Journalism in the Age of Data

JSK Journalism Fellowship, Stanford University , 2010
datajournalism.stanford.edu

When I first arrived at Stanford, I saw how researchers and scholars in different disciplines were grappling with large data sets, incomplete or dirty data, and the need to analyze and present these. I was struck by how this paralleled needs that were arising in the newsroom, even my own experiences.

These insights and others made their way into my documentary video Journalism in the Age of Data, which I published in the summer of 2010, at the end of my JSK fellowship. The report was the culmination of nine months of thinking, exploration, interviews, and footage from presentations and conferences in the United States and Europe.

In order to maximize the effectiveness of the video presentation, I split the 60 minute video into multiple chapters and used an interface I had developed while at Le Monde, which displays relevant supplementary information below the video at timed intervals. The idea was to connect viewers to the people behind the work they were seeing, and to create “bookmarks” that could mitigate the ephemeral nature of video presentations in general. I believe this helped establish the documentary as a valuable educational tool. The documentary was a snapshot of one field in transition – infographics and data visualization – and another being born: data journalism.

Journalism in the Age of Data web interface
The annotated version of the web documentary.
 

The program was shown in excerpts on German public television, has been translated into Chinese and Spanish and has been used around the world as a classroom resource, with over half a million users on its website and Vimeo page, not counting the podcast and foreign-language versions.

An annotated, interactive version is available on the original Stanford website .

Watch the film

Email

geoffmcghee [at] gmail.com

Phone

+1 (415) 326-4929‬