By Troy Thibodeaux on Poynter, Oct. 6, 2011
Data journalist. Computer-assisted reporter. Newsroom developer. Journo-geek. If those of us who work in the field aren’t quite sure what to call ourselves, it’s little wonder that sometimes even the people who work beside us are puzzled by what we do. Part of the confusion (and one reason for all the competing labels) lies in the sheer variety of tasks that can fall under this heading. We may be fairly sure that some jobs lie within the boundaries of data journalism, but we’d be hard-pressed to say what can’t be jumbled into this baggy monster of a field.
In its current state, data journalism describes neither a beat nor a particular medium (unlike photo journalism or video journalism), but rather an overlapping set of competencies drawn from disparate fields. We have the statistical methods of social scientists, the mapping tools of GIS, the visualization arts of statistics and graphic design, and a host of skills that have their own job descriptions and promotion tracks among computer scientists: Web development, general-purpose programming, database administration, systems engineering, data mining (even, I hear, cryptography). And the ends of these efforts vary as widely as their means: from the more traditional text CAR story to the interactive graphic or app; from newsroom tools built for reporters to multi-faceted websites in which the reporting becomes the data.