Data-driven journalism and the public good: “Computer-assisted-reporters” and “programmer-journalists” in Chicago

Since the mid-2000s, some US and British news organizations have hired programmers to design data-driven news projects within the newsroom. But how does the rise of these “programmer-journalists,” armed with their skills and technical artifacts, really affect the way journalism can contribute to the public good? Based on an empirical study in Chicago, we show in this article that although they have built on previous historical developments, these programmer-journalists have also partly challenged the epistemology conveyed by the computer-assisted reporting tradition in the US, grounded in the assumption that data can help journalists to set the political agenda through the disclosure of public issues. Involved in open source communities and open government advocacy, these programmers and their technical artifacts have conveyed challenging epistemological propositions that have been highly controversial in the journalism community.

[1]  Robert E. Park,et al.  News as a Form of Knowledge: A Chapter in the Sociology of Knowledge , 1940, American Journal of Sociology.

[2]  M. Schudson.  Discovering The News: A Social History Of American Newspapers , 1980 .

[3]  James S. Ettema,et al.  On the Epistemology of Investigative Journalism. , 1984 .

[4]  L. Winner.  The Whale and the Reactor , 2020 .

[5]  James S. Ettema,et al.  Investigative journalism and the moral order , 1989 .

[6]  Philip E. Meyer,et al.  The New Precision Journalism , 1991 .

[7]  Madeleine Akrich,et al.  A Summary of a Convenient Vocabulary for the Semiotics of Human and Nonhuman Assemblies , 1992 .

[8]  Bruce Garrison,et al.  Computer-Assisted Reporting , 1995, Encyclopedia of Big Data.

[9]  Brant Houston,et al.  Computer-Assisted Reporting: A Practical Guide , 1996 .

[10]  Margaret H. DeFleur.  Computer-assisted Investigative Reporting: Development and Methodology , 1997 .

[11]  R. Werle,et al.  De-Commodifying Software? Open Source Software Between Business Strategy and Social Movement , 2001 .

[12]  L. Manovich,et al.  The language of new media , 2001 .

[13]  M. Schudson.  The objectivity norm in American journalism* , 2001 .

[14]  Gérard Leclerc,et al.  Mauvaise presse: Une sociologie compréhensive du travail journalistique et de ses critiques , 2001 .

[15]  Brant Houston,et al.  The Investigative Reporter's Handbook: A Guide to Documents, Databases and Techniques , 2002 .

[16]  Sarita Albagli,et al.  Memory Practices in the Sciences , 2005 .

[17]  Frederick Turner,et al.  From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism , 2006 .

[18]  David Bawden,et al.  Memory Practices in the Sciences , 2007 .

[19]  M. Feldstein,et al.  A Muckraking Model , 2006 .

[20]  David A. Morrison.  Systematics as Cyberscience: Computers, Change, and Continuity in Science , 2009 .

[21]  P. Boczkowski.  News at Work: Imitation in an Age of Information Abundance , 2010 .

[22]  Henrik Örnebring.  Technology and journalism-as-labour: Historical perspectives , 2010 .

[23]  Amy Schmitz Weiss,et al.  Innovation processes in online newsrooms as actor-networks and communities of practice , 2010, New Media Soc..

[24]  M. Schudson,et al.  Political observatories, databases & news in the emerging ecology of public information , 2010, Daedalus.

[25]  Daniel Lathrop,et al.  Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice , 2010 .

[26]  Terry Flew,et al.  The Guardian Reportage of the UK MP expenses scandal: a case study of computational journalism , 2010 .

[27]  Clare Birchall,et al.  Introduction to ‘Secrecy and Transparency’ , 2011 .

[28]  Cong Yu,et al.  Computational Journalism: A Call to Arms to Database Researchers , 2011, CIDR.

[29]  Sarah Cohen,et al.  Computational journalism , 2011, Commun. ACM.

[30]  Seth C. Lewis,et al.  Journalism Innovation and Participation: An Analysis of the Knight News Challenge , 2011 .

[31]  Jonathan Gray,et al.  The Data Journalism Handbook , 2012 .