Towards A Taxonomy of Data Journalism

Abstract

In recent years data journalism has drawn significant attention not only in academic literature but also in the media sector. Data Journalism is a new form of journalism that has gradually appeared over the last decade, driven by the availability of data in digital form. Currently a significant amount of data journalism projects are being produced all over the world. These projects vary considerably in terms of structure and visualization characteristics. As a result of the above it would be interesting to propose a taxonomy of data journalism projects that can help future data journalists to choose the appropriate type of projects that will be suitable for their needs. This classification could be based on certain characteristics of the data journalism projects. The proposed taxonomy will take into account various parameters that play an important role in data journalist projects and especially in the type and the role of the visualization.

The Mediated Data Model of Communication Flow: Big Data and Data Journalism

“…Today's journalists employ many digital tools/services to gather information on breaking news and current events (Veglis & Bratsas, 2017a). Many new types of journalism have emerged, including data journalism (Veglis & Bratsas, 2017b;Gray, Chambers & Bounegru, 2012). This new form of journalism is based on large data sets (Gray, Chambers & Bounegru, 2012;Uskali & Kuutti, 2015).…”

“…Today, data journalism does not appear to have gained momentum since it emerged at the beginning of the 21 st century (Veglis & Bratsas, 2017a;2017b). It is common practice for data journalism stories to be categorised as less interesting stories, published on inside pages, or as infographics, which relatively few people look at (Stoneman, 2015), and even fewer read through.…”

“…Specifically, data journalists extract useful information from the datasets, write articles based on the information and utilise static or interactive visualisations (see path 2 in Figure 1). The main target of data journalism projects is to help the audience understand the significance of the story and/or offer them the ability to explore the data and find information that interests them (Veglis & Bratsas, 2017b).…”

Artificial Intelligence and Automated Journalism: Contemporary Challenges and New Opportunities

“…Technology has become a real driving force for the media sector to produce new digital content in line with the demands of Internet users. Hence, we can say that the dramatic changes in the field of journalism have connected directly to advanced technology tools [5]. In this context; some authors adopt a positive and optimistic view of the leading role of technology in the field of media and journalism.…”

“…Nevertheless, these new forms of journalism despite its relative novelty have drawn significant attention in academic literature and recently become the focus of considerable interest in the media sector. Loosen (2018) highlight of new four forms of journalism (see Figure 1), which can be considered as transformation process journalism faces today not only at the level of the basic stages of news production and consumption but also affects journalism at its core [12]:  Data journalism: This concept has gradually appeared in newsrooms over the last decade, which refers to the process of extracting useful information from data, writing articles based on the information and embedding visualizations in the articles that help readers to understand the significance of the story [13]. As Lindén (2017) notes, "digital revolution has expanded the supply and availability of data that can be used for computational journalistic processes, along with the expectation of events to a larger extent than before" (p. 24) [14].…”