Study On Characteristics Of Data Journalism

With the boom of the concept "big data", quantification becomes a popular term. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web in1989said "Data-driven journalism is the future""Journalists need to be data-savvy". Nowadays, data journalism, as a new branch in scientific research, is attracting more attention in related studies than ever.Data Journalism Award (DJA) is a typical award in data journalism fields. It was founded in2012, sponsored by Google and organized by the Global Editors Network (GEN) and the European Journalism Centre (EJC). DJA is the first international recognition of the importance of data journalism to newsrooms around the world. This paper concludes the criteria of awards and studies the change of DJA itself. Investigation, storytelling, visualization, applications are the four dimensions of DJA.This paper aims at figuring out the characteristics of data journalism based on206reports which have been on the shortlist of DJA. These reports are from32countries and areas and analyzed in angles of geographical distribution, producer, subject and topic. Some situations and trends of data journalism have been revealed.The application of data in reports is the most important part of data journalism. This paper describes three pairs of model for data journalism based on how dry data is applied into reports and gives examples for each pair of model. The three pairs are niche and analogy model, linear and non-linear model, net and dot model.