Data Journalism

• What is data journalism?
  • Data journalism uses gathered data to tell a story. It combines text with data, and allows it to be interactive. It creates stronger stories and allows the reader to process the data and visually see the facts and numbers of the story, rather than just the written words.

• The evolution of data journalism
  • Some of the first data journalism examples are tables full of raw data.
  • Later, data journalism started to include visual aspects, using type to represent people or including small portions of maps.
  • In 1943, a picture graph was included in The Guardian to represent 10% of the military plane and tank production from January to March.
  • From newspapers, data journalism moved to digital mediums. This allowed for faster creation of data and interactivity in the data.

• Data journalism in action
  • During the London Olympics, The Guardian wanted to create an interactive visualisation that could be constantly updated to show the amount of medals different countries had won, and adjust the numbers to make a more even scale. They also wanted the graph to be interactive so that the audience could sort the graph how they wanted, and could be updated as the Olympics went on and more medals were won.