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Michelle Minkoff

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Publicly available data was first used for journalism decades before the once-futuristic sounding year 2010 -- it's no longer a new thing. A lot of the excitement over data journalism and visualization is in the ability to make pretty pictures, and create data-focused Web applications. But as with all journalism, playing with cool tools isn't the point. The question remains: So what?

It’s something I've been thinking a lot about. So has my colleague Jonathan Stray, interactive technology editor at the Associated Press. He thoughtfully addresses this issue by simply asking: "Does journalism work?"

It's a fascinating question, one that's easily lost amongst the nuances of the daily grind. Part of the answer is wrapped up in how the daily news cycle is structured, and making sure we have the time to try new things, to see what does work.

Journalism thrives on outlying events -- wars, death, elections. But what about the pieces that explain complicated ongoing issues that can't be pinned to merely one point in time? Or as Stray writes, "I’m less interested in what journalism does in extraordinary times, and more interested in how the journalist’s work improves the day-to-day operation of a society, and the experiences of the people living in it."

I think that's where our PBS project comes in, less about the hour-to-hour headlines, more about what you need to know long-term, what exactly is happening. How these day-to-day events will affect you tomorrow. And the day after. And the year after. Data visualizations and applications can help with this, but some of the information that’s being put out doesn’t fit in that category.

Case in point: a visualization of Facebook networks, who's talking to who. It has its purpose, and is valid, and it's gorgeous. People are abuzz about it on social media. But it tells you what you'd expect. More people are communicating within the US. More populated areas, and technologically savvy, portions of the world have more Facebook users. But what did we learn from that knowledge nugget? Or as a former editing professor of mine would ask about every piece of information, and every story -- So what?

Let's take a broader look at the issue. A recent post by Nathan Yau at Flowing Data, a data visualization blog that has played a large part in my education thus far. Yau lists his favorite visualizations of the year. Fantastic examples here -- about half are interactive and clickable, and half are static. About half are from journalism organizations, half from elsewhere. But the difference between the journalistic ones, like an application exploring what online marketers know about you vs. a series of maps of where the most tourists go (based off of Flickr images), that's worth discussing. The journalistic ones integrate context. Not all videos and photos are videojournalism and photojournalism, not all data visualizations are journalism.

If we just map or graph data, whether it's clickable or not, it's nothing more than emptying our notebooks of raw unorganized information onto the Web. It may look pretty, but there's got to be more.

It's not a new idea. Matt Waite, senior news technologist at the St. Petersburg Times, introduced the phrase "data ghetto" a few years back. That's the notion of posting uncontextualized, even searchable, information up on the web and calling it journalism. He wrote, "Flatly serving up data with no context or analysis or value outside the record itself is hardly journalism. A public service maybe, but not journalism."

Stray points out that editors used to determine what was worth publishing, and "maybe it is now the job of an editor to decide what we need to know." I would add to that, and say that before the editors were a certain select group of people and now we are all editors. The reporters, producers, photographers, community engagers, data visualizers and readers. Before, someone else filtered and you knew that what you had access to was important. Now, so much information (sometimes, too much) is accessible, and we rely on everyone we can to help us make sense of what to focus on. I can make those decisions from Arlington, but so can your friend when they decide to retweet an article.

And then what? How do we gauge how that article affected your everyday life? If we measure our success in clicks, that doesn't mean it affected you. It means you clicked on it. You stayed on the site awhile? Great. Will you retain that information tomorrow? Will you tell your friends? Will it change how you vote? Will you write a letter to a political representative about the issue? How do I measure that? I think we're still working on the answer. Communicating with our audience, seeing how small things start to change in our world and acknowledging that this is something we should be concerned with, these are three big parts of the solution.

Years later, we could still use more context in all of the forms of journalism we create. As journalists, we can and must do better. How will we tell if our journalism is working? We'll have to wait to see the effects of our experiments. But in the meantime, I'll be focusing on using new tools, but never forgetting it's the context and opportunity for individual exploration that drives our pieces.