Hi, need to submit a 2500 words paper on the topic A New Ecology of News: Data-driven Journalism. Data-driven journalism, also known as Big Data, is a journalistic process that involves gathering data, filtering them, analyzing them, and then finding patterns in that data for the purpose of writing a news story. The main technology-based resources used for this process include openly available data, which are accessed from government channels or web-based or social media-based platforms, as well as open access publishing, and even open-source software. Although the data might be openly available, it is not easy to collect the right data, let alone analyze them, and find patterns in them. Journalists have to put in a lot of hard work and utilize various techniques to gather, analyze, and find optimal patterns, so it can lead to a strong news story. In that direction, blogger plus journalist Eliot Higgins gathered data primarily through Youtube and other social media videos regarding the internal conflict in Syria, analyzed it, and found patterns regarding the unauthorized use of Croatian weapons in the conflict thereby leading to its publication as a featured news story in The New York Times in 2013. So, picking this recent news story, the discussion will be about how the journalists, particularly Eliot Higgins managed to research vast amounts of information and how this data journalism is slightly from traditional journalism, although both can coexist.
According to a multimedia journalist, Mirko Lorenz data-driven journalism is defined “as a workflow, where data is the basis for analysis, visualization and – most important – storytelling” (Baack 2011, p.2). As storytelling is the key aspect, the end product is not just about visualization of the data. instead, it is about contextualization and highlighting of the important aspects in that data in the form of interesting, strong, and impacting news stories. The crucial player who triggered the development of this journalistic process is the .non-profit journalistic organization Wikileaks, which leaked secret and sensitive US government documents dealing with the War in Afghanistan and Iraq in the latter part of the 2000s. The data in those documents were immense but crucial. So, it initiated the journalists to delve deeper into those data, filter them, analyze them, and thereby find effective news stories related to the wars.