Data Journalism: The Inevitable Direction in the Digital Age

In 2016, the media world witnessed a major turning point with the shocking leak of the Panama Papers, revealing more than 2.6 terabytes of data on companies and hidden accounts of the global powerful. However, what made a strong impression was not only the content of the documents, but also the journalism method: more than 370 journalists from 76 countries used data journalism techniques to process and analyze millions of files, creating a series of cross-national investigative stories.

Since then, data journalism has emerged as a core form of journalism in the digital age, in which data serves as the primary source of information, evidence, and storytelling element.

Scene of the Workshop on Data Journalism and Outstanding Content Strategy (within the framework of the Vietnam Journalism Forum) taking place in March 2024. Photo: Nhandan.vn

What is data journalism?

According to Jonathan Gray, author of “The Data Journalism Handbook”, data journalism is the use of digital data in the process of investigating, telling stories and publishing journalistic content, with a combination of analytical skills, visualization and journalistic language.

More than just “sticking a chart to a story,” data journalism requires journalists to collect structured or unstructured data; clean and analyze data; visualize with maps, graphs, infographics; and interpret data into in-depth, emotional stories.

Associate Professor, Dr. Tran Quang Dieu, Ho Chi Minh National Academy of Politics : Data journalism is a new form of journalism, combining the information exploitation ability of journalists with the analytical ability of statisticians and the ability to graph and model.

In the context of AI explosion, data journalism plays an increasingly important role in press agencies. With the support of AI, journalists and press agencies can exploit unlimited open data sources on the Internet, thereby having more data to build quality articles.

Today’s world runs on data, from government to banking, from healthcare toeducation , from social media to logistics systems. In that context, if the press cannot master data, it will gradually be “overtaken” by analytical systems, specialized blogs, and even by technology companies themselves.

Editor-in-Chief of Nhan Dan Newspaper, journalist Le Quoc Minh once emphasized: Today's press competes not only with content, but also with presentation, data processing speed and the ability to transmit information from seemingly invisible sources such as... spreadsheets.

For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, online charts from VietnamPlus, Zing News, VnExpress and many other news agencies helped readers track the progress of the pandemic by day and by region, something that text alone could not do.

The big challenges

According to the 2024 press and media trends report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (UK), there are 3 main trends affecting press and media: Many new types of devices are emerging; digital platforms and social networks specializing in audio and video creation are developing explosively; and the wave of artificial intelligence (AI).

All three of these trends involve data journalism, a form of journalism that is increasingly asserting its position and role through the digital media environment.

Data journalism does not require all journalists to be programmers, but it does require them to have a digital mindset and be familiar with tools: Data processing (Google Sheets, Excel, SQL); visualization (Datawrapper, Flourish, Tableau Public); data collection (from Open Data, public APIs, or scraping via code); automation (AI like ChatGPT that can summarize data, write drafts, make suggestions)…

Paul Bradshaw, founder of Online Journalism Blog (UK), emphasized: Data journalism is a combination of classic journalistic skills and modern digital tools. It does not replace journalists, but forces journalists to "evolve".

Source: Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2023.

In Vietnam, the biggest challenge for data journalism is not technology, but the mindset of approaching data and the lack of open sources. Most data from government agencies is still published in “non-machine readable” form - scanned PDFs, photos. A journalist who wants to analyze high school graduation rates by region may have to… hand-type each number from a paper report.

In addition, many journalists are still wary of data, believing that writing based on emotions and information provided by characters is easier than analyzing charts. This causes the press to lose an important competitive advantage: transparency and accuracy.

Journalist Nguyen Thanh Chung (Nhan Dan Newspaper), who attended the data journalism training course at BBC Media Action, shared: I used to think that data was dry and difficult to access. But after creating an interactive map of Hanoi's air quality, I realized: data is not lifeless, it can touch people's deepest concerns if told in the right way.

When journalists are data storytellers

Experts and many experienced journalists believe that in order for data journalism in Vietnam to develop, systematic training is needed first. Journalism faculties add subjects on data mining, visualization, and basic analysis.

Along with that, the Government needs to standardize and strengthen the National Data Portal (data.gov.vn), provide CSV format data, API to help the press access flexibly. Newsrooms need to truly transform digitally and it is important that journalists do not "distort" data when exploiting and using it.

Data is increasingly a valuable resource, but also a “liar” without honest storytellers. Data journalism not only helps the public understand the world, but also contributes to shaping the mindset of digital citizens who are transparent, critical and evidence-based.

Clearly, data journalism is not a temporary trend and journalists cannot stand outside this trend in the current digital age.

Source: https://baothainguyen.vn/xa-hoi/202506/bao-chi-du-lieu-huong-di-tat-yeu-trong-thoi-dai-so-hoa-47f0251/