Data journalism methodology

Systematic approaches for finding, analyzing and presenting data in journalism.

Story structure for data journalism

Data journalism framework

The framework for data journalism was established by Philip Meyer, a journalist for Knight-Ridder, Harvard Nieman Fellow and professor at UNC-Chapel Hill. In his book The New Precision Journalism, Meyer encourages journalists to treat journalism "as if it were a science" by adopting the scientific method:

• Make observations / formulate a question
• Research the question / collect, store, and retrieve data
• Formulate a hypothesis
• Test the hypothesis, using both qualitative (interviews, documents) and quantitative (data analysis) methods
• Analyze the results and reduce them to the most important findings
• Present them to the audience

The process is iterative, not sequential.