Automating the News. How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Media. By Nicholas Diakopoulos
ISBN 9780674976986 ; Harvard University Press 2019
At
the end of a training in standard data journalism, focusing on Excel,
scraping and visualizing data a question came up how to integrate
data skills in journalism education? Discussion ended in two opposed
opinions. The first stated that is was cheap and easy to integrate
data journalism skills in the standard curriculum as a kind of
specialization. That is instead of TV, Radio, Magazines and
Newspapers, an other choice for specialization was created high
lighting wide range of data journalism skills. The opposition
took a longer approach and defended the idea of creating a new
curriculum that could be named computational journalism.
Computer science and therefore coding like R would be an important
element. Then, I was not convinced by the arguments of the second
group and believed that borrowing elements of computer sciences for
data journalism would be the right approach.
Now
I am less convinced and believing that there is demand for a separate
study as computational journalism. There are interesting developments
in that direction. First there is the growing interest in the use of
R at leading news media.
