Joseph Stashko interview: ‘Infographics aren’t data journalism’

You’re the Digital News Development Editor at The Times and The Sunday Times. What exactly does that mean – what do you do on a day-to-day basis?

Lots of different things. The digital team at The Times has expanded a fair bit recently – we’ve got a small team of developers, designers and multimedia producers as well as people taking care of social media and community stuff.

I basically act as a link between both titles’ newsrooms and our development team – we work on some day-to-day projects as well as things that take a couple of weeks, like the Sunday Times piece on Malala Yousafzai.

I know you’ve been involved in a few projects before The Times – can you briefly outline the sort of things you did before you got your job?

Back at university I edited a hyperlocal news site (Blog Preston) for two years, which managed to bag me a Guardian Student Media Award. It not only helped me improve my reporting skills and pick up basics like FoI requests and court reporting, but also opened my eyes to multimedia journalism and collaborating with others. Blog Preston was successful in pitching for a grant from NESTA, which allowed me to get involved in running journalism workshops in areas of Preston.

Towards the tail end of university I founded Liveblog Pro along with Jonathan Frost and Andrew Fairbairn. That saw me working more closely with developers (a large part of what I do now) as well as trying to develop a viable business. When I left university I started freelancing in TV journalism, working for the Associated Press and ITV News.

So I’ve been lucky to have a complete mix of things to do so far.

How important do you think social media is for journalists? Can it be ignored?

Pretty important. I was lucky in that I publicly experimented with using it for breaking news coverage around the time of the Utoya shootings and then during the UK riots, which led to a few potential employers being aware of me sooner than they would have otherwise [been].

I don’t think it can be ignored. No aspect of technology should be, if you’re a journalist. If something is fundamentally altering or augmenting the way you write stories, you’d be stupid not to pay attention to it.

Now whether you make that your modus operandi (as people like Andy Carvin do) or whether you just use it to newsgather is up to you, but I don’t think using social media in journalism is ever going to be to your detriment, so you may as well experiment.

Do you think data journalism is increasing in importance or not? Do you think it will grow in popularity or not? Why?

Data journalism is great but I’m fairly wary of its emergence as a buzzword. Infographics aren’t data journalism. Presenting data on its own isn’t data journalism. If you can find a way to intelligently crunch numbers and drive a story forward – that, to me, is good data journalism.

If more stories are being driven by intelligent uses of data, that’s only a good thing.

What three skills would you say are the most important for a journalist to have in 2013?

I know the whole ‘should journalists learn to code?’ debate has been raging on for a tedious amount of time, but to me it’s just another thing that you could be teaching yourself. Learn a language, experiment with code, do a basic design course.

I’m bilingual, which until last year didn’t give me a great deal of tangible professional advantage until I was working on the AP news desk and a video tied to a breaking news story entirely in Ukrainian was sent in. I was able to translate it and pass it on to AP clients.

You never know when an extra skill that isn’t directly related to journalism might come in handy.

What single piece of advice would you give someone wanting to start out in journalism today?

Keep trying to learn new skills and be open-minded.

Follow Joseph on Twitter @JosephStash