It’s Time For Every Journalist To Learn Basic Data Skills by Marta Kang.
From the post:
First came the web. Then came social media. Now journalists face a new challenge on the horizon: big data.
It used to be that data journalism lived in a corner of the newsroom, in the care of investigative or business reporters. But in recent years, big data has amassed at such a rate that it can no longer be the responsibility of a few.
Numbers, Numbers On Every Beat
In 2013, IBM researchers found that 90 percent of the world’s data had been created in the previous two years. We’d suddenly gained a quantitative understanding of our world! This new knowledge base empowers us to predict the spread of disease, analyze years of government spending, and even understand how an extra cup of coffee might affect one’s sleep quality. We’ve essentially gained countless new perspectives — bird’s-eye views, granular views, inward views of ourselves — as long as we know how to make sense of the numbers.
Many news outlets have already taken to using data to drive a range of stories, from the profound to the surprising. ProPublica and NPR calculated how much limbs are worth in each state to highlight the dramatic disparity in workers’ comp benefits across the U.S. The Washington Post analyzed 30 years of groundhog forecasts and found that “a groundhog is just a groundhog,” and not a weatherman, alas.
Still, conversations about data-driven journalism have mostly focused on large-scale projects by industry powerhouses and new outlets like FiveThirtyEight and Vox.
But the job shouldn’t be left to big newsrooms with dedicated teams. In this era of big data, every journalist must master basic data skills to make use of all sources available to them.
“There’s so much data available now, and there’s basically data on every single beat, and you have reporters getting spreadsheets all the time,” Chad Skelton, a data journalist with The Vancouver Sun, told me.
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I am very sympathetic to Martha’s agenda of motivating journalists to learn basic data skills. Reporters can hardly work in the public interest if they have to accept untested claims about data from one source or another. They need to skills to not only use data but to question data when a story sounds too good to be true.
For example, when the news broke about the data breach at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), how many reports headlined that the Inspector General for the OPM had requested at least two of their computer systems be shut down because they “could potentially have national security implications?” U.S. Was Warned of System Open to Cyberattacks
Oh, yes, that was the zero (0) number, the empty set, nil.
Several days after the drum beat that China was responsible for the breach, with no evidence proffered to support that accusation, the full brokenness of the OPM systems is coming to light.
Not that reporters have to have every detail on the first report, but finding an Inspector General’s report on security (obviously relevant to a data breach story) isn’t an exercise in data sleuthing.
Knowing how broken the systems were reported to be by the OPM’s own Inspector General, increases the range of suspects to high school hackers, college CS students, professional hackers, other nation states, and everyone in between.
The nearest physical analogy I can think of would be to have a pallet of $100 bills in the middle of Times Square and when a majority of those go missing, inventing a security fantasy that only a bank could steal money in those quantities.
Anybody with a computer could have broken into OPM systems and it is disingenuous to posture and pretend otherwise.
Let’s teach journalist basic data skills but let’s also teach them to not repeat gibberish from government spokespersons. In many cases it isn’t news even if they say it. In the case of data breaches, it is more often than not noise.