Thursday, April 14, 2016

Week 5: Data Analysis in Journalism????

Intro to Data Journalism
Last week when I had gone in for the diversity committee meeting a fellow journalist who works with Kaila offered to sit down with me to explain her line of work and how she contributes to the Republic with her stories. Caitlin McGlade is a data reporter(a line of investigative reporting), who focuses on government accountability. She spends months at a time working on one story gathering data and statistics to support her argument and facts. She produces original, high-impact, informative stories that require her to dig deep using her data analysis skills. The stories she writes requires pragmatic and analytical thinking with a healthy dose of creativity. 

Caitlin's Stories
The power of data is endless and diverse. These are a number of different stories that she's published using big data. Below are some of the ones that had extremely high numbers of engagement time.



 Engagement in the Eye's of Data Reporting
Since Caitlin's stories tend to be longer with an abundance of facts its harder to keep her readers engaged. She claims that the relevance of the article to the general public is key in having her audience love it. For example, she had written an article which focused on schools in Arizona that aren't vaccinated. Stories like this appeal to parents because of the importance of the content in regard to their kids. Longer articles require videos, photos, and "gadgets" that grab the readers eyes in order to have them keep reading. If you take a look at the article stated 'Why the Phx Sky Harbor flight-path noise may drive you crazy', there is a video half way through the article, and a "gadget" that readers can play around with. The map allows the reader to point their mouse to a particular section so that they can see how often planes fly in their neighborhood and how loud these planes are. This is interactive, it provides information that is specific to where a reader lives which make them more interested in the article. Despite the amount of data analysis and facts Caitlin uses she does indeed use creative writing when presenting her information. Since there's a large amount of information that needs to be presented in her articles, she says its important to separate it out like a narrative with a beginning middle and end.

1 comment:

  1. Aditi very good research! I came to know about data journalism. Very Interesting and there are lots of efforts behind it.

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