Data journalism is one of the buzz words of the media industry as it deals with its own issues of extracting information from the flood of data swamping business and society.
One of the media organisations leading the move to data journalism is The Guardian who have an excellent video on what a data journalist does.
The question though is where are the data editors? Like traditional journalism and writing, a good sub-editor is essential to clean up copy and check that the story makes sense.
With data, it’s even more important for other pairs of eyes to look at the numbers.
Last week I was asked by an editor to check a story that lots of number – and those numbers didn’t make sense. In fact, the numbers as they were presented argued against the writer’s point. Had the story run, both the writer’s and the publication’s would have been damaged.
Many news organisations are cutting back on their sub editing teams and the resulting drop in quality is hurting their publications.
Poor checking of data is even more risky and it’s going to be interesting to see if media organisations start devoting scarce resources to editing their data driven stories.