Data journalism

The amount of information in the world is growing at an alarming rate. Countless streams of information pass through us every day. The inevitable adaptation to the information noise is a decrease in concentration. According to a Microsoft study, in 2000 the average attention span was 12 seconds; by 2015 it had dropped to 8. Today’s media, in order to stay readable, it’s not enough to just report interesting news, you need to grab the reader’s attention in 8 seconds. Visual content can engage an audience in a matter of milliseconds.

The media has always strived to back up articles with data and facts. However, data journalism is a fundamentally new mechanism for organizing communication with the audience. It offers the tools to visualize “dry” data, helps to visualize the information. But attractive visuals are only the tip of the iceberg of data journalism.

To explain reality, data journalists use databases instead of informants or press releases, the main tools of traditional journalism. It is the data that is accumulated in various information systems, including state systems, that are the main source of information. For a wide audience, they are complicated and not understandable. The audience needs a journalist to see something meaningful in the midst of the growing noise of information. It is not enough to look at tables, it is important to ask the right questions to the data and find answers. This is what data journalists do by researching and processing large amounts of information, they structure it, apply it in the context of the situation and draw conclusions that affect the understanding of the general audience of economic and social processes and phenomena.