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ABSTRACT
In times of shrinking news budgets and increased pressure for innovation in media organizations, data journalism has come into the spotlight as an area still expanding in newsrooms. The practice drives quantitative and collaborative forms of journalism while its practitioners are said to further challenge the status quo. Using a standardized computer assisted telephone survey, this study contributes the first representative quantitative overview of data journalistic activities, contents and assessments in Germany. A population of 305 newspapers and public broadcasters was surveyed in 2018 for structures, processes, contents and perceptions of data journalism. The survey’s response rate was 36% for newspapers (N = 105) and 100% for broadcasters (N = 12). The results indicate that data journalism in Germany is well established (75% of the media outlets) and mostly practiced by individuals or small teams. On a content level, the most important topic for newspapers is local/regional coverage, for public broadcasters politics and economics. The media outlets use freely available data from statistical offices most often. Newspapers do not seem to fully leverage the potential of sophisticated forms of presentations of their data projects. The interviewees themselves demonstrate a strong believe in data journalism’s ability to transform journalism towards more transparency.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Denis Gießler, Jana Lapper and Manuel Mehlhorn for their data collection activities.
Data Availability Statement
The data that support the findings of this study are available upon reasonable request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to containing information that could compromise the privacy of research participants.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 In the definition presented, it was further stated:
The information can be presented in classic journalistic articles but can also consist of specific data visualizations or user-focused online experiences. The most prominent example of data journalism are perhaps the Panama Papers. However, also “less elaborated” stories can be data journalism. For example, a map showing the local distribution of fine dust or comparable pollutant would also be considered data journalism as the visualization is also based on data.