What Is Data Journalism?

What is data journalism? I could answer, simply, that it is journalism done with data. But that doesn’t help much.

Both “data” and “journalism” are troublesome terms. Some people think of “data” as any collection of numbers, most likely gathered on a spreadsheet. 20 years ago, that was pretty much the only sort of data that journalists dealt with. But we live in a digital world now, a world in which almost anything can be (and almost everything is) described with numbers.

Your career history, 300,000 confidential documents, everyone in your circle of friends; these can all be (and are) described with just two numbers: zeroes, and ones. Photos, video, and audio are all described with the same two numbers: zeroes and ones. Murders, disease, political votes, corruption, and lies: zeroes and ones.