Beyond headlines: When journalism is driven by data

Readers need to be offered a perspective to give them a fuller picture.

Keep the data confined to the tables and the text free of numerical babble, my first chief sub used to say. That was in 1993. Today, more than a quarter of a century later, that wisdom has turned on its head. Data, like the air we breathe, is omnipresent. It's in the headlines, for sure. Moody's slashes India's growth forecast from 6.6 to 5.4 per cent. Global coronavirus cases top 71,000 as US evacuates 400 Americans aboard quarantined ship. WhatsApp joins the 2-billion-users club. Trump sets Twitter record with 142 posts in a single day.
But, like the air we breathe, not all of it is fit for consumption, at least not in an incomplete form. Readers need to be offered a perspective to give them a fuller picture. The stats in the headline of Indian GDP revision, for instance, don't reveal that the south Asian nation is just one among a host of countries that have seen their economies come under pressure lately. China, of course, is the biggest victim of coronavirus- and trade tiff-related de-growth, but Japan, Singapore, Thailand, Australia and Turkey are among other notable economies to have seen watered-down GDP projections. Take the coronavirus headline, too, which doesn't say that, despite topping 71k overall, the number of new confirmed cases per day is witnessing a significant drop.
It may be a double-edged sword but data journalism, nevertheless, is assuming unprecedented popularity among readers - and not just because it can be used for predicting poll results or the winner of a particular sporting event. Stats help summarise news in palatable bytes and are a big pull for the audience. Use it or abuse it, love it or loathe it, small or big - data is everywhere. And like one needs to hold their nose to avoid the stink in case of foul air, we need to sneeze at some of the more irrelevant data points. And like with air, it's up to us to keep it clean or, when that isn't possible, use filters and masks to absorb only the non-injurious part.