Data Journalism

Data and Journalism: A Long History

Data regularly had a central role within journalism between the 17th and 19th centuries: as early as 1692 the Shipping News was publishing weekly data on the arrivals and departures of ships, while information on commodities, deaths, and taxes was common in newspapers throughout the period. The rise of international trade—and the birth of statistics—created both demand and material for newspapers: The front page of the very first issue of The Manchester Guardian in 1821, for example, contained a table of data on schools in Manchester and Salford as part of a story on education reform, while in the United States in the late 19th century, the journalist Ida B. Wells was using data to fact-check the reasons used to justify lynching.

With the arrival of the 20th century, the spread of computers provided a new way to work with data: In 1952, a mainframe computer was used by the U.S. broadcast network CBS to attempt to predict the outcome of the presidential election—although they didn’t actually use the resulting data, and the key year for computers in journalism wasn’t until 1967 when the Detroit Free Press’s Philip Meyer used a mainframe to analyze survey data relating to riots in the city.

Meyer’s reporting—testing claims about who participated in the riots and why—won him a Pulitzer Prize and helped provide the basis for the field of computer-assisted reporting (CAR), an antecedent of data journalism. His 1969 book Precision Journalism established some of the key methods of the field, centering on the use of [Page 434]databases, surveys, and the methods of social science. It also outlined how such methods could be used to address some of the criticisms of contemporary journalism, such as its reliance on information from sources in positions of power and a lack of independence from those sources.

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