Seventh International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

Data-driven journalism is a specialization that allows the compilation and in-depth analysis of structured information to present it in more versatile formats through interactive visualizations and other multimedia tools. This specialty serves to tell stories based on vast amounts of information that, without the assistance of a computer and the application of statistical methods, would be challenging to report. This work presents a study about the degree of penetration of data journalism through a comparative study of the journalistic media of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. For this purpose, an exploratory pilot questionnaire investigated the processes and techniques used by journalists in the preparation of publications in digital media of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, in order to determine whether they apply data journalism from the defining elements that Paul Bradshaw establishes in his inverted pyramid of data journalism. The findings point out that journalists from these countries vary in the level of frequency of use of the five characteristic functions, of which the analysis of databases is the most used by all. The respondents agree that the least used data journalism techniques are the collection of data through contests or open collaboration projects (crowd-sourcing) and the development of tools and informative web applications based on database contents. The digital journalists who have trained in this discipline did so, mainly, through workshops and practical seminars they took on their own initiative.