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Data and computational journalism key in the digital era
Thanks to the internet, anyone -- not just media that are true to journalistic ethics and standards –- can provide information accessible all over the globe anytime.
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A marquee of the Arango Orillac Building lists the Mossack Fonseca law firm, in Panama City, on April 4. Panama's president says his government will cooperate. (Associated Press/Arnulfo Franco)
I
n 2013, a database of shell corporations used by individuals, celebrities, criminals and multinational companies to evade taxes was released in public -- and went viral. This database, Offshore Leaks, was created by an international non-profit organization, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, Inc. (ICIJ).
Offshore Leaks was born out of 2.5 million secret notes consisting of 750,000 names and corporations -- including government officials and even presidents -- involved in tax-evasion crimes. Offshore Leaks initiated cross-continent collaborative investigations that produced data-based investigation products like Panama Papers (2016), Bahama Leaks (2016), Paradise Papers (2017 and 2018) and Pandora Papers (2021).
The emergence of said investigative products shows that data-analysis skills and an ability to operate computer applications have a significant impact on creating a high-quality journalistic product. Databases have no meaning without the journalist’s skill in understanding and analyzing data.
Journalists, as cited on ICIJ’s website, conduct a data-journalism process that comprises cleaning the data, finding a connection between one table and the other, analyzing the data and creating an interactive-data-visualization dashboard using computer programs, from those as simple as Microsoft Excel up to online-interactive software or web tools like Talend Open Studio for Data Integration, MockFlow and Sigma.js.
Therefore, data and computational journalism exist to strongly support the journalistic principle of truth.
The journalistic truth, according to Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel in The Elements of Journalism, is “a process that begins with a professional discipline to seek and verify data”. This principle is aligned with the news-making process using the data-journalism approach. News is not just produced by compiling words spoken by sources (talking news); rather, it involves data that has been cleaned, analyzed and visualized. The angle of the news can also be chosen through data-based approaches, such as scale, sequence or rank, and changes or explorative.
This truth-loaded basic principle of journalism has met with challenges, especially as journalism enters a period of digitalization and media convergence marked by the birth of the internet. Thanks to the internet, anyone -- not just media that are true to journalistic ethics and standards -- can provide information accessible all over the globe anytime. Therefore, information quality has become questionable, especially when delivered by individuals without any verification process and for the purpose of creating false news or information (hoax).
