Data had never been something I associated with storytelling before exploring digital journalism. Numbers and statistics weren’t something I would directly go to if I wanted to tell a story. However, this semester, learning about how to transform data and manipulate it to reveal information was a very eye-opening experience as a journalism student. I always struggle to find a story, but I’ve learned that finding datasets and dissecting them is a great way to see new and interesting things. Anything ranging from the most common crime committed in Australia to the largest tree in Melbourne, which happens to be two minutes away from my apartment.
It had not occurred to me before how much access everyone has to statistics from official and reputable sources such as the ABS, where I went for a lot of the datasets I looked at. Data is such an important tool to utilise as a journalist as it adds credibility and weight to your stories, which will only strengthen the piece.
Learning how to use pivot tables was an essential skill that allowed me to refine datasets and find what I was looking for. With this skill, I could quickly find interesting facts and figures about a particular topic, which I could then investigate further upon. Being able to sort and filter data by refining the parameters of the dataset allowed me to peel the layers of data so I could find something interesting. After finding the statistics I needed, I made sure to note as many of them down as they could lead to interesting stories or angles. However, just having data and statistics isn’t enough to propel a story, they need to be visualised.
I was introduced to flourish as a way to visualise data that I wanted to use for my stories. It was a little bit overwhelming at first because of the various types of charts and graphs you can use to visualise data, however, I found it best to use a simple line chart or column graph to visualise basic data. Once I became familiar with the platform, flourish became a lot of fun to use as I could visualise data in a lot of ways, but I had to make sure it served a purpose and added to the story, rather than just exist within it. Flourish’s extensive options for customising visualisations made it very easy to make my visualisations look interesting and professional, which I believe added to the intrigue of my story.
Data in journalism is an important tool that should be utilised as much as possible in today’s multimedia journalism landscape as a way to ground stories in facts and statistics. Fake news is too common these days to completely omit data found from credible sources in news stories.
