Journalistic Agency in Data Journalism Around the World

Sept. 21, 2023

Jason Martin, DePaul University

Gerry Lanosga, Indiana University

Lindita Camaj, University of Houston

Study focus

• Research on data journalism sometimes fails to properly examine journalistic agency at expense of overemphasis on the technical aspects of digital ‘tools’ (Wright et al., 2019)
• Recently, more research on general forms of journalism agency – choices & decisions made by individual journalists 
• Need more empirical work on how data journalists exert agency, especially for accountability or work with public data

Why focus on data journalists?

• Data journalism enables development & production of public knowledge in essential ways different from other forms of reporting (Ramsälv, Ekström & Westlund, 2023) by combining elements of news reporting, computational journalism & academic quantitative inquiry
• Data journalism also has strong potential for journalistic agency by incorporating audience into multiple stages of reporting (Ojo & Heravi, 2018)

Study significance

• Seek new insights into agency in data journalism globally via analysis of in-depth interviews with data journalists from 34 countries (including 18 from the Global South)
• Attention to legal framework & journalistic culture to understand reporting methods & processes – and how they think of journalistic agency & how they say they enact it 
• Study goal: Contribute to dialogue among scholars & practitioners about how a better understanding of journalistic agency may help improve their work and its positive impact on society

Journalistic agency: Conceptual framework

• Data journalists’ work is shaped by interaction of their own agency with multiple external and intrinsic factors, especially in African, Arab, Asian, and Latin American countries in which the journalistic culture is marked by specific types of hybrid, relational, dynamic qualities (Wright et al., 2019)
• Scholars have investigated the factors & situations in which journalists can influence newsgathering practices & counter external narratives about the news on which they report (Wasserman, 2016)
• Cultural context, politics, & journalistic culture central to agency (Tolz,  2021)
• Legal & ownership structures important influences, but scholars have found ways journalists enact agency reflects more nuanced actions to overcome limitations to report important truthful information (Issawi, 2020)

3 focus areas

• Data collection: official public sources, data subsidies from local and international non-governmental organizations, private business, other institutions for data sources, or partner with third parties, such as digital non-profit civic technology firms, academics, NGOs, or the public
• Data analysis: Community around collaboration & sharing data collection techniques across borders, & using crowdsourcing with the public to address gaps in available data
• Data dissemination & advocacy: social sharing, data disclosure, public discussion of DDJ & agency through advocating for greater access to public data via direct appeals to public officials, encouraging official sources to leak data that is publicly unavailable, or strategizing about how to write requests to elude typical government denials

Research questions

• RQ1: How do data journalists conceive of and express agency in data collection?
• RQ2: How do data journalists conceive of and express agency in data analysis?
• RQ3: How do data journalists conceive of and express agency in dissemination of data-driven projects & via open data advocacy?

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Methodology

• Interviews with data journalists in 34 countries (Spain, Germany, USA, Argentina, Kenya, Uganda, India, Bangladesh, Guatemala, Hungary, Nigeria, Costa Rica, Egypt, Hong Kong, Cuba, Venezuela, Australia, Brazil, UK, Netherlands, Switzerland, France, Canada, Russia, Finland, China, Philippines, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, Servia, Peru, Colombia, South Africa, Pakistan)
• Purposive sampling of most active in Global Editors Network/data journalism awards entries

RQ1: Agency in data collection

• Uniformly expressed great deal of agency in strategizing how to collect data from a variety of sources. Variation arose based on legal, economic, and technological restrictions with data journalists from countries with less transparent legal frameworks and limited or absent open government data environments more likely to use creative strategies for acquiring data from the public or third parties
• Universally lament obstacles to access to public data that statutorily should be easily provided to the public. Across country contexts, data journalists encountered obstruction and government delays in satisfying routine data requests
• Data journalists in countries solely reliant on open data portals as their only public data resource regularly find government agencies refusing to release any additional data
• Administrative staff incompetence, malice against requests, lengthy appeals processes, and fee demands for data also are encountered by data journalists globally
• Even when data journalists encounter cooperative government staff, there tends to be difficulty locating the data or a lack of institutional knowledge about where the data resides, especially for data journalists in Serbia, Kenya, and Guatemala

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RQ1: Agency in data collection

• Despite these challenges, data journalists are resourceful and hopeful when they speak about their journalistic agency and their ability to overcome these obstacles
• In countries in which specific desired public data is scarce, low quality, or less useable, data journalists are more proactive in creating their own datasets through crowdsourcing (Bangladesh, Canada, China, Cuba, Hungary, Kenya), public opinion surveys (Egypt, Guatemala, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria), compiling across government documents and media reports (Latin America), collection of social media data before government censor removal (China, Hong Kong), and gathering data with sensors (Germany, Ukraine)
• Overall, data journalists spoke strongly about how they conceive of their journalistic agency to identify and collect data on matters of public concern using a variety of strategies. 
• These attitudes reflected an epistemology of data journalism rooted in service to the public to uncover, gather, analyze, and share their work to inform citizens and to hold government agencies and legislation accountable.

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RQ2: Agency in data analysis

• Data journalists express less optimism in their agency to combat data quality problems in which public data sets provided by request or data portal are unstructured, unaggregated, incomplete, or outdated.
• Frustrated by intentional and unintentional formatting problems that hinder their work. Many complained of higher degrees of variation in data quality across government agencies within their countries or jurisdictions. They express a degree of resignation at “making do” with inconsistent or incomplete data, and lament hours lost to cleaning and verifying data sets that statutorily should be publicly available.
• DJs demonstrate a reflexivity about the provenance and quality of data to a greater degree than previously found in the literature. They are highly skeptical of the quality and value of data provided by third parties and tend to acknowledge limitations on the part of the government agencies compiling the data that hinder their data analysis work. 
• To overcome these challenges, they form a variety of strategic partnerships with NGOs (Costa Rica, Finland, Switzerland, Uganda, Ukraine), private sector data collectors (China, India), international organizations (Egypt, Nigeria), academic institutions (Argentina, Cuba, Guatemala), whistleblowers (Egypt, Hungary, Venezuela), and other news organizations (Cuba, Hungary, Nicaragua, Peru).

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RQ3: Agency post-reporting

• RQ3 produced least degree of reflexive agency and a muddled sense of epistemology. Despite objectives of transparency and engagement at other stages of their work, in post-production, DJs rarely had confidence in their ability to create impact beyond publication.
• While they invest a great deal of time and effort into engagement, they rarely receive reciprocal ROI. Therefore, most rationalize relatively less attention to engagement after production compared to their primary focus on data acquisition and analysis.
• The one area that emerged across country contexts where data journalists expressed relatively more agency was in advocacy for public data and open government. DJs tended to be much clearer and have a stronger voice on their role as advocates push for data on behalf of the public.
• These expressions demonstrate a clear merger of journalistic agency and data journalism epistemology as interview subjects articulated a range of societal duties and a sharp sense of their roles holding government power to account. 

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Discussion

• Takeway for DJ practitioners: largely a set of shared attitudes about journalistic agency and ways of knowing and knowledge production within the data journalism subfield that is the result of a shared professional commitment and values and the affordances of digital tools to share expertise and best practices across geographic borders
• Data journalists demonstrate a renewed sense of journalistic agency in data acquisition and analysis in the face of obstacles and difficulties that vary in degree based on country context, economic limitations, technological constraints, and local journalistic and cultural context
• Uniformly, data journalists globally are less optimistic and invested in their agency to engage with their audience and influence policy or government action beyond a range of public data advocacy actions and goals
• Data journalists therefore should preserve the burgeoning spirit of collaboration that emboldens journalistic agency in the areas of data collection and analysis, while turning their attention to developing shared methods for greater agency in engagement and post-production means of effecting societal change and highlighting their work

Discussion

• This study provides a broader set of geographic data on the commonalities and differences in data journalism practice around the world than previously available
• Data journalists around the world tend to have the same set of values and work routines regardless of legal, economic, and technological restrictions. Variations in approaches to data acquisition occur based on scarcity and censorial limitations, but as a community, data journalists are quick to share problem-solving techniques and generally demonstrate a reflexivity on the ethical concerns of sometimes cutting corners or using alternate strategies for collecting data. 
• We find support for previous studies that data journalists as a community are creating vanguard pathways for collaboration over traditional notions of journalistic competition, and we find them using crowdsourcing with the public to address gaps in available data as a small and narrow but significant form of enacting agency via audience engagement. However, there remains significant work to be done in fostering and growing journalistic agency in other forms of post-production engagement and activity beyond sharing on social media.

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Conclusion

• We hope these results provide support for data journalists conducting impressive data acquisition and analysis in difficult contexts in which their access and ease of acquiring public data is limited. Data journalists in those situations should be aware that they are at the cutting edge of performing their work and that their attitudes about their own agency and ways of understanding their work are very much in sync with colleagues who may have greater and easier access to the public data.
• This study also reveals importance of scholarly attention to issues of journalistic agency in the face of so many growing challenges and obstacles to the work of data journalists, including government obstruction and authoritarian actions to thwart their accountability reporting.
• We encourage scholars and practitioners to align and support important data journalism work being done around the world.
• Future research: more interview data with multiple data journalists within countries or regions.