#5 Where Data Journalism Comes From with C. W.

Anderson

The ways we consume and create media and content continue to evolve at a rapid pace. The
Demystifying Media seminar series at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and
Communication explores the impact of these changes across the communications landscape
and finds new ways to navigate forward.

Each term, we will bring several experts — media practitioners, academics, and researchers —
working on the cutting edge of these global changes to campus to discuss the impact of the
21st-century media revolution with students, faculty, and staff. Find our podcasts, interviews,
and talk recordings on our website.

Damian Radcliffe (00:04):

Hello and welcome to the latest in our series of demystifying media podcast. I'm Damian
Radcliffe, the Carolyn S. Chambers Professor of Journalism at the University of Oregon. And
today I'm joined by Chris Anderson, an Associate Professor at the College of Staten Island and
the incoming Professor of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds. Welcome
Chris.

Chris Anderson (00:22):

Thanks Damian. It's great to great to be out in Oregon.

Damian Radcliffe (00:26):

Well thanks very much for joining us. We have to make the most of these opportunities when
you're here on the West coast, which is not going to be for long and we're going to be working
you hard, I believe, over the next couple of days.

Chris Anderson (00:35):

Indeed. But it's good, definitely see as much as I can and talk to as many people in a short
period of time. So that's [crosstalk 00:00:40].

Damian Radcliffe (00:42):

Great. So what are you going to be talking about? You go two big kind of public talks that you're
doing one here in Eugene later today and then tomorrow in Portland?

Chris Anderson (00:49):

Yeah. And both of those are going to be pretty different in a really good way. So today in
Eugene it's going to be a bit more of a traditional academic talk. I'm talking about some
research that I'm doing right now and what I'm going to be talking about today in the lecture
this evening is a little slice of a longer history of data journalism that I'm finishing writing right
now. So probably a lot of your audience here knows or at least has an idea that data journalism
is the hot topic in news today, using data to tell stories. And believe it or not, there's a history
of data journalism. It's been around for a very long time. And I think we can learn a lot about
data journalism today by learning where it came from. So I'm going to be talking about that.

Damian Radcliffe (01:34):

So any particular kind of turning points or kind of origin stories that are worth recounting for
our audience?

Chris Anderson (01:40):

I think the most interesting thing to me, two things really, I mean I think if you go back to the
early 20th century, the 1920s even, one of the things you realize is that when sociology and
anthropology and social science came along, journalism had actually been around for a very
long time. So journalism was actually the older brother of a lot of these academic disciplines.
And believe it or not, a lot of academics wanted sociology to be more like journalism rather
than less, which is not usually how it is today, but you see these sociology professors writing
whole articles about how they wanted their students to learn how to write for newspapers. So
to me that's an interesting little nugget.

Chris Anderson (02:24):

Another really interesting nugget is in the 1950s and 1960s when a guy named Phillip Meyer
who was sort of the inventor of data journalism came up with the idea that well, looking back
to the 1920s journalism and social science used to be more integrated than they are now,
maybe we can integrate them again. Maybe we can make journalism more like social science
and that way we can do better journalism. So I'm going to be talking about the second point
mostly in my talk.

Damian Radcliffe (02:56):

And where are we on that continuum now? Because it feels as if a lot of conversations around
data journalism are much more kind of scientific if you like.

Chris Anderson (03:03):

For sure. So I think that we have seen kind of the interesting, we've sort of seen that idea that
journalism should be more like science. We've seen that become mainstream in the last 10
years. I think both because of the internet, because of big data, the access to data that
journalists have. And also journalists trying to grapple with what it means to be a journalist in
sort of the age of Trump or in the age of, in 2017 how can we be good journalists in this world
where it seems like no one really knows exactly what's going on. So I think that that's also a
factor as well.

Damian Radcliffe (03:41):

And can data help us to understand what's going on in different ways to perhaps other forms of
journalistic endeavor?

Chris Anderson (03:48):

I think that journalists hope it can. I think that, and we may get to this a little later, but
something that really interests me right now and the thing that I'm most excited about sort of
going forward is journalists themselves seem very excited and very confident and very intrigued
by this notion that data can help us do better journalism. But it doesn't always seem to have
the kind of impact that I think that professional journalists think it should or thought it should.
Especially in this last election. So you saw a lot of great data journalism being done that seemed
to, maybe in the grand scheme of things, not mean as much as journalists might hope that it
would. And so to me that's an interesting question as to why. So why do we have these great
expectations for data journalism that are not always met in practice? So I'm going to be
spending a bit of time on that tonight too.

Damian Radcliffe (04:43):

So Nikki Yasha joined us and kicked off this podcast series and she was, I guess more of a
skeptic to some extent, and argued that we had previously thought data journalists would solve
all of our problems and that they were the new masters of the journalistic universe. Where do
you sit in that regard?

Chris Anderson (05:02):

Here's what I would say. I would say that data journalism is great for journalism, but not
necessarily as great for democracy as we thought that it would be. I think there is nothing
wrong with look, journalism in some ways now is better than it's ever been before. And I say
that and people look at me like, are you crazy? How can you possibly say that? But I do think
that that is the case and I think that, so in professional terms data journalism is better for
journalism than ever. I think the question is data journalism good for the public and is it good
for democracy? I don't think it's bad for democracy, but I do wonder whether it is doing exactly
what its proponents thought that it would do.

Chris Anderson (05:47):

So I guess that maybe over time I've actually gotten closer to Nikki's position on this. I think that
probably one of the areas that Nikki and I share that we're similar is that we're both sort of
dealing with the aftermath of the 2016 election. And I think that if you and I had had this
conversation a year ago, the conversation might be very different. But I think that the election
of Donald Trump and the 2016 election has really kind of prompted a lot of soul searching on
people who are journalists, not even data journalists but data journalists in particular.

Damian Radcliffe (06:18):

So why do you think data journalism hasn't come through in the last 12 months in the way that
perhaps we thought it might?
Chris Anderson (06:26):
I think that data journalism is perceived by many people as, they have an aesthetic distaste for
it. I think [crosstalk 00:06:36] for numbers, statistics, and for visualization. And I think a lot of
people see data journalism and they don't think of it as, they don't look at it and think like, is
this true or not true? I think they look at it in the same way they would look at an avant garde
painting or a long opera and they just say, I don't like this. This is not relatable to me. This is
condescending. This is elitist in some way. This is meant for an audience that's not me. And I
think that there is almost, it's not that data journalism doesn't convince people of the truth, but
it's that people don't even look at it as a question of truth or not truth. They're perceiving it in
aesthetic terms.

Chris Anderson (07:19):

Like I said, much like you would if you are listening to an opera, right? And you're somebody
who didn't like opera and thought that opera was only for rich people who lived in New York.
So I think that there's almost an aesthetic reaction to that type of high level quantitative data
journalism amongst a lot of people where it just doesn't register or it actually alienates them.

Damian Radcliffe (07:42):

So how do we overcome that given the potential value of being able to not only use data to tell
stories in different and unique ways and sometimes that being the kind of key driver for a lot of
storytelling, but also of course, as we know, we live in a world where we are producing
increasing amounts of data. So this kind of trend for data-driven storytelling is only going to
increase and as citizens and consumers we're going to need to become increasing data literate.

Chris Anderson (08:10):

So I think that the way forward is for data journalism in particular and for journalists in general
to be more open, not only about what they think is going on but about what they don't know.
So to me the answer is data journalism wants to be like science. It wants to be more scientific. I
think that's a good instinct. But one of the things about science is that science is very open
about what it knows and what it doesn't know. And it uses what it doesn't know as almost like a
rocket or a springboard to push them into the future and try to answer the next question.

Chris Anderson (08:47):

So I think and it's always weird to say this to journalists, but I think that journalism and data
journalism might get a lot of mileage out of being a little more humble and being a little more
open about what it does and doesn't know and try to find ways to convey that to an audience. I
don't think it's necessarily easy. I don't think that it's always going to work, but I think that it's
worth a try. And I do also think that people are doing this already. I mean, the New York Times
has a great feature that at least runs online where it's say there is a terrorist attack or say
there's a big news story that's breaking very quickly. They have something up there that says
like what we know and we don't know about the London Westminster Bridge bus attack. Right.
I think that this is something that journalists kind of are doing already and something they can
do more of.
Damian Radcliffe (09:37):
But it is a change of mindset to demonstrate that fallibility and journalists find that hard.

Chris Anderson (09:44):

I think they find it very hard and I think that what I'm asking and they particularly find it very
hard at this moment I think because if there was ever a moment where I think journalists
thought it was time for the Woodward and Bernstein truth-telling patriot, going to tell it like it
is and not admit fallibility, I think that it's that it's now. And I am totally understanding and
sympathetic to the idea that that is very, very hard for journalists to do.

Damian Radcliffe (10:20):

But you can make a counter argument to that which says this is a way to rebuild trust is to be a
little bit more humble, to engage more, to listen better, to show your workings in public, all
those kinds of things.

Chris Anderson (10:30):

I think that's exactly right. I think if journalists really want to rebuild trust, humility is a good
place to start. And I also think look, academics of which I am one, are not necessarily seen as
the most humble people either. But in terms of their work and in terms of what they produce of
their writing, they are very open when they think they have left questions unanswered or
they're very open about the limits of what they do. And I think teaching journalists those limits
maybe even as early as J School as undergraduates can kind of go a long way into building that
into their writing.

Damian Radcliffe (11:04):

Great. And so you said, you're going to be talking about something very different in Portland
tomorrow?

Chris Anderson (11:08):

Yeah. The Portland talk as I've been talking to Regina Lawrence about it a little bit is going to be
much more of sort of for working professionals and for people who are maybe working as
journalists and who are also in school part time. So maybe I thought something a little less
abstract and something a little more relevant to kind of what they're dealing with kind of in
their daily working lives. So in the talk tomorrow I'm going to be kind of going through what's
the crisis in journalism today?

Chris Anderson (11:36):

We have a lot of conversations about the crisis in journalism and I'm going to go through kind of
five different ways that there is a crisis in journalism right now and talk about maybe some
solutions to it. So I think very quickly, and I won't go into the details, but we have a political
crisis in news, we have an economic crisis in news, we have a workforce flow crisis in news, we
have a technology crisis in news, and we have a larger cultural crisis in news in terms of, which
is kind of what I was talking about earlier, it's the cultural value of truth. Right? And so I'm going
to kind of go through each of those little bullet points and have a talk, informal conversation
with the folks about how those crises are playing out and maybe what some solutions to them
are.

Damian Radcliffe (12:20):

And from that kind of suite of potential solutions, are there particular things that you are really
keen to see or elements that you're starting to see bubble up that you think have the potential
to really make a difference?

Chris Anderson (12:35):

I think one of the things we've seen in the past a year or so, I think this was happening even
before the election, but I think the 2016 election has really driven it home, is the economic
crisis used to be the dominant conversation. And I think most of the time I've been a professor,
say 2009 till 2015, the economic crisis has been the primary crisis we've been talking about.

Damian Radcliffe (13:02):

This is the economics of the...

Chris Anderson (13:04):

Economics of the industry. [crosstalk 00:13:05] Yeah, yeah. Right, right. Although related, of
course the economic downturn in the US but yes, the economic crisis of the news industry,
right? How do we make journalism profitable? How do we stop laying off reporters? And I think
that's a really great, important conversation to have. But I think it is somewhat limited because
it sometimes forgets that journalism is ultimately about serving democracy. It's not simply
about its health as an industry. It's health as an industry is important, but its relationship to the
democratic sphere is also important. And I think that one of the things we are seeing is an
acknowledgement of, it's not just the economic crisis for the industry, it's also how journalism
does its public duty as a guardian of democracy and a guardian of the truth. And then that is
also related to the economic crisis as well.

Chris Anderson (13:54):

But it's not just how do we make the New York Times profitable again, it's how do we make the
New York Times profitable again and also our democracy seems to not be doing so well and
that's not good. And how can we use journalism to make democracy better? And I think that to
me that's been an interesting change in the past year or so how we've started to have these
new additional conversations. And I think that's good.

Damian Radcliffe (14:25):

And other examples of people who you think are leading this charge and doing this well? I
mean we've seen the emergence of say for example, the nonprofit news sector, which really
didn't exist kind of pre 2009, certainly not in the way that we see it now. That's a new model
that's very much designed to tackle issues around democratic deficit.

Chris Anderson (14:47):

For sure. I mean the Marshall Project, Pro Public, just to name two off the top of my head, the
Texas Tribune, all of those are new news or I mean they're not new anymore. But to me they're
new. Certainly weren't around when I was an undergraduate in college. They are all new
organizations funded in nonprofit ways with specifically democratic missions. Right. And yeah, I
think all those are perfect examples of like you said, the people kind of leading this charge.

Damian Radcliffe (15:18):

And is there a risk that that democratic mission becomes either overlooked or not fulfilled? If
the focus is too much on the economics and in particular I feel as if the conversation is very
much around how do we get back to where we were, rather than accepting those days are
gone. This isn't, this is about a new world order and what's our space and roll within that
environment.

Chris Anderson (15:45):

I think it is again, and maybe this is a running theme of what I do want to say while I'm out here
and what I'm thinking about in general, but what you said about that new world order and our
new role in this new sort of arrangement is that it again goes back to a particular type of
humility that's necessary for journalists, right? I mean, journalists are no longer the only people
talking to the public. They are no longer the only way people can get information. When I was,
10 years ago we were talking about blogging, right? Blogging as a way people can get
information. 10 years later we're talking about Facebook and Twitter as a way people can get
information.

Chris Anderson (16:25):

So the entities have changed. But there are lots of new and they're bad actors as well. There's
propagandists, there are PR people, there are Russian hacker, I mean there are all sorts of new
ways that people get information and for journalism to survive and for journalism to both be
democratically better and economically better, it needs to just remember that it is only one
voice among many. It's an important voice. Sometimes it's even the soloist, but not always. And
sometimes it needs to sing in harmony with these other voices as well.

Damian Radcliffe (16:57):

And do you think there's two different elements, the economics and the democratic element
move together in tandem or can they potentially be separate?

Chris Anderson (17:06):

I think they can be separate. I think you can have a economically, I mean look at the British
tabloid media for instance, very economically successful. Good for democracy? Well [crosstalk
00:17:18] some might say, I don't want to assume your view on this Damian, but many would
say probably not, right? So I think that they can move together. I think that, but I don't think
they always do. And I think a big, big problem in the last 10 years of this conversation has been
almost this default assumption that if we have a economically healthy news business, we will
have a democratically healthy news business.

Chris Anderson (17:45):

And I think that has been a bad link. I don't think that link is empirically true. And I think that we
are remembering and we're remembering that that is not necessarily the case. Facebook is very
economically healthy, but Emily Bell for instance would point out, it is not always good for
journalism or good for democracy. So I think that we again are remembering that the two can
go in tandem, but they don't always go in tandem.

Damian Radcliffe (18:14):

And I guess they never did. But the risk is that we look back with rose tinted spectacles at some
Halcyon era where everything was wonderful.

Chris Anderson (18:24):

It's an interesting thing for me sort of coming of age when I did and being in academia when I
did, to talk about Britain for a second. Every great media studies theorist in the UK from about
1960 to 2000, if they ever talked about the BBC, they always talked about how terrible it was.
They said, Oh, it's bad, it reinforces consensus, it's conservative, it leaves out marginalized
voices, it doesn't speak to the working class. And they love nothing more than to criticize the
BBC. The professors did.

Damian Radcliffe (18:56):

And that's not changed.

Chris Anderson (18:57):

Well it has a bit because there are now, I think when the BBC or when the New York Times for
instance started to look like it might go away, then everyone remembered how great it was.
You know what I mean? So I do think we have this really interesting moment where we
assumed that again, that the economics and the positive democratic forces went together and
that was never true. They never went together. Journalism was always subsidized. Journalism
was always helped out in various public ways. And we're remembering after a bit of a 10 year
break or so that economics and democracy are not always coterminous in that way.

Damian Radcliffe (19:40):

There's also a very peculiar part of the British psyche that Jonas Jeremy Paxman wrote about,
which said British people always say their country is going to the dog. And he traced that back
to like the 1700s, so people are always critical of institutions like the BBC or the government or
the national health service or whatever it might be. It's never as good as it was.
Chris Anderson (20:02):
It's never as good as it was and but then if it goes away, well then maybe perhaps we start to
rethink whether how good it actually is. I don't know. I mean, I guess I'm going to learn that
when I get there. It's an interesting difference from Americans. I mean, Americans tend to think
that everything's always getting better and it'll be better next year than it was the last, so.

Damian Radcliffe (20:25):

So we're just a bit more cynical. So can you just also tell us a little bit about the role that you're
moving to and what you're looking forward to doing when you relocate to Leeds in the North of
England.

Chris Anderson (20:33):

Yes, I am really looking forward to the new post. I'm going to be a Professor of Media and
Communication at Leeds in a great media and communication departments. And they have a
lot of great faculty there who studied journalism and who also study political communication
and visual communication and the cultural, you know what the British call the culture
industries. And I have always seen journalism as not just a profession but as part of political
communication as increasingly engaged in visual communication as one of the cultural
industries as well. So I'm interested in tying journalism into all those things that people there
are already studying.

Chris Anderson (21:13):

And I'm interested in, really quickly, I would say another thing I'm interested in in my new post
is sort of doing a, what I would almost call a comparative ethnography of economic, of political
shooting yourself in the foot. So here we have Trump, in the UK, we have Brexit, reasonable
people I know can disagree on either of those being good or bad, but to some degree both the
UK and the US seem to be in a bit of political turmoil right now. And I'm interested as an ex-pat
who's sort of going to be in both places at different times, in seeing how those two countries
kind of grapple with the situation they find themselves in. And that could even be a new book. I
mean down the road, who knows?

Damian Radcliffe (21:53):

Sounds great. Well we'll look forward to that and also following the the fruits of your different
endeavors on social media and elsewhere. Chris, thank you very much for joining us today.

Chris Anderson (22:03):

Damian, thank you so much for having me. It's been great.

Damian Radcliffe (22:05):

So just a reminder that you can catch Chris's full talk and other materials related to his
presentation at our website, which is demystifying.uoregon.edu, that's
demystifying.uoregon.edu. In the meantime, thanks once again to Chris Anderson for joining us
today. Until next time, thanks for listening.