Data journalism promises to offer a more factual, objective picture of the world — but to what extent can we fulfil that promise? How can storytelling techniques be useful in engaging audiences with factual data — and what risks do they hold? Drawing on a decade’s experiences as a data journalist, academic and author, Paul Bradshaw will discuss the decisions that data journalists take when telling stories with data, and how an awareness of narrative techniques and critical issues in the field can create better journalism. Keynote at University of Cambridge - Cambridge Digital Humanities Data School June 2019

1. @PaulBradshaw, Birmingham City University, BBC
Author: Scraping for Journalists, Finding Stories in Spreadsheets, Data
Journalism Heist, Online Journalism Handbook
Journalism, data
+ narrative

2. https://leanpub.com/u/paulbradshaw
https://onlinejournalismblog.com/

3. https://twitter.com/AlbertoCairo/status/907238441011773440

4. Spoiler alert!
● Why storytelling shouldn’t be abandoned
● How storytelling shapes what we do as (data)
journalists
● How to use narrative responsibly

5. Paul Bradshaw, Data Journalism Handbook
http://datajournalismhandbook.org/1.0/en/introduction_0.html

7. Act I:
How storytelling
shapes what we do

8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLZ1LT0kd-4

9. “1. Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth
“7. Journalism must strive to keep the significant
interesting and relevant”
Kovach & Rosenstiel (2007)
The elements of journalism

10. So crime & terrorism stories...
“...Use news values that favour conflict over
clarity and opinion over explanation.
“The desire ... to tell a story may end up so
disregarding statistical patterns that they
end up misinforming our view of the world.”
Cushion, Lewis & Callaghan 2017

11. “The Blame Frame affixes responsibility on human agents
and foregrounds the pursuit of punishment and justice.
“The Explain Frame takes responsibility away from human
agents and describes the tragedy in terms of natural or
quasi-natural processes ...
“Ultimately, both frames serve to reproduce social
boundaries and reinforce the status quo.”
Shahin 2015
‘Accused’/‘blamed’

12. The “Law of narrative gravity”
“The more widely accepted (or massive) a
narrative, the more it attracts and shapes
the perception of facts.”
Grosser 2017

13. 1hr50m: “That’s the story”
[Nightcrawler: Script, Analysis]

14. But data journalism is different,
right?

15. Act II:
(But we still need
stories)

16. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w#t=3m14s

17. “Fight rumours and conspiracy theories with engaging and powerful
narratives that leverage the same techniques as disinformation”

18. What do stories do?
‘Narrative news’ “elicited stronger affective and
cognitive involvement” (but not recall); made
“better informed” young readers (but lower
satisfaction)
‘Melodrama’ “increases recall” (but “not
comprehension”)

19. Not a great story.

20. “Data dumps were really popular, so
you will have this huge dataset and you
put it online … and everyone’s like ‘ah
cool, that’s so much fun!’ and then we
just see that readers just don’t use
that.
“So that’s the change that we’ve seen
here. And we’re trying to encourage
everybody to do, is focus on the story
first.”
Stuart Thompson, WSJ
https://www.dropbox.com/s/umr3r11v8dc088x/nerdJournalismDISSERTATION.pdf?dl=0

21. Data’s challenge to journalism
● New genres: interactivity, personalisation,
exploration vs explanation
● New cultures: transparency vs objectivity,
hacker ethic (the digital commons)
● Data as ‘fact’ vs journalism as ‘story’

22. Deconstructing narrative
Should contain an actor and a narrator*;
3 distinct levels: the text, the story, and the
fabula; Contents should be “a series of connected
events caused or experienced by actors.”
- Mieke Bal
*Actor and narrator can be same; narrator can be ‘effaced’

24. https://gender-pay-gap.service.gov.uk/viewing/employer-%2cd-EQDgBs_aYzIwbTF3O-UA!!/report-2017

25. Martin Cortazzi 1993

26. https://pinboard.in/u:paulbradshaw/t:gender+dj+pay
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gender-pay-gap/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/gender-pay-gap

27. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/aug/10/gender-pay-gap-widening-at-one-in-four-government-bodies-figures-show
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/25/gender-pay-gaps-in-academy-school-chains-among-the-worst-in-uk

28. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-42611365
https://github.com/BBC-Data-Unit/gender-pay-gap

29. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/28/what-you-need-to-know-about-gender-pay-gap-reporting
https://www.theguardian.com/news/video/2018/apr/06/the-truth-about-gender-pay-gap-video-explainer
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-43668187

30. Journalism’s criteria
● Choosing fabula that are most important...
● ...and ordering them (in a story) to most
accurately represent the facts
● ...and make those interesting and relevant
● ...to our audience
● ...through a particular medium (the text)

33. https://medium.com/tdebeus/think-about-the-grammar-of-graphics-when-improving-your-graphs-18e3744d8d18

34. Showing uncertainty
Gauge; box and whisker plots; ranges; visualising uncertainty;

35. http://napa-cards.net/

36. http://www.mat.ucsb.edu/~g.legrady/academic/courses/11w259/schneiderman.pd
f
Ben Schneiderman

37. https://www.ft.com/content/3685bf9e-a4cc-11e6-8b69-02899e8bd9d
1

38. The West Wing, Season 2 episode 16

39. “It is increasingly the case that it simply does not
make sense to think about certain types of crime in
terms of our conventional notions of space.
Cybercrime, white-collar financial crime,
transnational terrorism, fraud and identity theft all
have very real local (and global) consequences, yet
‘take place’ within, through or across the ‘space of
flows’ (Castells 1996). Such a-spatial or
inter-spatial crime is invariably omitted from
conventional crime maps.”
Theo Kindynis (2014)

40. Act II: Scene 2
A new era

41. “[Manovich suggests] the database is
to the digital era what narrative, in
novels and cinema was to the modern
era.”
Lewis and Westlund (2014)

42. “Historically, the artist made a unique
work within a particular medium.
Therefore the interface and the work
were the same; in other words, the
level of an interface did not exist. With
new media, the content of the work
and the interface become separate. It
is therefore possible to create
different interfaces to the same
material. ”

43. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-41805053
https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2018/apr/04/gender-pay-gap-when-does-your-company-stop-paying-women
-in-2018

44. Jensen: 4 types of interactivity
1. Transmissional (extra info about elements, e.g.
hover)
2. Consultational (multiple views, e.g. show same data
in different ways)
3. Conversational (user can input, & is displayed, e.g.
You Draw It)
4. Registrational (user input influences display, e.g.
personalisation) Veglis & Bratsas 2017; Jensen 1998

45. NYTimes

46. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/dataview/how-americans-die/

47. 101 East investigates Malaysia's underground baby trade
Chatbots as
ergodic
narrators?

48. Interactivity’s effects
Transmissional & consultational “have been found to
enhance user enjoyment and foster favourable
attitudes [but] do not necessarily increase...
knowledge acquisition … or recall
“Conversational interactivity has also been found to
increase loyalty”
Veglis & Bratsas 2017;

49. “Not all new media objects are
explicitly databases ... Computer
games do not follow database logic,
they appear to be ruled by another
logic – that of an algorithm.”

50. Jesper Juul 1998

51. *
Games of
progression
(abstract)
*
http://www.half-real.net/dictionary/

52. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/13/weekinre
view/deficits-graphic.html
Games of
emergence

53. “Games [need] how and why. 'How'
lets you understand the system. 'Why'
can be how the player understands
the ways that the pieces in the system
interact.”
http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2011/04/designing-a-newsgame-is-an-act-of-journalism103.html

55. Empathy and “ludic suspense”
Parallel empathy (feeling what the other person feels,
e.g. tension, pressure, confusion)
Reactive empathy (sympathy/pity because you have
something in common with that character)
Plewe & Fursich 2017

56. Act III: What we can
do about stories

57. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-fkZA8x68k

58. Providing a service to citizens by reporting truthfully and
independently on information that is of public interest,
holding power to account, providing a forum for criticism
and compromise, and giving a voice to the voiceless in a
way that makes significant information interesting and
relevant.
“Just the facts”
Journalism’s story about itself

60. https://github.com/washingtonpost/data-homicides
Transparency: a new “story”

61. Journalism’s challenge to data
● Journalism’s verification vs data’s ‘truth’
● Journalism holding power to account vs data as
a form of power

62. “We are moving from the
knowledge/power nexus portrayed by
Foucault to a data/action nexus that
does not need to move through
theory: All it needs is data together
with preferred outcomes”
Geoffrey Bowker, 2014
https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/download/2190/1156

63. https://www.propublica.org/series/machine-bias

64. https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-03-08/how-data-can-turn-immigrants-into-criminals

65. https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2017-02-27/the-future-of-fake-news

66. https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/hatecrime-map

67. http://museumofhomelessness.org/2019/03/12/dying-homeless-project/

68. https://twitter.com/guardian/status/1009433445032976389?s=09

69. https://onlinejournalismblog.com/2017/08/07/10-principles-for-data-journalism-in-its-second-decade/

70. The resolution
We are both products, and makers, of
stories — the first step is to admit this
Stories are just tools: whether used for
good or ill depends on the storyteller
Ethical storytelling means using stories
transparently while striving for impact,
fairness and accuracy

71. https://twitter.com/AlbertoCairo/status/907238441011773440

72. Questions?
@paulbradshaw
paul.bradshaw@bcu.ac.uk