Blast from the past: Three incredible examples of early data journalism

The growth and consumption of information, and the rise of data science specifically, continues to open up new areas of life and challenge the ways we approach traditional professions. Journalism is not an exception. From a disputable occupation that brought up more questions than gave answers, data journalism has transformed from the newest wrinkle in media life to become a standard in the domain.

Let’s take a look at three examples of data journalism, as it has developed over the years.

Meet PolitiFact – an incredible example of journalism in a new genre. This website became very popular during the United States’ 2008 presidential campaign and won a prestigious Pulitzer Prize for its election coverage.

PolitiFact works through claims madeby American politicians, rating their accuracy from true to false. In doing so, the sitemeasures the congruity of their positions and whether they’ve been keeping their promises.

Today, PolitiFact is a convenient tool to help navigate political debates. For example, according to PolitiFact, Donald Trump likes to state that Affordable Care Act exchanges will fail. On 13th June 2017 he tweeted:

The PolitiFact team analyzed reports from Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, looking specifically at statistics of insurance enrollments from 2015 to 2017. They found that this figure of 2 million people dropping Obamacare does exist, but that Trump had pulled it out of context. First of all, the majority of people who signed up and then left, did so because they received insurance coverage from another source (say, employer-sponsored). Secondly, the federal government changed their reporting timeline, which meant that decreasing enrollment figures were likely to be a result of new methodologies rather than a real-life trend. Thus, PolitiFact concluded: “Trump’s statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate it Mostly False.”

In explaining how PolitiFact came about, one of the site’s founders, Matt Waite, talked about how they took the concept of a standard newspaper and reassembled it completely for the web.They shifted the focal point from story-based journalism to a datadriven model, focusing on the information itself. The team decomposed the process of writing an ordinary political chronicle into its fundamental parts, identified the most important attributes and used data instruments to distil these into a journalistic product. The project was inspired by Adrian Holovaty’s article “A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change”.

“Adrian’s main theme was that certain kinds of newspaper content have consistent pieces that could be better served to the reader from a database instead of a newspaper story. I built PolitiFact with that in mind,” explained Matt Waite.

Everyone has heard about Wikileaks. 

The colossal volume of data that has been made available by Wikileaks has been a gift to journalists.