Survival Guide for Data Journalists


Data Journalism's Past and Future

The Rise of Data Journalists


According to Google's Data journalist open book in 2017, data journalism represents stories that are enriched by data, stories that use data to investigate and stories that explain data. Since 2009, the google trends shows that of the heat of the concept of data journalism has been significantly increasing.



What is a so-called data journalist? What should the data journalists be like in foreseeable future?
By digging deep into Global Data Journalists Directory published online by Journalism++, we try to answer these 2 questions through a data-driven way.

Does Programming Matter?


Here is the comparison between the google trends of the concepts of data journalism and the GitHub contributions changed from 2008 of the data journalists living in the 5 most active countries in the data journalism industry.




It’s impressive that many of the peaks of the two charts share the same time points. Since the GitHub contribution represents the times that one uploads his/her programming work, what is the relationship between programming and data journalism, and whether programming is a key skill for a data journalist? This kind of trend will have a certain reference and instruction function for potential data journalists.

The Relationship between Programming and Data Journalism


After crawling over 300,000 pieces of data written by journalists and reporters from different countries around the world through Github, we have classified their data according to different countries and regions, and calculated their contribution to Github, so as to obtain the total number of data news of a country or region on Github.

Global Data Journalists Distribution
Global Data Journalist

From the left picture, the deeper the blue colour means the more data news contributed on Github by this region. Thus, we can clearly see that the United States is the country with the largest contribution, and European countries have also made a lot of contribution.

However, when we look into the per capita contribution, we can speculate that the average level of American data journalists's programming engagement is relatively lower, which illustrates that the large number of DJ does not mean a high average contribution. This is a study-worthy phenomenon.

The Impact of Education on Data Journalism


Apart from the GitHub workloard, American is also the largest market for education on earth. The Irish data scientist Behahrh Heravi has made a research on these educational institutions providing data-related journalism programs by region through the statistics of 219 objects around the world. In terms of popularization and promotion of data journalism education, the United States is still in a leading position.

We believe these facts can support the reason why the U.S. data news industry is also leading the way in the world. Therefore, we decided to study the situation of the United States in the field of data news in depth.


Further Analysis on the US


The US has a sufficient and diverse educational environment, where potential data journalists can learn and master the knowledge and skills they need before entering the industry. Thus the data journalism education has been continuously increasing the proportion and competitiveness of data journalism in the United States.

Therefore, we analyze the US from three dimensions, geography, the number of data journalists and the contribution on their Github.

The data journalists' location in the US

The picture is the number of data journalists in different cities in the US. Obviously, New York has most data journalists.

The per capita contribution in the US

Then, we calculate the average contributions per person, which means divide the whole contributions by the number of data journalists. New York is hard to be found in this picture. Right? The layer wider means the more average contributions.

What are the data journalists in the US talking about?


According to the comparsion between the two maps and the case study in the US, programming seems to be less important for data journalists. So what is important to be a DJ?

In order to understand this issue, we analyze from Twitter and the job market. Firstly, we scraped the tweets of all the data journalists to understand what they were concerned about.

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Data

the most frequent word is ‘data’, but its leading superiority is not significant comparing to news, story which concerned to be the traditional media values. Also, 'programming' does not appear in the top15.

News, journalism and story, which concerned to be the traditional media components, are still important among data journalists.

It is interesting that the ranks of 'twitter', 'social' and 'facebook' are raletively high. We assume that data journalists are willing to discuss social media itself on social media.

Hot issues such as 'Trump' or 'election' still contribute a lot to data journalists online discussions.

A Talent Profile of Data Journalism


By scraping the job description of DJ at Indeed and Careers (both are job hunting website), it tends out the most frequent word is still 'data'. However, this time you will figure out some specific words that meet the needs of companies to hire DJ with these relative skills, emphasizing the abilities of storytelling as previous section.

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What’s more, the basic skills of analysis and using tools just has been mentioned in a quite few times. You can see that there are basically three parts of abilities a data journalist should obtain.

The data part

The data part requires a general understanding and application towards using and collecting data.

The storytelling part requires a good expression and sensibility of stories and news.

The experience part requires a past participation in research, teamwork and communication with news agency or institute.


Last but not least, a curiosity toward new things, caring news and a relative degree or diploma will also be considered as an important quality of becoming a good data journalist.