Data stories. Rethinking journalistic storytelling in the context of data journalism

Abstract

This paper addresses the increased use of data and data visualization in newsrooms, which has yielded a new form of storytelling: data stories. In journalism, data stories or storytelling with data are the new buzzwords. What journalists mean by data stories, however, remains blurred. We use the emergence of data stories as an opportunity to describe the changing understanding of journalistic storytelling. Based on interviews with editorial leaders, data journalists, developers, and designers in 26 major news organizations in Europe, we focus on practitioners’ perspective on data stories. In our empirical study, we identified seven key features of journalistic data stories: data, communicative function, the textual-visual relationship, structure and design of a story, interactivity, and the meta-story. These findings contribute to rethinking the narrative approach to journalism.

Situated data analysis: a new method for analysing encoded power relationships in social media platforms and apps

“…2 Computational journalism provides some of the best examples of data visualisations that are not automated, but carefully researched and hand-crafted, making clear arguments based on data. For discussions of a range of data visualisations in journalism and other communication practices (see for instance, Engebretsen and Kennedy, 2020;Weber et al, 2018). 3 Andrejevic writes that "The code of the machine is purely operational-it does not refer to an absent referent but collapses the signifier into the signified: this is the logic of code and of the operational image/symbol" (p. 128).…”

Journalistic innovation: How new formats of digital journalism are perceived in the academic literature

“…However, much work remains to be done in relation not only to this format, but also to other less studied formats such as structured journalism (Freixa et al, 2017), augmented reality news (Azkunaga et al, 2019;Parra et al, 2017. ), visual and photojournalism (Thomson and Greenwood, 2017;Láb and Štefaniková, 2017), data journalism (Young et al, 2018;Weber et al, 2018), and newsgames (Rojas-Torrijos, 2020;Plewe and Fürsich, 2018).…”

Toward a humanistic turn for a more ethical journalism

“…In recent years, as computing has become ubiquitous and a positivist zeal has captured the field, the social scientific model of journalism has congealed into common sense. Journalism’s present-day advocates and futurists place increasing stock not in the narrative, human-driven storytelling that was a hallmark of reporting through much of the 19th and the 20th centuries (Barnhurst and Mutz, 1997), but rather in building, collecting, interpreting, and managing databases (Anderson et al, 2012; Fink and Anderson, 2015; Lewis, 2015; Weber et al, 2018).…”

“…In the present day, journalism is ‘strongly influenced by social science discourse’ (Steensen, 2017: 41) – with heightened attention to data-driven reporting methods (Lewis, 2015; Weber et al, 2018), ‘an increasing tendency to portray events as abstract metrics and decreasing attention to personal, lived anecdotes’ (Lowrey and Hou, 2018: 1), and a movement to delegate parts of the newsgathering and sensemaking process to machines (Wu et al, 2019). Similarly, in academia, ‘The last few years have seen an explosion in data journalism-oriented scholarship’ (Fink and Anderson, 2015: 467).…”