Data Journalism - Another Tool for Creating New Community Paradigms

Besides taking the ongoing STW/STIA Systems Thinking Certification course, there was also an opportunity to participate in a Doing Journalism with Data, First Steps, Skills and Tool course put on by the Data Driven Journalism site as part of the European Journalism Centre’s Data Driven Journalism initiative, a hub for news and resources from the community of journalists, editors, designers and developers who use data in the service of journalism.

The organizer is based in Europe but this blog has had no issue with adopting resources from Europe, Great Britain, Canada or anywhere else if it can help engage and empower communities. There is also a USA version of the course being provided through the Knight Foundation’s Knight Center for Journalism called INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM IN THE DIGITAL AGE, but it is much further along and was only just discovered so it will be covered in subsequent posts. The Knight Foundation was featured in a post from 2011 that is one of the building blocks for this effort, Finding the soul of your community and the reason to create your own community paradigms, more later on that as well. 

While there aren’t any plans on becoming a data journalist or having this blog become a data journalism site, there is still an important role that this type of information gathering and dissemination could play in creating new community paradigms. 

The first basic question addressed in the class is ‘What is data journalism?’ It is learning to use the techniques of data journalism (which changes all the time) to find the best possible way to tell a story using numbers.

Data, as  the course points out, has always been a part of how news organizations work. Historically, this also includes those using information to bring about change. Doctor John Snow's mapping of a cholera outbreaks in nineteenth century London changed how we saw how a disease progresses and serves as a model for data journalism today. Another surprising historical example, at least for me, is Florence Nightingale’s key report, ‘Mortality of the British Army’, published in 1858, which presented statistics on the Crimean War regarding war dead. The report documented changes in procedures at military hospitals initiated by Nightingale during the Crimean War and was illustrated using statistical diagrams.

Journalism’s job still remains reporting facts in a manner that people can understand more about issues that matter to them.  The added goal of data journalism is to bring numerical data to life making it possible not only to be understood, but I would add also to make it actionable. 

The basis for this ability is easy access to a variety of often free tools and other resources and their ease of use. This is one of the primary purposes of the New Community Paradigm Wiki. 

Today data journalism can reveal the numbers behind the news, on a national level as through the Associated Press,  US Election results 2012 interactive visualization. At the local news level, even with relatively little resources, it can tell stories that work for local communities, as  with the  Washington DC income gap (DC Action for Children). It can also be a watchdog on local community politicians, as the Texas Tribune did with it’s Ethics Explorer, A guide to the Financial Interests of Elected Officials.

This depends upon greater availability to open data though that is still an ongoing process. Hopefully, this will mean the development of a greater network of trust through increased transparency between those creating and generating data and those who are depending upon it. 

The skills required for data journalism are a collaboration between coding, designing, and journalism applied to a variety of different media products ranging from visualization to long form articles. It is the process of turning numbers into a story, regardless of whether the story is composed of words or of graphics.

There are different approaches to creating data journalism stories. The Lone Ranger approach is when you are able to do everything by yourself. This is possible because of tools now available such as those found in the Data Driven Journalism ecosystem. These include tools like OpenRefine, Datawrapper, Tableau, Google Fusion Tables, CartoDB. You could also have two person teams, like the Guardian's DDJ team in the USA that created the award winning Guide to gay rights in the US story or a small scale team capable of producing innovative projects quickly like the 'Flooding and Flood Zones' map Hurricane Sandy by WNYC.

It is large teams, like the New York Times that have the resources and the capacity to implement a deliberate strategy to create a new kind of online journalism. They can help with finding ways to tell the story better. An example is their 2012 Olympic Experience.

The size of the team is not everything though. Data journalism, according to the European Journalism Centre Data Journalism course, is about making friends which means it is about community.  The course is designed to  start out with smaller things, what that story will be, how to turn the numbers into stories and give you the basic skills to practice on your own or as part of a team with the potential of becoming part of a movement. The essential thing to remember is that anyone can do it. As the course states, you don't need to compete with the New York Times or The Guardian.  Starting small can lead though to bigger things.  Argentina's La Nacion, considered by many the best data journalism site in South America, started without a programmer using free software. What is important is the information. There are times when quick, messily created pieces can be hits having tremendous impact.  Even visualization is not always required for a compelling story. What is vital is getting the correct facts.

Data, the basic stuff, the building blocks of data journalism, is usually organized for use in commonly used formatted spreadsheets such as Microsoft Excel or Numbers. The key is the selection of the data. The fewer numbers you use to tell the story, the better.  This makes research the most important role but also the most tedious and time consuming, having to dig around in data on the basis of a journalistic hunch that may not pan out. 

If you adopt the Lone Ranger approach then you are going to have to do your own coding. If you have a team, particularly a small team, then your coders can also assist with research on the front end and visualization on the back end. A good team will effectively coordinate who can write and who can code. One notable example sited by the course is Reuter’s Connected China. Designers are those who can make visualizations happen. The example provide by the course is the Guardian’s 99% vs 1%.

At the end of the day though it is the words of the story that give context to the numbers, without context numbers are just numbers.  The Guardian’s Yearly guide to public spending by each government department  helps to explain the data.

“Public spending in 2011-12 was £694.89bn - compared to £689.63bn in 2010-11. That may look like an increase but once inflation is taken into account, it is a real-terms cut of 1.58%, or £10.8bn.”

I will finish up by letting Simon Rogers, one of the instructors for the course, sum it all up in this TEDxPantheonSorbonne video. 

“Today, data is increasingly accessible and simple to use, allowing journalists to develop a new way of sharing news. This revolution in the use of data is also accompanied by the increasing importance of data-journalists newsmakers, amateurs, representatives from the crowd ... No specific skills, unfailing motivation: the data-journalists are punks sharing of information.”

Finding the soul of your community and the reason to create your own community paradigms

In the last post, Placemaking - for communities the canvas becomes the art, we began exploring the concept of  Place and Placemaking from the perspective of  Project for Public Spaces or PPS and similar organizations.

Placemaking, was defined by PPS as both an overarching idea and a hands-on tool for improving a neighborhood, city or region.  The linked to site went on to say of Placemaking:

Put simply, it involves looking at, listening to, and asking questions of the people who live, work and play in a particular space, to discover their needs and aspirations. This information is then used to create a common vision for that place.

The New Community Paradigm Places wikipage  which will serve as a depository for community resources on Place was also introduced.  Community Places, was examined in the last post.  This post will deal with what has been described as the  Soul of a Community.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Gallup joined forces and following an approach similar to PPS studied cities across the country to determine what attaches people to their communities by launching the Knight Soul of the Community project in 2008.  Three years and close to 43,000 interviews later with people in 26 communities, the study found three main qualities responsible for attaching people to place:

1. Social offerings, such as entertainment venues and places to meet, 
2. Openness (how welcoming a place is) and 
3. Area’s aesthetics (its physical beauty and green spaces)

The same three answers apply to cities across the country as shown by the Vimeo video below An Explanation of Community Attachment - Soul of the Community Project.




What is even more interesting is that these three aspects which provide for Residential or Community Attachment also have a strong correlation with economic prosperity.  By studying the 26 individual cities that participated in the study, it is possible to determine what steps can be taken to replicate the same results.  The study showed both good and opportunities for improvement in each city. Each city had a its own story to tell. The stories were of place and, more importantly, the stories were of people and how they interacted with the place they called their community.

From the Aberdeen post:

Despite its high ratings of resident caring, social offerings remains a challenge area for Aberdeen, specifically in the areas of local night life and arts and cultural events. This must be addressed as these areas are particularly important to young people. Over the past three years of the study, Aberdeen has made significant gains in attaching young people 18-34 years old to the community. Imagine what could be possible with more attention to these aspects of social offerings.

From the Corpus Christi post:

The comments I had read in the article announcing the presentation flooded my mind as I stood facing what seemed to be a completely different crowd that night. And I worried about deflating that crowd with my honest response. But I said, “It seems to me that some of you, and I’m not sure if you’re in this room, but some of you are stuck in place.”

The Soul of the Community study helps identify new approaches to help create transformational change and new possibilities for continued progress, in other words it helps in creating new community paradigms.  A community can use the study’s findings to help optimize the strengths of their community and address the challenge of improving of areas community attachment thereby potentially increasing local economic growth.


This effort' to create new community paradigms began by looking at economic development in working to create Liveable Cities through Liveanomics.  The relationship of community attachment to economic development in the Soul of the Community Study provides particular relevance for this effort by going beyond the recent economic crisis as the study's findings can help leaders include new ideas into the existing economic rebuilding and development conversation.

Good economics and finance are essential to the sustainability of a city but they are not the soul of the community and do not make up the all of that community's wealth.  This was demonstrated in the one Southern California city included in Knight Soul of the Community Study - Long Beach, California..

Ratings of the local economy increased in 2010; however, the economy is still not a key factor emotionally connecting residents to their communities. Perception of local leadership is rated lower in 2010, but it is not a key driver in attaching residents to Long Beach.

To increase its community wealth, Long Beach added to its own natural assets of good weather and relaxed Southern California attitude by investing in high-quality bicycle infrastructure and encouraging bike-related businesses.

Long Beach according to PPS offers charisma according to their online article How Charismatic Is Your City? showing that there is more to a community than just the city budget and that investments into the livability of the community can have a long term return on that investment.  Charlie Gandy, mobility coordinator of the city of Long Beach, California talks about his city and what they have done to enhance their charisma for the members of the community and others in this TEDx. video.