A recent hiring created a big noise in the US media. New York Times reporter Nate Silver decided to move on to the TV network, ESPN.
Silver is a statistician and a journalist, a perfect combination in an age when data streams in from everywhere. In ‘Big Data’ times, someone needs to decode it and translate for wider understanding.
The theory of ‘Big Data’ is already used in science, business and sports, but few journalists have applied it for specific news coverage.
Silver has created a kind of personal franchise: his blog FiveThirtyEight has now been sold to ESPN, where he will predict possible outcomes using mathematical tools and sports statistics.
He gained worldwide exposure making predictions about the outcome of the 2012 US Presidential election with an accuracy that surprised even experts in public opinion polls.
What awaits Silver at ESPN
The secret was his ability to handle large volumes of data using mathematical, statistical and probabilistic calculations. Silver’s contract with New York Times expires in August, and at ESPN, he will analyse politics on ABC, ESPN’s sister network.
The Silver episode proves that in the sea of information, it is still important for someone to make the numbers relevant for the public to understand and take advantage. Also his hiring emphasises the success of “brand” name journalists.
With the advance of technology and online information, data explosion allows access to a wide range of information, not only useful to a journalist, but also marketing departments.
The data journalist does not necessarily need to leave the front of a computer desk; he can handle large volumes of data and know how to produce correlations between trends revealed by the numbers.
It was based on these correlations that Silver could predict results of national elections with a degree of accuracy far superior to that of research institutes with decades of experience in opinion polls.
How times have changed
“When information was scarce, most of our efforts were devoted to hunting and gathering,” said Philip Meyer, professor emeritus, University of North Carolina. “Now that information is abundant, processing is more important. Like science, data journalism discloses its methods and presents its findings in a way that can be verified by replication.”
Can anyone be a data journalist? According to The Guardian’s datablog: “There is a great democratisation of data in the internet. Rather than the numbers belonging to the experts, they belong to all of us — and data journalism is part of that reclaiming of the facts.”
Data journalism doesn’t have to mean data visualisation. It can be in flexible formats as pictures, infographics, words and stories.
It is also true that visualisation can be more effective. Infographics can be a very useful way to illustrate the information, better than only having numbers and tables.
To conclude, data and technology are revolutionising news coverage, and a journalist assumes an important function to narrow this huge amount of information and make more sense to the public. Machines can provide data but only people can decide what to do with the information.
