@digiphile’s being doing some digging around current popular usage of the phrase data journalism – here are my recollections…
My personal recollection of the current vogue is that “data driven journalism” was the phrase that dominated the discussions/community I was witness to around early 2009, though for some reason my blog doesn’t give any evidence for that (must take better contemporaneous notes of first noticings of evocative phrases;-). My route in was via “mashups”, mashup barcamps, and the like, where folk were experimenting with building services on newly emerging (and reverse engineered) APIs; things like crime mapping and CraigsList maps were in the air – putting stuff on maps was very popular I seem to recall! Yahoo were one of the big API providers at the time.
I noted the launch of the Guardian datablog and datastore in my personal blog/notebook here – https://blog.ouseful.info/2009/03/10/using-many-eyes-wikified-to-visualise-guardian-data-store-data-on-google-docs/ – though for some reason don’t appear to have linked to a launch post. With the arrival of the datastore it looked like there were to be “trusted” sources of data we could start to play with in a convenient way, accessed through Google docs APIs:-) Some notes on the trust thing here: https://blog.ouseful.info/2009/06/08/the-guardian-openplatform-datastore-just-a-toy-or-a-trusted-resource/
NESTA did an event on News Innovation London in July 2009, a review of which by @kevglobal mentions “discussions about data-driven journalism” (sic on the hyphen). I seem to recall that Journalism.co.uk (@JTownend) were also posting quite a few noticings around the use of data in the news at the time.
At some point, I did a lunchtime at the Guardian for their developers – there was a lot about Yahoo Pipes, I seem to remember! (I also remember pitching the Guardian Platform API to developers in the OU as a way of possibly getting fresh news content into courses. No-one got it…) I recall haranguing Simon Rogers on a regular basis about their lack of data normalisation (which I think in part led to the production of the Rosetta Stone spreadsheet) and their lack of use (at the time) of fusion tables. Twitter archives may turn something up there. Maybe Simon could go digging in the Twitter archives…?;-)
There was a session on related matters at the first(?) news:rewired event in early 2010 but I don’t recall the exact title of the session (I was in a session with Francis Irving/@frabcus from the then nascent Scraperwiki) https://blog.ouseful.info/2010/01/14/my-presentation-for-newsrewired-doing-the-data-mash/ Looking at the content of that presentation, it’s heavily dominated by notions of data flow; the data driven journalism (hence #ddj) phrase, seemed to fit this well.
Later that year, summer, was a roundtable event hosted by the ECJ on “data driven journalism” – I recall meeting Mirko Lorenz there (who maybe had a background in business data? and since helped launch datawrapper.de) and Jonathan Gray – who then went on to help edit the Data Journalism handbook – among others.
https://blog.ouseful.info/2010/08/25/my-slides-from-the-data-driven-journalism-round-table-ddj/
For me the focus at the time was very much on using technology to help flow data into useable content, (eg in a similar but perhaps slightly weaker sense than the more polished content generation services that Narrative Science/Automated Insights have since come to work on, or other data driven visualisations or what I guess we might term local information services; more about data driven applications with a weak local news/specific theme or issue general news relevance, perhaps). I don’t remember where the sense of the journalist was in all this – maybe as someone who would be able to take the flowed data, or use tools that were being developed to get the stories out of data with tech support?
My “data driven journalism” phrase notebook timeline
https://blog.ouseful.info/?s=%22data%20driven%20journalism%22&order=asc
My “data journalist” phrase notebook timeline
https://blog.ouseful.info/?s=%22data%20journalist%22&order=asc
My first blogged used of the data journalism phrase, in quotes, as it happens, so it must have been a relatively new sounding phrase to me, was here: https://blog.ouseful.info/2009/05/20/making-it-a-little-easier-to-use-google-spreadsheets-as-a-database-hopefully/ (h/t @paulbradshaw)
Seems like my first use of the “data journalist” phrase was in picking up on a job ad – so certainly the phrase was common to me by then.
https://blog.ouseful.info/2010/12/04/what-is-a-data-journalist/
As a practice and a commonplace, things still seemed to be developing in 2011 enough for me to comment on a situation where the Guardian and Telegraph teams were co-opetitively bootstrapping each other’s ideas: https://blog.ouseful.info/2011/09/13/data-journalists-engaging-in-co-innovation/
I guess the deeper history of CAR, database journalism, precision journalism may throw off trace references, though maybe not representing situations that led to the phrase gaining traction in “popular” usage?
Certainly, now I’m wondering what the relative rise in popularity of “data journalist” versus “data journalism” was? Certainly, for me, “data driven journalism” was a phrase I was familiar with way before the other two, though I do recall a sense of unease about it’s applicability to news stories that were perhaps “driven” by data more in the sense of being motivated or inspired by it, or whose origins lay in a data set, rather than “driven” in a live, active sense of someone using an interface that was powered by flowing data.
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