Digital Journalism Sample Clauses

Digital Journalism. ‌ Journalists have long used information and communication technologies in their work. Computer- assisted reporting was first used in the 1950s to support journalists covering election results. Investigative journalists in particular have often used public datasets combined with data collected specifically as part of their investigation to provide the evidence and analysis to support their stories. Two things have changed. First, new forms of data have become available, often born-digital as well as the sheer availability of data. In addition, the technical capacity for processing datasets has increased significantly, not least through the development of on-demand resource provision through computational grids or cloud computing. Journalists have entered a world where data is abundant – a situation described as the “data deluge” (Hey et al 2009) – but where their traditional methods for data analysis fail to translate to this new data and scale to the volume encountered. Where previously the challenge for the journalist was to find data to underpin their analyses, today the massive availability of different forms of data is challenging their capabilities and capacity to analyse them and, in particular, to assess the veracity of online information and the credibility of its source. Second, social media datasets are raw, real-time streams of “messy” content, making them difficult to process without significant human effort and expertise to make them ‘fit for purpose’.