114 media professionals had their say about data-driven journalism
114 media professionals had their say about data-driven journalism
For the last months I’ve been doing research for Code for South Africa’s Data Journalism Academy, interviewing 20 media professionals about their experiences using data-driven journalism. How can news publications that already struggle to survive justify investing in such an expensive and time-consuming form of journalism? Some were confused by my questions “Why are you asking us? We’re trying to find this out ourselves”, others said data-driven journalism opened opportunities for those new and much-needed revenue streams.
Using their claims and hypothesis we shaped a survey about data-driven journalism. The survey got 114 respondents, 51 from South Africa and the rest from 30 other countries.
The survey was distributed in the Naked Data newsletter, to my research informants, South African newspapers and forums for data-driven journalism and journalism, as well as social media to drive engagement.
We focused on three main questions and here are the results:
What benefits do you envisage data-driven journalism providing for your readers?
What do you think are the main obstacles to use data-driven journalism in your publication?
What business opportunities do you see data-driven journalism providing for your publication?
What are your thoughts on starting to use data-driven journalism in your publication? What are the obstacles, and what are the potential business models? Share your thoughts in the comment field, follow my upcoming blog posts or take the survey yourself!
Survey about data-driven journalism
Download the full data set here.
- The results about obstacles to use data-driven journalism in publications is based on only 65 of the respondents, 36 from South Africa, as the alternative “Lack of simple software/visualisation tools” was added after 48 had already responded to the survey.
- When I started to do my research I came over a survey done by Mirko Lorenz and the European Journalism Centre in 2011 that asks some similar questions, you can see the results from it here.