Written in collaboration by Cloey Nash and Mishelle Tongco, and Loughlin Patrick
Tracking trends
Written by Mishelle Tongco
If there was one thing we remember from 2020, was the pain, fear, and frustration the COVID-19 Pandemic has brought to the many lives of Australians.
It was during that period that individuals pondered the question of the severity of catching the virus, as academic journals – including Plos One, Scientific Reports, and the National Library of Medicine began to release research articles based on COVID-19’s most searched topic on Google Trends: “Will I die from Coronavirus?”
However, one thing all these articles have in common is that the information they reflected on was sourced from Google Trends.
Google Trends is an online search tool that provides viewers – like me and you, the most frequent search requests made to Google. It shows what trend is currently on the rise and what trend is slowly disappearing away from the web. Other features it includes to help understand Google Trends are: related topics and queries, as well as demographic insights.
Before enrolling in this course, I never heard of Google Trends. I knew that somewhere on the big wide web, there was a website that gathered Google’s top searches every year, but who knew that it would be the most helpful tool for an aspiring journalist like me.
For journalists, this search tool is quite useful for finding fresh story ideas or even finding data on a certain trend in Australia. It enables them to be informed and update on what the public’s interests are on a certain topic and allows them to gain an insight into what’s on their minds.
📆 29 September 2022 Thursday 18:00
— 🇦🇺 Australia Google Trends (@24trendsAU) September 29, 2022
🔍 Recent trending searches in Australia:
News and details below pic.twitter.com/mKYfxzCil0
Yet, from my past experiences of using Google Trends for my own journalistic pieces, I found that when finding data for a particular trend, this search tool only gives relative numbers rather than absolute numbers. Meaning that when I have a story that needs the exact data figures, Google Trends may not be the one for this.
However, this doesn’t mean that one should avoid using Google Trends for data stories, because if there was one thing that I have learned from using it, and one thing that I would like any aspiring journalists to remember, is that Google Trends is always free and always available. There are times when I often struggle to find a story that’s either newsy or relatable to the public, or even days when I can’t find any reliable data figures for my stories.
So I encourage everyone to take advantage of it because if there’s one thing for sure, it’s that Google Trends is a journalist’s best friend.
Finding Trends
Written by Cloey Nash
Sometimes, the most challenging part of starting a new journalistic piece can be gathering your information once you have decided on a key topic and question. So, where are the best places to look to get the statistics and data needed to produce a balanced and factual story?
One of the key things I have learnt in the past two years of this course is to make sure your facts are correct and are from a reliable source. Although interviews will always be a key component when writing any new story, it is essential to find the most updated statistics and data to back up what is being presented in your article. If journalists skip over this step, our work would no longer be credible and we would not be doing our duty as a journalist to present the truth to the public in the most straightforward way possible.
Through the past few years I have found various ways to find good statistics, with each story needing different data which can be found in various places. For us journalists and the public there are many websites and companies where you can source statistics, a good place to start for most pieces is the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).
With data collected by the Government, the ABS publishes statistics and analysis on topics including economics, social issues, the environment and information on the population. If your story involves any of these topics it is always best to check on the ABS to see if they have the data you need. It’s also good to note that the ABS has the results of many different census’ that get done throughout the year.
Despite the ABS collecting and releasing data regularly, they won’t always have what you want and sometimes fail to include certain topics and groups of people in their findings. An article written by SBS includes a Human rights complaint that alleges the 2021 census failed to include the LGBTQI+ community.
In spite of this, the ABS is a great tool that we can use to find certain trends in data, but keep in mind that they won’t always have the information you want. This includes data and statistics for more unique and focused topics. If this is ever the case, it can be a rewarding experience to collect the data yourself to ensure you have the most updated and relevant information for your story.
Presenting trends
Written by Loughlin Patrick
Now you’ve found a data story — whether it’s from Google, the ABS or word of mouth — and backed it up with some hard statistics, it’s time to present your findings. But getting the presentation right can be just as tricky as researching, as we know all too well from this course.
Get it wrong, and it’s not just the story that suffers. Like poor writing, poor data visualisation can pose a challenge to your audience’s comprehension of your piece. That risks your audience seeing the piece as confusing and misleading — which ultimately reflects on you as a journalist.
In a media environment where consumers are more discerning and critical than ever before, and audience trust is at an all-time low, this is a real possibility. In January, The Australian copped a beating for publishing a pie-chart depicting a tight race for preferred PM as anything but.
This is an incredibly bad graph. The difference between Morrison and Albanese is 2% but it’s made to look closer to 10% and the 16% undecided is way over represented. Horrendously biased from @australian #Newspoll pic.twitter.com/czv6Fy9igX
— Dancing Dan (@DancingDanB) January 30, 2022
Eight months on, we’ve been banned from using pie charts at RMIT. Coincidence? I think not.
So, how you avoid a Newspoll incident of your own? Firstly, it’s incredibly important to be transparent with the framing of your data — even with line charts. Sometimes, it’s necessary to ‘zoom in’ on your trend by altering the y-axis, but this needs to be clear to your audience.
This means clarifying any alterations to the axis. As the UK’s Office for National Statistics emphasises in a 2016 article: “As soon as you truncate your axis you’re making an editorial decision to focus on the data in a different way, so take care not to mislead the reader.”
Another approach can be giving your audience choice and control over how they view your data, by embedding live graphs into a webpage rather than just static pictures. The ABC does this well on its Charting the Coronavirus page, which lets readers interact with the graphs on the page.
Flourish has been a fairly intuitive option for achieving this in my coverage of the airline industry. This graph tracking passenger flights over the last 36 years lets readers select individual classifications in the legend to show. The y-axis adjusts automatically to focus on the data.
Of course, interactive graphs like this one are still no substitute for being transparent about your methodology and the limitations of your data visualisations. Below this graph, there’s a disclaimer explaining exactly what is — and isn’t — depicted. This helps establish and build audience trust.
By carefully considering our data visualisations, hopefully trust in journalism can be a trend we soon track upwards.
