First person: Working as a data journalist
This week’s first person article comes from Annie Gouk, who is part of the Trinity Mirror Data Journalism team based in Manchester. Two years into the job, she’s now proud to admit she’s become a ‘data nerd’ … even though she never expected to:
When I was doing my MA in journalism, I never thought I would get into data — it wasn’t even on my radar as a possible career option.
But when a job came up with the Trinity Mirror Data Unit, writing for both national and regional titles and based in my home-town of Manchester, it was too good an opportunity to pass up.
I’ve now been with the team for almost two years, and can genuinely say I love my job — and I’m not ashamed to admit I’m now a proper data nerd.
As part of the Data Unit, I write data-led news stories, conduct investigations and undertake long-term data projects for all the Trinity Mirror titles.
This involves sending articles to our newsrooms with exclusive, local data stories tailored to them, based on official statistics, original analysis and Freedom of Information requests.
Examples of stories from open datasets include my work on corporate and foreign ownership of property in England and Wales, child poverty within hyper-local neighbourhoods, and road conditions across the UK.
Exclusive investigations include this specially-requested data on children hospitalised with eating disorders and this one on babies born addicted to drugs.
Alongside this day-to-day journalistic work, I also produce more ambitious, longer-term data projects.
These cover public interest subjects that I am personally passionate about, and are often based on combining existing datasets in new and revealing ways.
One example of this is my project on gender inequality, which brought together dozens of national and local data sets to show the difference in outcomes for men and women in almost every aspect of life.
These statistics were woven together with interviews in an interactive storytelling format to guide the reader through the issues, rendering a large quantity of data instantly understandable at the same times as making it more engaging.
Another of my recent investigations exposed the extent to which structural racism remains a huge problem in Britain.
By analysing local data on education, health, crime and other issues, I revealed disturbing cradle-to-grave discrimination that means while ethnic minorities now often outperform white Britons at school, they still suffer worse outcomes in other aspects of life.
Our findings — described as “shocking” by the head of Britain’s equalities watchdog — came with a gadget which allowed readers to type in their postcode and see the figures for their local area visualised in an easy-to-digest, clearly narrated format.
My work often includes video, data visualisation and interactive gadgets. These don’t just add a new storytelling dimension, they also personalise my work and means each individual reader can find their own “story”.
While data journalism uses new sources, techniques and technology, in all other respects it is exactly the same as other journalism. We explore issues of public interest. We hold power to account. It is just that our sources, the things we “interview”, include databases and spreadsheets.
At a time when it is important to fight back against the perception of digital journalism as “clickbait”, I’m very proud of the way the Data Unit is combining the best journalistic principles and standards with technology that helps us better connect with readers.
In the last year, I have produced thousands of local data stories for Trinity Mirror titles, providing content that is used both online and in print — including many front-page splashes.
Since we use data that is rarely analysed at a local level — and usually not a national level, either — we are providing a vital perspective on stories that would otherwise never come to light.
People often ask where my data comes from. Much of it is sourced from government departments and other public bodies like the NHS, the ONS, and Public Health England.
Some comes from Freedom of Information requests, or other requests for bespoke data.
Some comes from scraping figures from websites using software like OutWit Hub.
Google Sheets is my preferred method of analysing data — it’s surprising how much you can achieve with advanced spreadsheet skills alone!
When I analyse data I am looking for trends, outliers, changes over time and comparative rates.
I then work with a designer, coder and video editor to create any extras, such as explainer videos or interactive postcode-search gadgets.
I’m also learning the coding language R as a way to analyse and visualise large data sets.
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