Journalism, data

+ narrative
@PaulBradshaw, Birmingham City University, BBC
Author: Scraping for Journalists, Finding Stories in Spreadsheets, Data
Journalism Heist, Online Journalism Handbook
https://leanpub.com/u/paulbradshaw
https://onlinejournalismblog.com/
https://twitter.com/AlbertoCairo/status/907238441011773440
Spoiler alert!
● Why storytelling shouldn’t be abandoned
● How storytelling shapes what we do as (data)
journalists
● How to use narrative responsibly
 Paul Bradshaw, Data Journalism Handbook
http://datajournalismhandbook.org/1.0/en/introduction_0.html
 Act I:
How storytelling
shapes what we do
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLZ1LT0kd-4
The elements of journalism
“1. Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth
“7. Journalism must strive to keep the significant
interesting and relevant”
Kovach & Rosenstiel (2007)
So crime & terrorism stories...
“...Use news values that favour conflict over
clarity and opinion over explanation.
“The desire ... to tell a story may end up so
disregarding statistical patterns that they
end up misinforming our view of the world.”

Cushion, Lewis & Callaghan 2017

‘Accused’/‘blamed’
“The Blame Frame affixes responsibility on human agents
and foregrounds the pursuit of punishment and justice.
“The Explain Frame takes responsibility away from human
agents and describes the tragedy in terms of natural or
quasi-natural processes ...
“Ultimately, both frames serve to reproduce social
boundaries and reinforce the status quo.”
Shahin 2015
The “Law of narrative gravity”
“The more widely accepted (or massive) a
narrative, the more it attracts and shapes
the perception of facts.”

Grosser 2017
 1hr50m: “That’s the story”
[Nightcrawler: Script, Analysis]
But data journalism is different,
right?
 Act II:
(But we still need
stories)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w#t=3m14s
“Fight rumours and conspiracy theories with engaging and powerful
narratives that leverage the same techniques as disinformation”
What do stories do?
‘Narrative news’ “elicited stronger affective and
cognitive involvement” (but not recall); made
“better informed” young readers (but lower
satisfaction)
‘Melodrama’ “increases recall” (but “not
comprehension”)
Not a great story.
“Data dumps were really popular, so
you will have this huge dataset and you
put it online … and everyone’s like ‘ah
cool, that’s so much fun!’ and then we
just see that readers just don’t use
that.
“So that’s the change that we’ve seen
here. And we’re trying to encourage
everybody to do, is focus on the story
first.”

Stuart Thompson, WSJ

https://www.dropbox.com/s/umr3r11v8dc088x/nerdJournalismDISSERTATION.pdf?dl=0
Data’s challenge to journalism
● New genres: interactivity, personalisation,
exploration vs explanation
● New cultures: transparency vs objectivity,
hacker ethic (the digital commons)
● Data as ‘fact’ vs journalism as ‘story’
Deconstructing narrative
Should contain an actor and a narrator*;
3 distinct levels: the text, the story, and the
fabula; Contents should be “a series of connected
events caused or experienced by actors.”
- Mieke Bal

*Actor and narrator can be same; narrator can be ‘effaced’

https://gender-pay-gap.service.gov.uk/viewing/employer-%2cd-EQDgBs_aYzIwbTF3O-UA!!/report-2017
Martin Cortazzi 1993
https://pinboard.in/u:paulbradshaw/t:gender+dj+pay
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gender-pay-gap/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/gender-pay-gap
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/aug/10/gender-pay-gap-widening-at-one-in-four-government-bodies-figures-show
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/25/gender-pay-gaps-in-academy-school-chains-among-the-worst-in-uk
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-42611365
https://github.com/BBC-Data-Unit/gender-pay-gap
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/28/what-you-need-to-know-about-gender-pay-gap-reporting
https://www.theguardian.com/news/video/2018/apr/06/the-truth-about-gender-pay-gap-video-explainer
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-43668187
Journalism’s criteria
● Choosing fabula that are most important...
● ...and ordering them (in a story) to most
accurately represent the facts
● ...and make those interesting and relevant
● ...to our audience
● ...through a particular medium (the text)
https://medium.com/tdebeus/think-about-the-grammar-of-graphics-when-improving-your-graphs-18e3744d8d18
 Showing uncertainty

Gauge; box and whisker plots; ranges; visualising uncertainty;

http://napa-cards.net/
 Ben Schneiderman
http://www.mat.ucsb.edu/~g.legrady/academic/courses/11w259/schneiderman.pd
f
https://www.ft.com/content/3685bf9e-a4cc-11e6-8b69-02899e8bd9d
1
The West Wing, Season 2 episode 16
 “It is increasingly the case that it simply does not
make sense to think about certain types of crime in
terms of our conventional notions of space.
Cybercrime, white-collar financial crime,
transnational terrorism, fraud and identity theft all
have very real local (and global) consequences, yet
‘take place’ within, through or across the ‘space of
flows’ (Castells 1996). Such a-spatial or
inter-spatial crime is invariably omitted from
conventional crime maps.”

Theo Kindynis (2014)

Act II: Scene 2
A new era
“[Manovich suggests] the database is
to the digital era what narrative, in
novels and cinema was to the modern
era.”

Lewis and Westlund (2014)

“Historically, the artist made a unique
work within a particular medium.
Therefore the interface and the work
were the same; in other words, the
level of an interface did not exist. With
new media, the content of the work
and the interface become separate. It
is therefore possible to create
different interfaces to the same
material. ”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-41805053
https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2018/apr/04/gender-pay-gap-when-does-your-company-stop-paying-women
-in-2018
Jensen: 4 types of interactivity
1. Transmissional (extra info about elements, e.g.
hover)
2. Consultational (multiple views, e.g. show same data
in different ways)
3. Conversational (user can input, & is displayed, e.g.
You Draw It)
4. Registrational (user input influences display, e.g.
personalisation) Veglis & Bratsas 2017; Jensen 1998
NYTimes
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/dataview/how-americans-die/
 Chatbots as
ergodic
narrators?

101 East investigates Malaysia's underground baby trade

Interactivity’s effects
Transmissional & consultational “have been found to
enhance user enjoyment and foster favourable
attitudes [but] do not necessarily increase...
knowledge acquisition … or recall
“Conversational interactivity has also been found to
increase loyalty”

Veglis & Bratsas 2017;

“Not all new media objects are
explicitly databases ... Computer
games do not follow database logic,
they appear to be ruled by another
logic – that of an algorithm.”
Jesper Juul 1998
 Games of
progression
(abstract)

*
http://www.half-real.net/dictionary/
 Games of
emergence

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/13/weekinre
view/deficits-graphic.html
“Games [need] how and why. 'How'
lets you understand the system. 'Why'
can be how the player understands
the ways that the pieces in the system
interact.”

http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2011/04/designing-a-newsgame-is-an-act-of-journalism103.html
Empathy and “ludic suspense”
Parallel empathy (feeling what the other person feels,
e.g. tension, pressure, confusion)
Reactive empathy (sympathy/pity because you have
something in common with that character)

Plewe & Fursich 2017

Act III: What we can
do about stories
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-fkZA8x68k
Journalism’s story about itself
Providing a service to citizens by reporting truthfully and
independently on information that is of public interest,
holding power to account, providing a forum for criticism
and compromise, and giving a voice to the voiceless in a
way that makes significant information interesting and
relevant.
“Just the facts”
Transparency: a new “story”

https://github.com/washingtonpost/data-homicides
Journalism’s challenge to data
● Journalism’s verification vs data’s ‘truth’
● Journalism holding power to account vs data as
a form of power
“We are moving from the
knowledge/power nexus portrayed by
Foucault to a data/action nexus that
does not need to move through
theory: All it needs is data together
with preferred outcomes”
Geoffrey Bowker, 2014

https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/download/2190/1156
https://www.propublica.org/series/machine-bias
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-03-08/how-data-can-turn-immigrants-into-criminals
https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2017-02-27/the-future-of-fake-news
https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/hatecrime-map
http://museumofhomelessness.org/2019/03/12/dying-homeless-project/
https://twitter.com/guardian/status/1009433445032976389?s=09
https://onlinejournalismblog.com/2017/08/07/10-principles-for-data-journalism-in-its-second-decade/
The resolution

We are both products, and makers, of

stories — the first step is to admit this
Stories are just tools: whether used for
good or ill depends on the storyteller
Ethical storytelling means using stories
transparently while striving for impact,
fairness and accuracy
https://twitter.com/AlbertoCairo/status/907238441011773440
Questions?

@paulbradshaw
paul.bradshaw@bcu.ac.uk