2.The History of Data Journalism

Since journalism existed, the data was used for news. Over the past two decades, the amount of data available for analysis, research, communication has increased at unprecedented rates. Technological innovation has not only made more sources of data available, it has also made it easier to access, analyze, and share that data. And now journalists, newsrooms are reshaping their organizations to take better journalism. So according to the data journalism report we see that data has been used in journalism for hundreds of years, and actually predates newspapers. In the early 1600s, there was a weekly accounting of deaths and births in London that sold for a few pennies. Wellcome Library, London If we go in the 1850s, Florence Nightingale, pioneer of modern nursing and statician had recognized the impact of a good visualization and used it to achieve her goals and during the Crimean War, F. Nightingale documented the deaths of British soldiers so her findings in a series of innovative graphs and diagrams – some of them she invented herself, including the polar area chart now sometimes referred to as the Nightingale rose diagram. So a few reports like this one about early applications of data journalism methods however it only became possible to collect, filter, clean and analyze data on a larger scale once the first computers hit the world. The team of American broadcasting network CBS were among the first to use these methods to predict election results. In 1952, they fed results and polls of former presidential elections to a Remington UNIVAC, one of the very first computers. A few years later, journalist Philip Meyer would set a milestone in the field of “Computer Assisted Reporting”, or CAR for short. It was 1967, the year of the civil rights protests in Detroit. These demonstrations were one of the deadliest in American history, with 43 people dead and over 7.000 arrested. He coined the term “Precision Journalism” as an alternative, and wrote a book of the same name in 1973, subtitled “A Reporter’s Guide to Social Science Methods”. The book gained quite a lot of recognition and was published in four editions, the most recent one in 2002.

The 70s and 80s, work time on computing machines became cheaper and processing data became easier and Today the number of projects that would be labeled as data journalism,data driven journalism. One enabling factor was the Freedom of Information Act that came into force in the US in 1967. Germany only passed a similar law in 2006, almost 40 years later. In Azerbaijan, a Law on Access to Information was approved in 2005. It has gone into effect. Previously in 1998 there was accepted Law on Freedom on Information, but the Law of 2005 provided more detailed and secured regulation for access to official information. In Turkey access to public information is regulated by the Law on the Right to Information. This law on access to information in Turkey has been in existence since 2003.

With the Missouri Institute for Computer Assisted Reporting (MICAR), later renamed the National Institute for Computer Assisted Reporting (NICAR), an important institution for data driven journalism in the US was founded 1989. With the internet during the 2000s, data journalism evolved towards its current state. Journalist Adrian Holovaty authored an influential essay in 2006, in which Holovaty invites journalists, media networks to regard their own stories as sources of data and treat them as such. He encourages them to convert journalistic content into usable data and make it accessible in databases which linked journalism to the ideal of transparency to the open data movement. We can also say that today, this movement is closely connected to the data journalism community. So since many leaks and of course first WikiLeaks’ release of the Afghan and Iraq war logs in 2010 though, data journalism is integrating itself into newsrooms department and journalism.

In the last 10 years, multiple newsrooms have established data teams consisting of journalists, computer scientists and designers. We will see examples later in the training.