Why life is hard for the data journalist (but needn’t be)

It didn’t seem to get the coverage it deserved. Few news outlets covered its release despite its significance in the publishing industry.

In early April, the European Journalism Centre published The State of Data Journalism Survey, 2023 – it’s an illuminating insight into the difficulties the industry faces in getting access to data, making an impact with it, and, implicit within it, why publishers fail to see its true potential.

776 individuals took part in the EJC’s extensive research, all with a professional interest in using data to support their reporting and investigations. The survey focused on establishing the challenges they face, the tools they use and the practices they employ.

In terms of challenges, access to quality data is the biggest single issue. With deadline pressures, lack of resources and tools to acquire data, time is exhausted on getting hold of data sets to support a lead or idea.

Aligned to this is the purpose for data journalism. Respondents primarily use data as mean to discover stories (38%), establish the truth (34%), detect events (16%), and make predictions (11%).

But if getting hold of data is a key barrier to doing the job, there’s clearly a lack of support in the market to aid that. Nearly 30% of respondents lack the tools and software to support data acquisition, visualisation.

Those who do have access to software, say they lack the skills needed to use them, with one in ten admitting that data reliability was a worry. There’s heavy reliance of spreadsheet software such as Google Sheets (26%) to map, and a variety of data visualisation tools to hand (Flourish and Tableau are popular) to visualise.

While there are some data journalists using open-source data cleaning tools such as OpenRefine (6%), there is a distinct lack of software supporting data acquisition or insight generation to unearth story leads. One in four say they can spend several weeks/more than a month working on one data-led task.

Sadly, this far from a surprise to flare. Launched last year, the founders of flare (all of whom have worked in busy, high-profile news businesses) had one vision: to discover every insight data has to offer.

In our careers, we’ve been hit by the cost, time and difficulty of acquiring, structuring, and making sense of data. We believe this part of the process should be automated and made easily available. We want journalists to generate more unique compelling content, not faff around with pivot tables.

And now is the time to experiment. More publishers than ever are opening their wallets to see how AI software can fit into their workstreams. Of all those who responded, 62% admitted they do not use AI in any form to support their work. A remarkable 90% said they expect to in five years’ time.

Maybe the reason the ECJ’s excellent report didn’t receive the coverage it deserves is because not enough people bothered to look into the data…. We hope to change that.