Verification and Data Processing of Open Data for Data-Driven News Stories in Lokadata.id and Katadata.co.id

Abstract

With the existence of open data, journalists have additional investigative tools to report on issues in the public interest and to hold the government to account. However, it remains outside the mainstream of journalism due to the limitation to access and work with data. The open data initiative in Indonesia has started since 2010. Adhering to UU No. 14 Tahun 2008 about Public Information Openness, Indonesia has implemented an open data portal, called Satu Data Indonesia in 2019. There are indeed a handful of studies that examine the implementation of open data portals in Indonesia. However, only a few studies have given attention to how data journalists are using these data and their perceptions about the quality of data provided by the government. This study uses a descriptive qualitative approach and collects data through semi-structured in-depth interviews. It is intended to see the process on how data journalists in Indonesia turn data to news stories. By studying Lokadata.id and Katadata.co.id, we found that data provided by the authority sources (government) are still the main sources for data journalists in Indonesia. Despite the fact that the quality of data is getting better, most journalists in this study argued that the government’s open data has not yet integrated and has no basic standard that is collectively used. Therefore, the verification process and data processing in each media is important. The most common ways that journalists use to verify the data are by exploring the raw data, contacting the institution that provided the data, and considering the reputation of the data sources. However, there is a tendency of data journalists to be passively relying on official sources and ‘hide behind’ the perceived credibility of their sources.

Penguatan Jurnalisme Data Melalui Modifikasi Program Python Dan Pengembangan Produk Media Online TERAKOTA.ID

“…Bagi pemangku kepentingan, jurnalisme data dan produk turunannya dapat menjadi feeding informasi sebagai bahan pertimbangan pengambilan keputusan. Bagi masyarakat jurnalisme data akan dijadikan rujukan utama atas peristiwa yang terjadi hingga terjadinya transparansi pemerintah (Muthmainnah AN, 2022).…”

Open data journalism: A narrative synthesis of how, when, and why data journalists use open data sources

“…Government data are also often shared in processed forms (e.g., as PDFs rather than spreadsheets), making it difficult for journalists to process, verify, and use-particularly in the Global South (N. P. Lewis & Nashmi, 2019;Muthmainnah et al, 2022). Even researchers have had to resort to alternative tools for gathering data due to the lack of publicly available official data in Venezuela, such as using Google Trends to estimate the number of Zika virus cases (Strauss et al, 2020).…”

“…Even researchers have had to resort to alternative tools for gathering data due to the lack of publicly available official data in Venezuela, such as using Google Trends to estimate the number of Zika virus cases (Strauss et al, 2020). Some strategies journalists have developed for overcoming data access barriers include supplementing openly available datasets with data they have collected themselves (e.g., via web scraping), gathered in partnership with a third party (e.g., an NGO), or received via a leak by a source (Muthmainnah et al, 2022;Porlezza & Splendore, 2019).…”

“…While government data is typically data journalists' preferred data source, one study of Indonesian journalists found that research data sometimes played a supplementary role; when government data about a newsworthy topic was not available, journalists explored other options, such as data from scientific journals (Muthmainnah et al, 2022). Along these lines, Zhang and Feng (2019) found that Chinese data journalism stories often relied on publicly available data sourced from NGOs and research institutions-however, as these two data providers were treated as one category, it is not possible to determine the proportion of stories that used academic sources specifically.…”

“…Academic research is often complex and highly specialized, with data collected for the purpose of providing insights that are relevant to scholars rather than citizens or journalists (Elliott & Resnik, 2019); in contrast, government data typically has more direct relevance to civic issues and can be used to hold governments to account (Lawson, 2022). Journalists working in diverse contexts have expressed that the stories they can tell are often limited by the nature of the data available to them, with simple, relatable stories based on government data typically winning out over more complex data narratives (Lawson, 2022;Muthmainnah et al, 2022). It does not help that journalists are not often considered as stakeholders or users of ORD within the research community (Elliott, 2022), as evidenced by the lack of attention to journalism within manifestos and policy papers on ORD (Ekaputra et al, 2017;Stoneman, 2015).…”