Nieman Foundation at Harvard
HOME
          
LATEST STORY
Two-thirds of news influencers are men — and most have never worked for a news organization
ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
May 19, 2014, 12:40 p.m.
Reporting & Production
LINK: www.thefunctionalart.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Joshua Benton   |   May 19, 2014

Dataviz whiz Alberto Cairo had an interesting blog post over the weekend critiquing the new wave of data journalism sites as insufficiently rigorous:

Perhaps I was exaggerating, but I’m seeing too much shoddy stuff in websites like Vox.com and FiveThirtyEight. They do publish interesting stories, but a very visible portion of their output is dubious.

I’m not just talking about the foolish comparisons of health care prices. That’s old news. It’s also the speculations about kidnappings in Nigeria (at least they corrected this one properly; good for them.) Or making long-term linear predictions while forgetting about xkcd (see the cartoon below) and black swans.

I should also mention this piece on helmets and bikes, an example of Gladwellism gone crazy: “Hey, here’s a counterintuitive idea, and here you have a handful of papers and small datasets — you don’t mind if they aren’t that significant, if they say the opposite to what I claim, if I jump to conclusions, or if one of the studies has a sample size of one, do you?”. See more (and more) details about this case, which is an absolute shame.

Data journalism, at least in some of the stories and blog posts that these organizations are publishing, has become “datum journalism,” a term that I’ve stolen from Census Reporter’s Ryan Pitts. It’s a pity.

[…]

Alberto also links to this related Storify, featuring C.W. Anderson, Greg Linch, Scott Klein, Emily Bell, Tim Carmody, Alex Howard, Jacob Harris, and a bunch of other smart people you might want to follow on Twitter.

Show tags
 
Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
Two-thirds of news influencers are men — and most have never worked for a news organization
A new Pew Research Center report also found nearly 40% of U.S. adults under 30 regularly get news from news influencers.
The Onion adds a new layer, buying Alex Jones’ Infowars and turning it into a parody of itself
One variety of “fake news” is taking possession of a far more insidious one.
The Guardian won’t post on X anymore — but isn’t deleting its accounts there, at least for now
Guardian reporters may still use X for newsgathering, the company said.