The Pew Research Center notes that journalism is a mode of communication that provides the public verified facts and information in a meaningful context so that citizens can make informed judgments about society. As aggregated, large-scale data have become readily available and the practice of journalism has increasingly turned to big data to help fulfill this mission. Journalists have begun to apply a variety of computational and statistical techniques to organize, analyze, and interpret these data, which are then used in conjunction with traditional news narratives and reporting techniques. Big data are being applied to all facets of news including politics, health, the economy, weather, and sports.
The growth of “data-driven journalism” has changed many journalists’ news gathering routines by altering the way news organizations interact with their audience, providing new forms of content for the public and incorporating new methodologies to achieve the objectives of journalism....
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Further Readings
Pew Research Center. The core principles of journalism. http://www.people-press.org/1999/03/30/section-i-the-core-principles-of-journalism. Accessed April 2016.
Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. Understanding data journalism: Overview of resources, tools and topics. http://journalistsresource.org/reference/reporting/understanding-data-journalism-overview-tools-topics. Accessed April 2016.
Silver, N.What the fox knows. http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-the-fox-knows. Accessed August 2014.
Special Issues and Volumes
Digital Journalism–Journalism in an Era of Big Data: Cases, concepts, and critiques. v. 3/3 (2015).
Social Science Computer Review – Citizenship, Social Media, and Big Data: Current and Future Research in the Social Sciences (in press).
The ANNALS of American of the American Academy of Political and Social Science – Toward Computational Social Science: Big Data in Digital Environments. v. 659/1 (2015).
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Weeks, B.E., Diehl, T., Huber, B., Gil de Zúñiga, H. (2017). Journalism. In: Schintler, L., McNeely, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Big Data. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32001-4_124-1
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