Here’s a link to a paper published today by: Data-driven journalism and the public good: “Computer-assisted-reporters” and “programmer-journalists” in Chicago. Here’s the abstract:
Since the mid-2000s, some US and British news organizations have hired programmers to design data-driven news projects within the newsroom. But how does the rise of these “programmer-journalists,” armed with their skills and technical artifacts, really affect the way journalism can contribute to the public good? Based on an empirical study in Chicago, we show in this article that although they have built on previous historical developments, these programmer-journalists have also partly challenged the epistemology conveyed by the computer-assisted reporting tradition in the US, grounded in the assumption that data can help journalists to set the political agenda through the disclosure of public issues. Involved in open source communities and open government advocacy, these programmers and their technical artifacts have conveyed challenging epistemological propositions that have been highly controversial in the journalism community.
Here’s a snippet:
To users, such websites generally appear to be quite sober: they simply have to write down their address or zip code and they have access to a map and several lists that they can browse. But from the designers’ point of view, such news projects offer readers a convenient “decision-making tool” or “research tool” in their daily life through simple and standardized access to data:
“It could be a citizen who finds out about something and goes and looks at it, and then makes a decision about the neighborhood, about what they’re going to bring back to their block club or what – you know, if I’m going to live here or not. So it’s a decision-making tool and a research tool for everybody.” (Daniel O’Neil, September 8, 2010)
And here’s a copy of the paper: Parasie & Dagiral_Data-driven journalism and the public good