The Datablog was launched in March 2009, starting in a corner of the Guardian website dedicated to the publication and analysis of data. In the last decade it has published thousands of stories and datasets on every topic imaginable, from Reading the Riots to how the UK fared in every Eurovision song contest, and its influence lives on throughout our data journalism.
How did it all begin? This is what its founder, Simon Rogers, remembers:
It really started with a simple idea: what if we could publish data in a format that would be easier for others to use? I was working as a news editor with the graphics team and had a ton of datasets. This came at a time when there was suddenly a load of data being published, but often in terrible formats, such as PDFs.
We launched with 200-odd datasets, stored on Google drives because I couldn’t get any resources for a database. That had the weird side-effect of making our work very easy for others to replicate. We were the first blog about data anywhere in the mainstream media. Before the 2014 launch of FiveThirtyEight, before the Upshot, there was the Datablog.
Through a combination of big stories – the WikiLeaks war records, the 2011 riots coverage and the MPs’ expenses crowdsourcing – it really took off. Suddenly, there was data everywhere, and we explained it and made it more available. At a time when trust in journalism was diminishing, we were there saying: “Here’s the data, here are the tools we used and here’s the result. Now you have a go.” I really believe that, today, anyone can do it.
Today the Guardian has five data editors and journalists working across all three Guardian offices. Caelainn Barr is the data projects editor in London, Mona Chalabi is the editor in New York and Nick Evershed is the data editor in Sydney. Here, they explain the unique way in which they interpret the news of the day.
How has the Datablog changed in the past decade?
Caelainn The Datablog paved the way for the data projects team but the work we do today is very different. Over the past decade our approach has evolved and now we amplify the stories we find in data by collaborating with specialist reporters to put human voices at the center of our stories.
On the data projects team, with Pamela Duncan and Niamh McIntyre, our journalism spans projects including the Zero Tolerance project and Beyond the Blade to occasional shorter turnaround stories. The Datablog set the tone and proved to the newsroom that data could be used to consistently find stories. The skills we use and how we tell stories today differs.
Nick I’ve been writing and making graphs for the Datablog for more than five years now, or about 57.9% of the total time the datablog has been around. It’s the one publication that really got me interested in data journalism, as it had a very hacker-punk-DIY approach in the early days. This made me think it was the sort of thing I could do even though I’d had no training in programming or data visualisation beyond the little I’d learned studying science.
Mona I think in the early days there was more of an emphasis on making the data available. We’d always create a Google spreadsheet with the numbers we had used to write the piece.
Back then, we tended to publish a lot of articles (I’d write about three or four a day), often quite short ones, often about the latest numbers to come out of the Office for National Statistics. Now, I think we’re a lot more picky about what articles we cover.
What does the Datablog look like today and what makes a Datablog post?
Mona I ask myself whether the numbers I’m looking at will start a new conversation that people aren’t having yet, or if they will add to an existing conversation in a valuable way. If the answer to both of those questions is no, then I don’t bother to write the piece.
Nick In Australia we’ve taken on uniquely Australian topics such as disputes over the Hottest 100 (a yearly music poll on the public broadcaster’s youth station) and why a fluffy Maltese terrier named Bella is the quintessential canine of the nation. We’ve also covered more serious topics, including offshore detention and deaths in custody.
These days there are fewer blogposts with charts, and a bit more of the larger, more polished interactive graphics. This is partly due to experience, but also due to resources. When Guardian Australia started, it was a very small operation with only a handful of reporters. Now we’re a bit bigger, which has allowed us to tackle more ambitious projects.
Where is data journalism headed?
Nick Data journalism has become more integrated into the broader newsroom and less siloed. This is because many reporters now have an understanding that it’s a viable means of getting a story, and are familiar with the basic techniques, which is great.
Caelainn I see data journalism going in two directions. As there is more data in our reporting, journalists will really need to know how to interpret and fact-check basic datasets. That’s not to say everyone in the newsroom will be a data journalist, but it might start to be seen as a skill for finding stories rather than a field apart from general journalism.
However, I also see data journalism becoming more specialised. In the past couple of years we’ve started to deal with bigger datasets. We’re finding new microdata to dig into, and in London we have worked on leaks involving millions of records. Bigger datasets require new skills, and as the data changes so does how we analyse it and look for stories.
How does the Guardian do data journalism differently?
Mona I would like to think that our work stands out because we consider the public interest first and foremost in every story we do. But it’s also so easy to mess up in data journalism, and I’d like to think that we’re also humble about the possibility that we’ll be looking in the wrong places for the wrong stories. I would hope that readers feel empowered to drop us an email any time with feedback and suggestions: I know those messages have been absolutely crucial over the past six years for me to become a better journalist.
Caelainn Data was being used in data journalism long before the Datablog. Philip Meyer is one of the pioneers of modern data journalism, which he described as using “social science methods” in the newsroom.
We keep some of Meyer’s approach alive in how we do data journalism and we work alongside reporters to get the most out of the combination of data and specialist knowledge. Data is not just about numbers, and behind every row in a database there is a human story. They’re the stories we’re striving to tell.
