In a world of numbers and computers, of social media and online communities, it’s easy to assume that journalism isn’t what it used to be. The digital age has ushered in all these clever new tools that must mean the sleuthy skills of inky-fingered hacks are out-dated, right?
Not so, says Aine McGuire, chief marketing officer of ScraperWiki: “You need both sides of the equation,” she insists, “You still need the classic skills of the journalist who has the nose for a story and the creativity to work out a hypothesis and to think ‘Oh this is interesting, perhaps I’d like to dig a little deeper.’”
This is interesting to hear from someone behind a key platform in the emerging network of data journalism; a critical eye is not usually cast on the waves of change by those riding on their crests. ScraperWiki was set up in 2009 with the aim of providing the tools to “liberate” public data and allow journalists to get this information into a format that could be easily used and understood. It’s a forum where programmers can share code they have written to scrape websites and then journalists, or other interested parties, can requests specific scrapers if their needs are still not met.
As much as you do still need the traditional skills of a journalist, it’s impossible to deny that the industry is changing and Aine sees a few key shifts coming over the next few years. The first is the ever increasing array and variety of tools available to help journalists use and take advantage of data. These new tools are gateways into stories and, possibly, could help restore trust in the currently battered image of journalism. “I think there will be a lot more factual information in stories…Data helps give a story more gravitas and more weight because you can’t really lie about the data. It’s there, you can see it, so people aren’t really going to question it.”
While this first change is rather top-down, with journalists grateful grasping the new tools handed to them, the second shift that Aine sees on the horizon comes from the other end of the spectrum. As journalism courses begin to embed coding as part of the general curriculum for their students, you end up with newsrooms increasingly filled with people who not only understand the advantages of data led journalism but also know how to do it themselves, without having to rely on skills previously sitting outside of the profession. “It will be a squeeze from both ends, the tools will improve but so will the skills and the people coming into journalism. At the moment I think that there’s a reasonable gulf between the two but over time they will come together.”
This new generation has already started to appear behind the world’s news desks and ScraperWiki has more and more journalists fighting their corner for open, data-driven journalism. With clients and supporters ranging from Dispatches to The Guardian, the portfolio of work made possible by ScraperWiki’s tools is growing rapidly.
Aine is particularly proud of Paul Bradshaw’s work around Olympic torchbearers, as well as investigations by James Ball, who used ScraperWiki to research and find stories that ended up splashed across the front of The Guardian. Not just constrained to British papers however, ScraperWiki’s reputation has stretched as far as the US, where The Texas Tribune used it to great effect investigating Governor Rick Perry’s support of the death penalty.
“The wind is in our favour,” Aine says. Governments across the world are spewing out “tonnes and tonnes and tonnes” of data and even in regions like the African sub-continent, where regimes are not traditionally knows for openness, “you find there is an interest in making public data more available.” The issue for governments is not deciding whether to put to data out there, but finding a way to do it that is useful and accessible to the public. This is where ScraperWiki can step in and why issues of legality are becoming less important, as by “making this data that’s been published into something that’s reusable we’re actually doing governments a favour.”
ScraperWiki is pushing for an open world because, they say, it would be a better one; understanding the society you live in is a cornerstone of it being democratic and data is becoming increasingly vital to fostering this understanding. Whether helping journalists or governments or businesses or just everyday people, ScraperWiki isn’t out to push an agenda, the team behind it are scientists, they don’t shape the data they have into a narrative nor do they tell those that do what the story should be. Other people might want to fix the world but these guys are just out for democracy and, in the end Aine says, “democracy needs a little bit of fixing too.”
Student on the Interactive Journalism MA at City University.
Sub-editor here, there and everywhere (but mainly at The Times).
Interested in data journalism.
Former student media mogul.
@sam_creighton if you want to know/ask anything else.