Why data literacy is imperative for every journalist
“If you don’t like math, you cannot be a journalist,” said Alberto Cairo, chair of the visual journalism program at the University of Miami. He spoke on a panel about data journalism during the COVID-19 pandemic on Thursday at the Journalism in the Time of Crisis conference organized by Carleton University.
Cairo, who teaches data visualization, urged budding journalists to learn how to read data. “I would encourage students to try to get into these worlds because it really gives you another completely different skillset that will be complementary to what you already have, and that will make you more employable in the future,” he added.
He characterized a journalist’s lack of data fluency as “the equivalent of not knowing grammar.”
According to Joel Eastwood, numeracy and data fluency is evolving the language that journalists use. Eastwood — a graphics editor at the Wall Street Journal and part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team last year — said: “We’re also seeing policymakers increasingly deploying charts and statistics to the public, but they don’t necessarily do so with the same interest that journalists do.”
That being said, “Just because something takes the form of data …does not mean that it is authoritative and all-knowing,” warned Eastwood. “Charts and data can be used as a sleight of hand” for authorities to downplay the situation if, for example, they report the percentage of cases as a share of tests administered as opposed to a share of the total population.
He urged people to “think critically about a dataset in the same way that you would interrogate and think critically about what a human source is saying to you.”
Not showing the full picture with data is one issue, but whether the data itself is accurate is another barrier altogether. Faced with a choice between data gathered by journalists, or government data on COVID-19, Patti Sonntag said she would pick the former.
Sonntag is the director of the Institute of Investigative Journalism at Concordia University. Her team of students and researchers compiled a heatmap of COVID-19 cases in North America that is only accessible to journalists.
“If you look back through the project pandemic records you’ll see this repeated pattern where journalists provided higher numbers. The regional office or government would say, ‘No, that can’t be right.’ And then gradually, like a week later, it would turn out that was, in fact, correct,” said Sonntag.
Every state or country may have a different way of measuring COVID-19 data, and “you can’t hope to ever find that mystical magic wellspring of data,” said Eastwood. He added that it’s important to be transparent with readers about what trade-offs were made with the measurements.
“Being transparent is important, but also to be open to suggestions of your readers,” said Nael Shiab. Shiab is a Montreal-based data journalist for Radio-Canada, CBC’s French-language broadcaster.
Putting a journalist’s contact information in a prominent place within a data-based story could help generate “thousands and thousands” of emails, said Shiab. He recalled one instance when a retired statistician got in touch with him and pointed to some great resources because they were both researching the same topic.
When tackling a major project in the public interest, he said, “readers could help.”
Before the panel closed, the panelists were asked for advice on how to gather data. “Collecting our own data is a laborious and time-consuming process that we rarely embark upon,” said Eastwood. “If you’re going to do so, I would really recommend you get acquainted with a good piece of database software, or are very fluent in spreadsheets.”
To view the whole panel discussion here.
