The role of data journalism is to give qualitative and quantitative reporting, empower the public, and hold institutions accountable. There is a negotiation and balancing of the relationship to power between journalists, institutions, and the public. In an ideal world, data journalism would be “the collection, protection, and interrogation of data as a source complementing traditional investigative reporting (witness, experts, and authorities),” in service of creating a healthier existence for humanity. This extended definition from Alex Howard’s lightning talk “Data Journalism in the Second Machine Age”, along with his declaration, “data plus journalism plus activism plus responsive institutions equals social change, establishes a way to look at the interconnected nodes in data journalism that require it keep central a power-based lens.

In Episode 1 of the Data & Society Podcast “Becoming Data: Data and Humanity,” Lam Thuy Vo discusses two ways of looking at data/datasets. One type of data is created naturally as people live and is collected by platforms, institutions, and individuals, while the other is intentionally made by individuals to shape their public self. Since this forming of data is contingent on the public, concerns, and frameworks for maintaining privacy, security, ethics, and transparency should be present. Data is not neutral; how it is collected, used, analyzed, and preserved indicates the relations that exist around it. In collection, we consider the “‘reality’ of what collections methods can uncover and the impact of these methods on the data collected, participants, and researchers” (Guyan, 61). The ‘reality’ and impact are present during each part of the data lifecycle. While the data itself is paramount to data journalism, institutions play just as great a role.

Institutions that do not embrace intersectionality, and that are built upon colonial, extractive practices, will not aid data journalism in its role to understand our world and make it more just. If institutions are not questioning accessibility, the financial interests present, the normative implications built into how the public interacts with them, the rigidity of how the public must identify, and so on, how can they be sure that the data they collect, and house is accurate to the ways in which the public wants to be represented? Dismantling present structures of inequality in institutions that data journalists use when not making their own datasets requires institutional rethinking of documentation practices. How is the data constructed, what is deemed as knowledge, and are we removing the context from the data?

Data journalist in the role of change agent (for the betterment of society) are tasked then with creating and maintaining relationships with the public they wish to analyze, and with holding institutions accountable to the public and creating pathways for the public to advocate for themselves. Data journalists and the field of data journalism must navigate the challenges and complexities to contribute to the greater good.