society mation, or on power structures. ▶ Interactive Data Visualization These methods can be combined to produce a ▶ Open Data more holistic account of events. For example, journalists at the Associated Press used textual and network analysis to examine almost 400,000 Further Readings WikiLeaks documents related to the Iraq war that identified related clusters of words used in the Pew Research Center. The core principles of journalism. reports. In doing so, they were able to demonstrate http://www.people-press.org/1999/03/30/section-i-the- patterns of content within the documents, which core-principles-of-journalism. Accessed April 2016. Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. shed previously unseen light on what was happen- Understanding data journalism: Overview of resources, ing on the ground during the war. tools and topics. http://journalistsresource.org/reference/ Computer algorithms, and self-taught machine reporting/understanding-data-journalism-overview-tools- learning techniques, also play an important role in topics. Accessed April 2016. Silver, N. What the fox knows. http://fivethirtyeight.com/ the big data journalistic process. Algorithms can features/what-the-fox-knows. Accessed August 2014. 4 Journalism Special Issues and Volumes The ANNALS of American of the American Academy of Digital Journalism–Journalism in an Era of Big Data: Political and Social Science – Toward Computational Cases, concepts, and critiques. v. 3/3 (2015). Social Science: Big Data in Digital Environments. Social Science Computer Review – Citizenship, Social v. 659/1 (2015). Media, and Big Data: Current and Future Research in the Social Sciences (in press).