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A new style of news reporting: Wikileaks and data-driven
journalism
Baack, Stefan
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Baack, Stefan: A new style of news reporting: Wikileaks and data-driven journalism. In: Cyborg Subjects (2011). 10 S.. URN: http://
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A new Style of News Reporting: Wikileaks and
Data-driven Journalism
Stefan Baack, M.A. - s.baack@rug.nl; Centre for Media and Journalism Studies,
University of Groningen
Published in: Cyborg Subjects: Discourses on Digital Culture, edited by Bonni Rambatan
and Jacob Johanssen, 113–122. Shoestring Anthologies. [S.l.]: CreateSpace Independent
Publishing Platform, 2013
First published online 2011 at Cyborg Subjects.
Abstract
The coverage of Wikileaks‘ huge amounts of leaked data was a challenge for newspapers
– they had to figure out how to get stories out of extensive and complex data sets and
how to present their findings to readers. The result significantly differs from traditional
news reporting; including illustrations, interactive web applications and reading
instructions to make the material accessible. This style of news reporting is called data-
driven journalism. The international interest in the leaks combined with collaborative
work between newspapers from different countries made it a new trend in current
journalism. A key lesson from working with this kind of material is that data collection is
essential for the effectiveness of the used techniques. If journalists would adapt this
insight to their own, internal data collection process, this form of news reporting could be
used on a large scale and be much more common. The coverage of Wikileaks’ might give
a glimpse of how journalism will look like in the future.
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A new Style of News Reporting. Wikileaks and Data-
driven Journalism
Newspapers are still struggling with the changing media environment that is undermining
their traditional business model and are unsure how to make profits online (Freedman
2010). With growing commercialization, journalists tend to use new technology foremost
to speed up the news production process rather than experimenting with the new
possibilities or enhancing quality (Phillips 2010). However, the collaboration with
Wikileaks challenged traditional newspapers and forced them to think about new ways of
finding and telling stories. They had to work with large and extensive data sets. To take
an example, the Afghanistan War Logs consisted of about 92,000 documents written in a
military jargon (Rogers 2011). The obvious problem is accessibility – both for journalists
who want to get a story out of the material and for readers who want to take a closer look
at it. Letting journalists go through everything individually would be too time consuming
and writing about the findings in a traditional manner seemed insufficient for the
coverage. Especially The Guardian and New York Times realized that early on. Tools
were used to go through the data and to create visualizations and interactive web
application which made the material accessible for readers. This form of news reporting
is called data-driven journalism – and Wikileaks contributed to its development as a trend.
Data-driven Journalism
Scholars and professionals started to discuss data-driven journalism very recently. In
April 2010, the European Journalism Center and the University of Amsterdam initiated
the one day event Data-driven journalism: What is there to learn? to define it and discuss
possible implications. At this event, Lorenz defined data-driven journalism as “a
workflow, where data is the basis for analysis, visualization and – most important –
storytelling” (2010: 10). Due to the storytelling aspect, the end product is more than just a
visualization of data – it is also contextualizing and highlighting of important aspects.
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Bradshaw (2010) explains this data-driven workflow in more detail and distinguishes
four steps: finding the data (1), interrogating data (2), visualizing data (3) and mashing
data (4). Finding can involve having expert knowledge, good contacts or technical skills
to gather data. The interrogation requires a good understanding of the used jargon and
wider context of the data. Visualization and mashing can involve the work of designers
and/or free tools. An example is IBM’s ManyEyes, where users can easily upload and
visualize data for free. As Bradhsaw points out, these four steps require teamwork: “The
reality is that almost no one is doing all of that” (2010). At the end of this workflow, raw
data should be accessible for readers. Lorenz describes it as a process of refinement, raw
data is transformed into something meaningful: “As a result the value to the public
grows, especially when complex facts are boiled down into a clear story that people can
easily understand and remember” (Lorenz 2010: 12).
Data-driven journalism is not something completely new. As Rogers (2010a) shows, it
can be considered to be quite old instead. He describes Florence Nightingale as one of the
first data-journalists in the 19th century who already worked with visual presentations of
information to tell stories. What really is new, however, is the media environment
journalists are working in. Especially these four aspects indicating a growing importance
of data-driven journalism:
• The sheer amount of publicly relevant data available online. Especially in the United
States and Britain, huge data sets are available in connection with the open
government initiative. The problem here is the same as described above: Having
access is not enough without accessibility. To take Britain, most governmental data
is released as a simple and static PDF file (Stay 2010). Journalists from The
Guardian and New York Times saw the potential and started to fill this gap by
offering interactive tools and illustrations to add public value to the data.
• The existence of free tools to handle this data, like the already mentioned ManyEyes.
• The possibility to make the data accessible in an interactive way with web
applications.
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• Time is precious for journalists, they are always under pressure to get the story out
fast (see Phillips 2010). By giving access to the raw data, it is possible to involve
people outside the newsroom in the process of news production with crowdsourcing
– the collaborative analysis by volunteers. This can save time and resources for
researching.
Obviously, data-driven journalism greatly benefits from the possibilities of new media.
Its perception as a trend is therefore not surprising.
The role of Wikileaks for Data-driven Journalism
Is Wikileaks data-driven journalism in itself? Two contra arguments are that it does not
provide visualizations and does not attempt to generate stories out of its materials (only a
brief contextualization is given) - both is largely left over to established news media or is
considered to be done by ‘users’ (see Lovink et al. 2010). In regard to the workflow of
data-driven journalism, Wikileaks is doing the first and second step of collecting and
interrogating data without going further. A key aspect, the transformation of raw data into
something meaningful to add public value, is not given. To what extent Wikileaks can be
considered journalistic more generally remains open for debates, but it is not a form of
data-driven journalism alone - but surely an important actor in the data-driven workflow
nonetheless. From this perspective, Wikileaks is a source for data that needs to be
‘refined’ to add public value.
Wikileaks as a data-source can be called a driving force of data-driven journalism and has
contributed to its development as a trend for three main reasons. First and obviously, to
analyze and cover its huge amounts of leaked (raw) data, data-driven journalism
techniques are essential both for journalists who want to get a story out and present it to
their readership and for readers who can access the material through visualizations and
reading instructions. The second reason is that the leaks were interesting for an
international audience. The released data from the open government initiatives in the
United States and Britain were only interesting for national audiences and there was no
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need for foreign newspapers to work with it. Connected to this, the third reason is the
collaborative work between newspapers from different countries combined with the
simultaneous release date of their coverage. The coverage of the Afghanistan War Logs
therefore internationally demonstrated the advantages data-driven journalism can have.
In comparison, not all of Wikileaks‘ media partners were able to keep up with The
Guardian and New York Times. In Germany, where the open government movement was
(and still is) much weaker, Der Spiegel covered the Afghanistan War Logs in a much
more ’traditional’ way, using no interactive illustrations at all and focusing on the print
version (Krebs 2010). The experience in Britain and the United States to work with huge
amounts of data was clearly an advantage for the coverage and made newspapers from
other countries aware of the potential. As a result, almost every media partner followed
their example and offered visualizations for the second major leak, the Iraq War Logs. As
Simon Rogers from The Guardian states: “Wikileaks didn’t invent data journalism. But it
did give newsrooms a reason to adopt it” (2011).
Using data-driven journalism on Wikileaks’ materials:
What was there to learn?
To be more concrete about how data-driven journalism was used in connection with
Wikileaks, lets take a closer look at the Iraq War Logs and the ‘Cablegate’ (focusing on
The Guardian as an example).
The War Logs contained 391,832 field reports from soldiers. Since each report describes
only a single incident, visualizations are extremely helpful to see patterns and get a
bigger picture. Two important characteristics made it relatively easy to automatically
separate those logs into categories: The standardized format and the use of a dense
military jargon, giving meta-data about date, location, type of incident etc. (Matzat 2010).
In other words: The data set was largely readable for machines. The Guardian
concentrated on incidents where someone had died and separated them into cause of
death, who were killed (for example civilians or hostile forces), time, location etc.
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(Rogers 2011). Then they used Google Fusion tables and marked every single death in
Google Maps. The map was released alongside with key findings from their statistical
analysis (Rogers 2010b). This gave an overview of the amount of people killed and
further information to contextualize it (for example, most of these people were civilians).
In addition, The Guardian took all incidents from a single day to create an interactive
graphic (Dant et al. 2010). While a timer is running from the first to the last minute of
this day, a map shows the location of each incident, gives a description of what happened
and counts the total amount of dead people. It also offers a link to the original report of
each incident. As Lorenz described, abstract numbers were broken down into something
meaningful. By visualizing a single day, you can get a better picture of the atmosphere
and violence that shines through the logs. Apart from that, the fact that the material was
readable for machines did not only help to create visualizations to present the news and
make the material accessible for readers. The automatic separation into categories was
used to guide the selection of documents worth reading for the coverage - which can
speed up the generating of stories out of the data set.
Compared to the War Logs, visualizations for the ‘Cablegate’ are rare. According to
Matzat (2010), this is not only due to the broad geographical reference but mainly to the
content of the material. While the War Logs could be categorized and visualized
relatively easy due to their clear structure, the diplomatic dispatches (‘cables’) are
extensive reports and complex analysis. As Rogers from The Guardian points out, their
“reporters ended up with the enormous task of actually going through each cable, reading
it and seeing what stories were there” (2011). Still, The Guardian created a static world
map showing how many cables come from which locations and how they are classified.
This may be useful to get an overview of the material, but without knowing the actual
content of the cables it does not give readers a better access to it. The fact that 1,083
cables have been sent from London to Washington is not interesting without knowing
what is written in it. Seeing the problem, The Guardian also offers a more ‘context-rich’
interactive map. Users can click on a country and get list of both the original cables from
Wikileaks and a list of articles covering the content of those cables, which is a very useful
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tool to investigate the material. However, only a small amount of cables is available on
this map yet, partly due to the material and to the releasing policy of Wikileaks (not all
cables have been released simultaneously, they continue to be steadily released in stages).
For this kind of unstructured material, crowdsourcing or alternative web resources for
investigating it is still an advantage of data-driven journalism. There are a couple of
crowdsourcing projects or search engines for the cable releases, for example CableWiki
or CableSearch (see an overview here). These resources can form the base for further
visualization attempts in the future.
The coverage of the Iraq War Logs and the Cablegate showed that the effectiveness of
data-driven journalism techniques is dependent on the material at hand. For structured
and machine-readable data, they are very helpful for both showing journalists where to
find a story in the material and for readers who can get access through visualizations. For
more extensive and unstructured data like the diplomatic cables, visualizations are not as
useful and there is no other way than reading everything individually.
First Precursor of a new Journalism?
With more and more publicly relevant data available online and a further development of
visualization techniques, data-driven journalism is at least likely to become a more
established form of news reporting. However, it is questionable if such data will continue
to come from Wikileaks. The recent release of the Guantánamo Bay files seems to be
“very nearly the final” (Gabbatt 2011) cache of the huge data set the platform supposedly
obtained from Bradley Manning. I think such persons who have access to those files and
are willing to leak it are far from the norm. Even if Wikileaks is this initial spark for a
‘leaking culture’ (which can be assumed due to the rise of more specialized and local
leaking platforms like Greenleaks) it is unlikely that leaked data with the same impact
and size as the Cablegate or the Iraq War Logs will be common. Apart from that, the
future of open government initiatives is unclear as well – especially after the budgets for
this project have been cut in the United States (Yau 2011). When newspapers solely rely
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on the success of leaks and open government, data-driven journalism may remain a niche
form of news reporting.
Therefore, I would argue that the real lesson journalists can learn from the collaboration
with Wikileaks is shown by Kayser-Bril et al. (2011). They suggest that media
organizations should not wait for the release of other data sets and, instead, further
embrace the opportunities of data-driven journalism by becoming ‘trusted data hubs’
themselves. They should not only focus on handling externally produced data sets, but
also develop and structure their own, internal database. Even though Kayser-Bril et al. do
not refer to Wikileaks, they largely take the experience with its materials into account by
stressing that the way data is collected is essential. Basically, all content produced by
journalists is already data. What has to be changed is the way this data is collected,
making it readable for machines and enable journalists to quickly analyze large and
complex data sets and build stories around them. Every event can be broken down by
some fundamental information (latitude, longitude etc.), described in a structured manner
and linked to other events in a database. As an example of the possibilities, Kayser-Bril et
al. mention the crime page of a newspaper. Instead of just giving a list of articles about
crime events, it could be transformed into a web application that plots the events over
time with the options to sort the data by time, type of crime, location and visualizing it on
a map - similar to The Guardian’s map for the War Logs.
When newspapers adopt these ideas, data-driven journalism will surely be a more
common and established form of news reporting that can come into use regardless of
leaks or open government. Journalism could benefit from the new possibilities for
finding, telling and presenting stories demonstrated in the coverage of Wikileaks’ material
on a large scale. As Phillips (2010: 100) and Benson (2010: 192) are pointing out, more
important than the capabilities of new technology is the way journalists actually use it.
Becoming data-hubs could make them aware that they can and should use the new
possibilities to improve the quality of news reporting and not only the speed of
production. This would be an important step forward - not least initiated due to Wikileaks.
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