Research On The Data Literacy Of Chinese Journalists In The Era Of Big Data

In the big data era, data appears in every field and brings a huge change to it. For the traditional news field, data also takes an important role as data literacy has become a core part of media literacy of journalists. However, the study on data literacy of domestic journalists is still very deficient and needs to be closed the gap immediately.Based on coding and statistical analysis to domestic and foreign literature, with the idea of Grounded Theory, the study extracts the primary and secondary components of data literacy and put them into the various stages of news production, and parse out the core elements of Journalists Data Literacy. These elements are “data management” in news accumulation phase, “data decision-making” in news planning phase, “data acquisition” in news gathering phase, “data interpretation” in news writing phase, “data processing” in news editing phase, “data communicated” in news release phase.Through case studies, text analysis, in-depth interviews and other research methods, this article has explored the current scarcity of data literacy of domestic journalists in data management, decision-making, acquisition, interpretation, processing and communication.And it also has found those correspondent reasons to the data scarcity. The objective reasons include the inadequate of public data disclosed by the government, the scarcity of data education, training, the immaturity of data technology. Besides, the subjective reasons are including the missing of big data thinking, data skepticism mind and data inquiring mind.Because most of the journalists are majoring in art, their sensitivity to data is not enough and also their attitudes towards data are rigorous.Finally, in order to promote the data literacy of domestic journalists, this research made following suggestions: Firstly, to improve the government's data disclosure mechanisms.Secondly, to increase data education and training. Thirdly, to establish data incentive system.Last but not least, to put innovation into practice, than share the innovation with others bravely and so on.