Challenges Facing Development of Data Journalism in Non-Western Societies

Abstract

As shown by several papers in this special issue, there has been an increasing interest in data among journalism scholars and practitioners worldwide including those in the Global South. While papers in this volume include scholarly assessments of data journalism in Italy and the UK, the inclusion of papers focusing on the Arab region, Latin America and Africa in a well-respected journal like this should be commended. Research has outlined the benefits and challenges of data to journalism practice, transnational experiences in teaching data journalism and the changing nature of the profession in a data-dominated society, be it in practice, pedagogy and empiricism. However, up until this volume, very little was known about the developments of data journalism in non-Western societies. Noticeably, there is a small but significant developing interest in studies that seek to investigate the growing expansion of data journalism in the Global South. It is important to examine the development of data journalism beyond Western paradigm because every region and in some cases, country, seems to be adopting a specific culture orientation that best describes its position when it comes to data journalism.

Keywords:

• Africa
• Global South
• data
• data journalism
• non-Western

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.