Is data journalism dead? The NYT thinks so. My thoughts from last year

I was interested to see that The New York Times’ data journalism blog the Upshot recently published a piece called ‘Death to Data Journalism’. This is a key sentence: > You’ll notice that at least a couple of us find the phrase “data journalism” to be a bit strange.

Data journalism, ultimately, has the same aim as “quote journalism” and “anecdote journalism.” They all aspire to be “fact journalism” or, more eloquently, journalism.

So regardless of the source - journalism is journalism. It’s what I said in this interview I did with journalism.co.uk about Ampp3d, the data journalism site for the Mirror that I edited. > Editor Anna Leach told Journalism.co.uk that after a year of working on Ampp3d, she sees data and numbers as just another source for news stories. > “I don’t think there is something that intrinsically different in data journalism from ‘normal’ journalism and I think it’s a little bit set to one side,” she said. > “A number is evidence in the same way a quotation is.”

The dichotomy between data journalism and normal journalism is false in many ways. The division probably reflects different skill sets within the newsroom rather than qualitatively different stories.

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