Value
Articulating (and measuring) the promise of your team.
Why invest in data journalism at all?
It’s a fair question for any newsroom, and a pressing one for a small or non-profit newsroom, where money is tight and every organizational decision carries a cost. The short answer is that data capacity produces work other newsrooms cannot easily match. There is good evidence that data journalism, visual journalism, and visual metaphor open novel routes to understanding in an audience, which is one reason the form pairs so naturally with explanatory reporting.
The business case for data journalism has been made plenty of times elsewhere. The case worth making here is the non-financial one, on the theory that the money tends to follow it.
Broadly, the value statement looks like this: data journalism takes the complexities of the real world and makes them a little more legible. Consider climate change. It’s big and unwieldy, slow-moving, and it crosses borders and generations. The act of detecting signal in the noise, the core analytical act of data journalism, is what pulls those future complexities down into the present. The immersive climate features of places like The New York Times and ProPublica are a testament to the claim.
There’s also a structural argument, and it’s stronger now than when we first made it. Local news has been collapsing while the nonprofit sector has grown to fill the gap, and that sector’s own research shows the field maturing but still leaning heavily on foundations rather than earned revenue. The particulars shift from year to year; the underlying logic does not. In that environment, distinctive, hard-to-replicate reporting is what sustains a newsroom, and data capacity is one of the most reliable ways a small newsroom produces work that no one else can. It is a differentiator, not a luxury.
Scott Klein, then of ProPublica, offered these words in 2016:
Help the organization build on successes. Work hard and create great projects. Go viral. Get covered. Win awards. Smart leaders will see your team as having an impact that grows more sharply than linear when you add people. My team is about 20 percent of the staff but its projects are about half the traffic. We bring in earned revenue and grants. We bring home prestigious journalism awards. Make sure your sales pitch to your bosses for growing your team includes all those metrics.
Measure the right thing
Klein’s metrics are useful, but raw traffic is the wrong yardstick for a nonprofit. An investigation that changes a law might draw modest numbers, and that says nothing about whether it mattered. Measure what maps to your mission instead.
If you want tools for it, the American Press Institute’s Metrics for News ties metrics to editorial values instead of raw volume, and the Tow Center has done the deeper research. Just don’t expect a single accepted standard. Dozens of impact metrics circulate and most newsrooms track only a few. Pick the handful that map to your mission and measure them consistently.
And remember why this matters downstream: funders care about action. To the extent that you can show your data features moved readers to act, or moved an institution to change, you’ll have a far easier time sustaining the work.