You may have noticed that the newspapers you read on the Internet offer more and more types of content. If you look closely, a lot of the news you read and share already includes a map, or an interactive timeline, or a chart that illustrates a problem.

The so-called “data journalism” is the future of the profession, although in reality it is not something so new. Journalists have consulted databases, tables, and archive documentation since the profession began. What changes is that the information is now available in digital format and in massive volumes and, for the first time, the data can be processed by simple programs and represented in a visual plot that allows us to discover trends that were hidden and offer new perspectives on a problem.

Several traditional media have fully put journalists , programmers and designers to work on the same team to explain with words, images and graphics stories that range from bringing order to the chaos of social networks to showing corruption networks. Here are five examples of the possibilities that data processing and visualization offer journalism:

New York Times

The Washington Post or The New York Times have developed good examples of a change that is hopelessly approaching the media. Let’s take this NYT visualization of the football league results as an example .

Without the ability to collect and process the massive volume of NFL passing data in record time, this graph comparing the best football players in history could not have been produced. The graphic further highlights the exceptional nature of a player, in this case the Peyton Manning quaterback, and supports and justifies the text itself. The news is born from the visualization.

Washington Post

In this article, the Washington Post crosses data from firearms assaults and recordings of shootings carried out by the police to explain much more deeply the crime problem in some areas of the city. Data journalism, as seen in this example, can add not only charts and tables, but also maps, audio, and video, to further enrich the story.

Nature

Nature magazine was also able to make this highly interactive and comprehensive visualization of the most cited academic research in history by combining an enormous amount of academic titles and citations. This impressive volume of information allows the reader to browse the database visually and easily and search for the type of information on their own

Foreign Policy

The usual stories can now be told differently. As in this map from Foreign Policy magazine where you can see all the great popular protests in the world month by month in the last 34 years. Although the map by itself does not explain the complexity behind each survey, it is certainly an aid that allows each reader to find the answers they want on their own without necessarily having to follow the path marked by the journalist in the text or simply browse. about how our world moves at a faster speed than we think.

BBC

This example developed by the BBC is an example of how data journalism can give new meaning to the public service task entrusted to entities paid with taxpayer money. By entering their postal code, the user can compare the quality of the health system in his area with that of other regions and check whether it is above or below the national average. This type of digital instrument empowers citizens, who otherwise would not have been able to collect and analyze the various sources from which this data originates, to finally demand improvements.

What is data journalism?

This journalistic discipline thrives on many others: investigative, in-depth, precision, computer-assisted and analytical. In it, you work with large volumes of data , make the most of interactive visualization and incorporate the programmer into the journalistic team.

SANDRA CRUCIANELLI *

Many colleagues ask me what is data journalism (PdD). They do not find logic in the denomination, since, as always, journalists use data to produce journalistic content. It corresponds, in fact, to call it “database journalism” (PBD); but, by use and custom, the shorter denomination predominates.

• Is it investigative journalism (IP)?
  Certainly, techniques typical of investigative journalism are used.
• Is it journalism in depth (PP)?
  Also, depending on the topic being analyzed.
• Is it precision journalism (PPr)?
  Sometimes, indeed, it is necessary to resort to the methods of social investigation defined in the 1960s by Philip Meyer for their application in the field of journalism.
• Is it Computer Aided Journalism (PAC)?
  Almost always, because we have to analyze data and we use spreadsheets, as well as the procedures of this discipline. In fact, I believe that the PAC is only summarized when we handle small data volumes and, for larger cases in terms of information volume, it has ceased to be PAC to become data journalism.
• Is it Analytical Journalism (PA)?
  Also, since in general we use analytical methods to bring the data to geographic information systems that allow us to better visualize the behavior of the variables we have.

In reality, what is known today as data journalism – which, as I said, is truly database journalism – involves all of the aforementioned, to which we must add:

1. Large volumes of data, which often could not even be accommodated in an Excel spreadsheet
2. Interactive visualization
3. Incorporating the programmer to the news team to perform tasks ranging from data extraction and cleansing of data sets to design news applications ( apps news)

So, if we could write it as a formula, we can say that we have a sum of known methods to which three fruits of technological innovation are added:

PI + PP + PPr + PA + PAC + data volume + interactive visualization + programming = PdD or PBD

So that we start from scratch and everything is clear, the definitions are as follows:

• Investigative journalism: three necessary conditions are required for a report to claim to be investigative: it must be a subject of social relevance, to which it must be added that someone intends to keep it secret and, finally, additional work by the journalist is required, oblivious to the daily practices of informative coverage. These are the cases in which matters related to irregularities in the administration of public money are investigated, such as cases of corruption, when situations of inefficiency or abuse are revealed by privatized public service companies and everything that affects the society (for example, an ecological crime case).
• In-depth journalism: it is the same as PI, only in this case nobody tries to keep secret what the journalist investigates. Thus, for example, a study on the variables of poverty with data from national censuses.
• Precision journalism: formulated as a discipline – as I have already pointed out – by Professor Philip Meyer, it involves the use of social research methods applied to journalism such as qualitative research (case analysis, focus groups, discourse analysis, etc.) and the quantitative. The latter includes descriptive (when all cases are considered: for example, a census among legislators) and what is called inferential research, that is, when working on a universe and, given the difficulty of addressing each member of that universe, a representative sample of that universe is designed, which is put under study. This is the case of opinion polls or electoral polls for predictive purposes.
• Analytical journalism: analyzes a complex reality, in order to achieve public understanding. It combines some aspects of investigative journalism and explanatory information. Its mission is to offer evidence based on interpretations of reality, explaining it in an understandable way. Contextualizes a background theme, by describing historical details and statistical data. The result is a comprehensive explanation, intended to shape the public’s perception of the phenomenon. It aims to collect disparate data and make connections that are not immediately obvious, and is often effective in fact-to-fact analysis, not the facts themselves. It uses the so-called geographic information systems (GIS) as a pillar of visualization.
• Computer Aided Journalism: Known as CAR ( Computer Assisted Reporting ), it is defined as “any process that uses computer assistance during data collection and processing.” She has based her practice on the use of Excel spreadsheets for the analysis of information contained in tables.

The Products of Data Journalism
There are at least four different products, generally complementary, that emerge from this practice:

1. Data-Driven Articles
2. Interactive visualizations
3. Open data sets
4. News apps

• Data-based articles: theseare generally short articles, built from large volumes of data such as those that could be contained in databases or data sets designed from one or more databases .
• Interactive visualizations:in general, they are complements to articles based on data, but they can be contained in themselves without the need for a referential article: in some cases, a title, a subtitle and an explanation to the audience on how read data from visualization .
• Open dataset (known as dataset):The media does not necessarily engage in journalistic work based on data. They can also, as in the case of La Nación  de Argentina, dedicate a large part of their effort to opening public data. In countries where there are no laws on access to public information, they do not work as they should, on government websites there is some data but others are not, they are hidden under different layers of information or the formats for displaying data on the Internet. websites are not accessible (seeing data on the screen is not the same as accessing it). For a data to be accessible it must be displayed in a reusable format. For example, an official document uploaded to Flickr. In these circumstances, the media and organizations can dedicate themselves to searching, extracting and opening public data, just as  La Nación  does through its data catalog . That is, since there are data to which governments or organizations do not allow access – for whatever reason – the media can enter this field, and thus they will surely make great contributions. The data can be managed or administered from simple and free platforms such as Google Drive.
• News apps :Known in English as news apps , they are the fruit of the joint work of journalists and computer programmers. Many times, the volume of data is so large that it is impossible to find a story if an application is not designed that allows us to group and analyze variables, for example, by geographic location, by date, by company name, etc. (example 1 , 2 , 3  and 4 ).

No open data culture
There is no open data culture in most Spanish-speaking countries. However, what governments do not do regarding open data will be done by the community, civil society organizations or the media .

The forecast is not new. An example came to light in 2010, when the Texas Tribune newspaper  asked the state government for the details of the salaries of the 674,000 public employees , with the intention of designing an application that would allow citizens to consult the assets that are paid with public funds, including teachers from schools and teachers from public universities.

Many things can be done to do data journalism, since there are free digital tools that all journalists can use to overcome almost any obstacle, but what we cannot do without is data. They are a necessary edge condition without which we cannot even begin to design any journalistic hypothesis.

In many cases, the format in which the data is displayed on the websites is not reusable. We journalists can truly resolve these pitfalls by learning specific techniques. But what about citizens? Are taxpayers not entitled to better access to data directly related to public money?

Information that is overdue, disorderly, still outdated or in inadequate formats can certainly be read on the screen, but viewing data is not the same as accessing it. It is the classic example of an image converted to a PDF in which the detail of a table is read, such as the execution of a budget. An Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technique would have to be used to extract the data; Although these programs are not always efficient and there is no other resource than manual data loading, which greatly complicates the task of every reporter, especially if the content of the table we want to process is extensive.

In the film Eyes Closed , directed in 1999 by Stanley Kubrick shortly before his death, the line of argument revolves around two specific feelings: uncertainty and dissatisfaction. To take an example, in Argentina, without the components of the thriller  that surround that dark story, 13 years later, citizens and journalists find ourselves with Data well closed . Before them, we experience uncertainty and nobody can be satisfied with a scenario in which you have to have specific skills, when not paying for additional resources, to access legitimately public data.

How to assemble a data set
The data has already been retrieved from the web or downloaded to the PC. Perhaps, the journalist has had to resort to manual data entry, since this is frequent when documents, upon request, are delivered in paper format and it is not possible to extract the information and subsequently restructure it into tables, considering Optical Character Recognition (OCR) programs do not always work efficiently.

In data journalism, we consider a data set to be a collection of grouped data elements, which allow for easy registration. In them, the data is organized in variables, generally measured over time and on downloadable media.

Visualizing data is not the same as accessing it

The easiest way to manage data sets is using Google Drive, the tool that replaced Google Docs with its biggest and best features. Its free download is necessary from a Gmail account and, once installed, it allows you to host all kinds of documents, in the case at hand, from Excel spreadsheets to tables, thanks to its innovative Google Dynamic Tables function .

The most common ways of managing and hosting data sets are carried out using Excel spreadsheets or through a format called CSV, which is also open and reusable, in which the columns are separated by commas.