Ethics of Data Journalism

And here's the latest blogpost from journalists.org

For the past three years, I’ve been a videographer through and through with only smaller excursions into the world of data visualization (although I never really stopped consuming them). The last time I worked on extensive graphics was eons ago in Internet terms — the distant year of 2008 when I was tinkering around with Adobe Illustrator to sketch out corn prices in an elaborate “charticle,” the crossbreed between a chart and article.

But I wanted to rekindle that passion of mine. I’ve recently started working more with infographics and wanted to educate myself. So I talked to two former colleagues who KNOW what they are doing and have spent the past few years in data journalism — from mapping data points, to finding stories in deluges of data, to making sure each is visually pleasing and clear.

What struck me about the conversations was that I was not given a long talk about the newest tools or the troves of data that governments and organizations have started pouring out in recent years. The points that really stuck were principles and ethics that surround non-linear storytelling and data literacy.

DATA IS NOT THE ANSWER; STORY IS

One of the main things that came up while chatting with my former Wall Street Journal journalist coder and now Columbia prof Susan McGregor is that data has become quite the buzzword recently. So much so that the New York Times declared this “The Age of Big Data”.

But what Susan cautioned me about was the need to go beyond finding ginormous data sets and do the same kind of reporting that any thorough and skeptical journalist would do: Find the story! It’s one thing to do “data-dumping” graphics, meaning graphics that visualize a set of statistics, but it’s another to actually find relations and stories within that data that tell you something interesting, surprising or new.

And beyond that, it’s also about finding the right kinds of data and looking outside what government departments provide. “Data are answers to an interview that someone else conducted,” Susan said.

Her statement was confirmed when I read The Guardian’s Facts Are Sacred: The Power of Data, a short e-book about some of the more recent projects the newspaper has done. One of the cases looks at its work during the London riots and illustrates just how much work went into requesting documents from the Ministry of Justice that detailed where convicted rioters came from. This data was paired with census information about the neighborhoods where these rioters lived, allowing for a glimpse into who they were.

DATA AS PART OF THE STORY

I also spoke to Albert Sun, a former colleague at the Wall Street Journal who just moved on to the New York Times (helping to create this excellent live platform for its Oscars coverage). He said that one of the interesting current issues journalists are dealing with is “how to integrate data more closely into other types of stories that are not grand interactive graphics set-pieces.”

There’s lots of potential “for putting data and multimedia inline,” he said. In other words: there have been many data-heavy infographics that are standalone pieces but there’s also an art to integrating what many news editors now define as “separate art” into the medium of text and have it flow within the story and interact with the written word.

This is an approach that the iPad long-form magazine Atavist is trying to take, as the magazine’s co-founder and creative director Jefferson Rabb explained during a Hacks/Hackers meeting in New York last week. The magazine is trying to integrate its multimedia and infographic elements as smoothly as possible to avoid having content feel like an interruption and, instead, make it part of the flow of the experience.

COME TO OUR FREE DATA JOURNALISM EVENT!

During a caffeine-fueled nerd session, Susan and I decided we should put on an event about data literacy. And so we are.

Please join us March 28 at the Columbia Journalism School for “Doing Data Journalism: It’s Not Just Numbers” as we host the Wall Street Journal’s technology editor and columnist Julia Angwin, ProPublica’s editor of news applications Scott Klein, the New York Times’ interactive news editor Aron Pilhofer and data journalist Maurice Tamman. It’s free!

Off soon

I am leaving for Vietnam soon (afterwards heading to China). In just four days, I'll be lugging about my camera and my macbook in more tropical climates, probably dehydrated and grilling in the sunshine that blankets Ho Chi Minh City. I've spent the past few days acquiring miniature packages of Pepto-Bismol and Advil, light summer clothing and fit-in-your-pocket-sized travel guides in hope that those bibs and bobs will end up saving me from diseases, heat strokes and other minor catastrophes.

I can finally follow what a good friend of mine calls "the tug back home", though Vietnam is a homeland that I have never really gotten to know. In my naivety, I hope to be able to report on HIV among injecting drug users in Vietnam, possibly make a difference there. Mostly because my 25-year-old cousin is just that.

Tam. 

I don't even know his full name. I haven't seen him since 1998. I was in Ho Chi Minh City that year, a 13-year-old, wearing shorts that were too short and having just discovered hair dye. I was an estranging, colorful eye soar in a brown and dusty city, infested with honking, clattering mopeds. 

He was a meagre little portion of a teenager, a cheeky grin painted across his round, stretched face. He mistook my braces for jewelry. He played a bamboo flute that had holes too large for him to cover with his stick fingers. 

Then, eight years later, I was told that he got into heroin. He might have contracted HIV and was sitting in jail, my mother said with a sententious voice. Then resentment: He had gotten so much financial support, a broken family is an explanation, but not an excuse, so many people tried to help him getting over the addiction, it serves him right, poor boy, he deserves it, it's such a pity, sigh, hrmpf, sigh. 

Periodically, I received random updates from my mother and my aunts. But the bits of information about Tam were randomly inserted into phone conversations about my school grades, my current boyfriend and my daily diet and so they dangled around like buzzwords without contexts. I was left puzzling together a mosaic of facts. 

In a culture where the 'Western import'  HIV is kept hush-hush, asking questions of fact-seeking nature is rather frustrating. A sound wall of uncomfortable laughter deflects any serious attempts to dig deeper into an issue like this. Then sometimes in whispered conversations fragments of the entire picture are passed on, delivered in an eerily gossipy fashion. 

What was a possible infection in a cell phone conversation in 2005 became awful, awful and untreated HIV in prison during the summer I was at home from college and turned into full-blown Aids by Christmas December 2007. At first he was incarcerated for burglary according to my mother, later the crime was re-cast; he got jailed for stealing a bike or a moped. Four years of imprisonment turned into two years for good conduct. Or maybe the director of the prison felt sorry for him because he had Aids. Whatever it was, he got out, had rashes all over his face, was crying, was jobless, was alone and had to start anew in a society governed by a communist government and traditional values. Aids was written in prickly letters all over his skin.

Then the poor sucker, the asshole, the nice young man turned bad because of circumstances messed up again, dealt a drug of some sort and got locked up again, a choir of female relatives told me in a staggered canon. And he's still there.  

So what can a girl do? 

I decided that reporting within family circles to get the anecdotal story of my cousin might not suffice to emerge myself from the helplessness in which I am swimming. I want to help. I'm denied access to my cousin. Physically. Bureaucratically. I try to think of what I can do with my new-learned skills and my uselessness in scientific research. And I came to the conclusion that I just gotta go now and go and do and go and speak to and produce and see and write and educate (?) and do. And maybe find a CD player I can send to prison. Some chocolate, too. 

About learning flash and being spat on while filming a little refugee boy

After about 6 months of reporting and an additional month of production, we have finally published our Master's project on Burmese refugees in the greater New York area,From Burma To New York.

Packaging for multimedia

How do you tackle a project like this which is both politically sensitive and multi-layered. How do you convey the complexity of the resettlement process without boring people? How do you elevate the individual's story from a sea numbers? And how do you construct a project that will encapsulate all dimensions of the resettlement process?

Our answers to these issues consisted of three main mini-documentaries about three individuals, each at a different stage of their resettlement; four interactive features that visualize the larger context; and complementary elements, such as slideshows or short video clips.

Each element was assigned a job: the mini-docs were supposed to bring color into our project. We Se, a newly arrived refugee who used to be a teacher in the refugee camps along the Thai-Burmese border, finds solace in his belief in God and dreams of becoming a Christian pastor one day. Taw Ko, a one-armed father of four, lives in an all-Burmese building where his neighbors and fellow landsmen translate letters for him. Myra Dahgaypaw is doing a Bachelor's degree and is working for the Burmese government in exile several years after her arrival in the U.S.


Taw Ko and his son Lulu in their house in Brooklyn.

A graphic illustrated how many people had fled Burma and were now living in refugee camps along the Thai-Burmese border (151,894 according to the Thailand Burma Border Consortium) and how atrocious the situation was there, which eventually led to what we illustrated in another graphic, namely the sudden admission of about 14,000 Burmese refugees to the United States in the fiscal year of 2007 (an eightfold increase from the year before when only about 1600 were admitted).
















Graphic of Thai-Burma Border and the concentration of refugee populations inthe refugee camps there

Moral decisions in reporting on refugees

But all this tech and editorial training was nothing in comparison to the reporting lessons we took home. Not only were we speaking to and taking the time of people who have have lived through gone through some pretty atrocious situations. On top of that, a large number of them have lived in refugee camps for more than 20 years and, before coming here, had no concept of what a key was or how to use Western toilets (the International Organization of Migration actually teaches some of them how to use toilets, among many other skills that are essential for living in the U.S.) and that means that many of these refugees might not have a clear understanding of what it's like to have your face plastered on the global platform that is the internet.

Now, many of these refugees have been ethnically persecuted for being Karen, an ethnic minority in Burma that has been fighting for independence since Burma's independence from British colonial rule. Many Karen Buremse refugees are still facing the same situation. We have encountered many refugees from Burma who have had worries about getting their relatives in Burma into trouble by participating in our project. And in some ways, someone who is struggling with using a microwave might not fully comprehend what it means to partake in a project that will be posted on the internet.

Nicholas Kristof wrote a very interesting column about this issue:

As a reporter, I always feel a tension between the interests of the broader community of refugees — for the most compelling individual stories possible, so the world will pay attention — versus the interest of the individual victim, who often wants privacy and doesn’t want to risk getting in trouble by telling her story.

[...]

And the refugees have no concept of what it means to be in a major newspaper or network broadcast, so you can’t just let them weigh and accept the risks themselves.

That is not to say that we should take away people's agency and presume that refugees aren't at all media savvy. Yet, we had to carefully assess each time whether the people we interviewed really understood what we were doing. We also had to deal with communication problems which made it even more difficult to clarify to our interviewees what were doing.

I guess I'll see what they think when I visit the Ko's on Sunday. Linday Ko, Taw Ko's wife, gave birth to their son Aung He in February. I haven't seen the little boy yet and am mighty exited. I'll have my camera with me. Finally for recreational purposes.