2022.Jul.13

REPORTS

The 8th BAIRAL Research Meeting for 2021 Report on “Thinking about the Potential and Challenges of Data Journalism from the Perspective of the Frontline”

On March 15th, 2022, BAIRAL (a study group organized by research assistants of the B’AI Global Forum) held its eighth meeting for 2021 online. The guest speaker was Mr. Kazuki Ogiwara at SmartNews Media Research Institute, who won the Good Design Award among other awards for his work on the Toyo Keizai Online “Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Situation Report in Japan.” In the meeting, he gave a presentation on his efforts so far, basic knowledge on data journalism, and the situation regarding data utilization and journalism in Japan. This was followed by participants asking and discussing related topics.

Generally speaking, Japanese media companies are behind those in other countries in the utilization and visualization of data in news reports. Mr. Ogiwara indicated some factors which possibly caused this situation, such as the inactivity of investigative journalism in Japan and the dominance of Yahoo! Japan in the Japanese media environment, which does not accommodate such interactive data expression. Since the spread of COVID-19, however, data visualization has been widely used in daily news reports, and data journalism has been gaining more attention in Japan. To make data journalism more common, Mr. Ogiwara said, it is necessary to bridge a gap between the release of raw data by public authorities and its utilization by the press. Since one of the challenges for data journalism is the cost of data handling for those who are not experts in data analysis, data specialists should proactively develop open-source software (OSS) which makes data available for everyone. Actually, Mr. Ogiwara has been currently involved in an OSS project to facilitate data utilization in Japan.

Following the introduction by Mr. Ogiwara, participants discussed various issues such as the significance of visualizing data in society and what kind of data is inappropriate for visualization. Among many issues, some audience asked Mr. Ogiwara about the differences between data journalism by media organizations and the citizen journalism using data visualization. According to Mr. Ogiwara, one of the differences is the accountability. That is, professional journalists should be more sensitive to data source and faithfully present data by clarifying its source and treatment. Now, in the age of media distrust, it seems especially important for media organizations to accumulate such reliable reports and improve their accountability step by step.

Data journalism has huge potential, but at the same time, there are still many challenges to overcome to utilize omnipresent data in our society. In order to bring out data’s full potential, it appears necessary to facilitate more discussion about data journalism among both researchers and practitioners and create a better environment for data utilization.