Data-driven journalism at Canon Media Awards
I had the chance to attend the Canon Media Awards Night, as a guest of the Science Media Centre (who are one of the sponsors).
It was a good year for data journalism. Harkanwal Singh and his team won “Best use of interactive graphics” and “Best multimedia storytelling” for projects based on effective communication of publicly-available data.
Perhaps more importantly for the future, the citation for the Herald’s “Best digital cross-platform news coverage” explicitly called out the integration of data:
“The combination of exclusive breaking stories, data journalism, use of the digital media platforms and social coverage, meant the user’s experience was both exciting and broad.”
with similar comments in the citation for best website.
Bloggers can do data analysis and visualisation. What the professional media can do that we usually can’t is combine this with traditional reporting — stories of individual experience, or detailed investigation of who is hiding what and why.
For the consumer of traditional journalism, data literacy gives context — is this the tip of the iceberg or just the tip of the icecube? Interactive, visual data publishing adds the opportunity for readers to explore further and have deeper engagement with the story.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »