The rise of Data Journalism

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Data journalism is a technique used by journalist to increased the role in the production and distribution of information with numerical data. Data journalism can elevate your knowledge and invigorate your statistics with information. I believe that data journalism is an opportunity that all journalists should master.

Even though I agree that journalists should use data journalism, there are still a few concerns and downsides of using data journalism. Data requires context, which could possibly lead to biased sources, error, and misleading. Data journalism can also be referred as opinionated journalism.

One big concern of using data in journalism is the perception of how the data could be interpreted. People think in all different ways, and with data the wrong judgment can often lead to mistakes. A writer can help eliminate these problems if they use the data to answer one particular question, instead of multiple questions at a time. After a journalist chooses their data they needs to identify key points, and discard some assumptions/observations to keep it as clear as possible.

Another concern of data in journalism is how difficult it is for the readers to interpret certain calculations. If it was difficult for the journalist to write a calculation, then it will be even more difficult for the reader to understand it. When writing calculations journalist should limit their writings to simple calculations. The more complex and difficult a calculation is could lead to assumptions and predictions.

I often receive my news from social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. On those social media sites companies, and news organization use data journalism to catch a readers eye and connect people to their story. On these social media sites hashtags like “#datajournalism” could take you to the trending data journalism examples. Also, on twitter there is a page strictly used as a Data Journalism Blog.