| The issue of people killed by police has become a focus of current political and social discourse related to criminal justice reform in the United States. Two data journalism projects attempting to track previously missing data have been central to a changing discussion. The Guardian's The Counted and The Washington Post's Investigation: Police Shootings have each attempted to create a running log of fatalities resulting from law enforcement activities. Such endeavors have added to a collective consciousness about the scope and commonality of deadly police encounters, and has provided empirical reference points for various legislative pushes related to police accountability. These two projects -- one from an acknowledged leader in data journalism, the other by a legacy newspaper with a tradition of Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalism -- presented a unique opportunity to compare and contrast two exemplars of data journalism in an active contemporary media context. This thesis conducted a comparative case study consisting of content analysis built on a framework of Coddington's (2015) typology. Findings showed two different approaches to data journalism, one of which won the Pulitzer Prize. In the end, this thesis offers a proposition of adding a new dimension to Coddington --- vision of self, which would assess different data journalism decisions as a binary choice between seeing journalism as a public service or national news. |
