Nate Silver examines what his data journalism company Five Thirty Eight does. He shares how so much information is filtered through news outlets- but today, we have access to so much more of the raw information and this can make decisions about the data without having to wait for a study. I wonder what our world would be like if the news started to write itself- ie, finding patterns such as the word “revolution” starting to trend in a country- and this would automatically be posted as a news story faster than anyone could have written an article.
Wolfinger’s formulation makes sense: Data does not have a virgin birth. It comes to us from somewhere. Someone set up a procedure to collect and record it. Sometimes this person is a scientist, but she also could be a journalist….
The first step is the collection of data or evidence. For a traditional journalist, this is likely to involve some combination of interviewing, documentary research and first-person observation. But data journalists also have ways of collecting information, such as by commissioning polls, performing experiments or scraping data from websites.