A new book published by the team behind the Datablog explains how we do data journalism at the Guardian. This is what you will learn
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Data journalism in action at the Guardian
"Comment is free," wrote Guardian editor CP Scott in 1921, "but facts are sacred". He was writing his manifesto for the Guardian newspaper on its first century, a set of ideals journalists can still sign up to. "Fundamentally it implies honesty, cleanness, courage, fairness, a sense of duty to the reader and the community."
Ninety years later, publishing those sacred facts has become part of the establishment, a new type of journalism in itself: data journalism.
Only four years ago, when we launched the Datablog, all this was new. People still asked if getting stories from data was really journalism and not everyone had seen the godfather of data journalism Adrian Holovaty's riposte.
It goes like this:
Is data journalism? Is it journalism to publish a raw database? Here, at last, is the definitive, two-part answer:
1. Who cares?
2. I hope my competitors waste their time arguing about this as long as possible
But once you've had MPs expenses and Wikileaks, the startling thing is that no-one asks those questions anymore. Instead, they want to know, "how do we do it?"
Facts are sacred We wanted to show with this book how we do it. It brings together some of our thoughts about how data has changed our world – and what it tells us, expanding on themes that have flown across the Datablog since it started. It's more than a collection of stories; almost a manifesto for a new way of seeing things. In the past two years, data journalism has become our industry standard, our way of telling the big stories.
It's not just about reporting and news organisations – data has become the hope for companies across the world, a potential source of revenue, either in exploiting it or in helping others analyse it. The divisions between what we do in the media and what happens out there in the rest of the world are breaking down – and data has played a huge part in that.
So, we are not alone in this: every day brings newer and more innovative journalists, developers and entrepeneurs into the field, and with them new skills and techniques. So, not only is data journalism changing in itself, it's changing journalism too. And the world.
