is what I say when describing what I do and what I receive is at best a nod of fascination but in fact a confused stare.
I go on and say I deal with numbers, statistics and I cover any topic that deals large set of data such as education, crime, government, really anything at this day and age; more blank stares promptly follow.
With time, I hope I get better at elaborating how valuable data-driven reporting is. To make up for all the times I couldn’t do data journalism justice, here’s a snippet of my fan/love letter on the topic.
Journalism or reporting, I believe, is about connecting dots. We are not constrained because we can have more than just one character or voice in any given piece. We are given first, the latitude in collecting as many as perspective as possible and second, the confidence that we are presenting them in a manner that is most comprehensive and collective.
Data is just like another source; an official, an expert, a victim, an offender or a bystander. Except data can mean thousands or million of sources compressed in a single statistics.
In lieu of the shooting of Michael Brown, no prosecution of Darren Wilson and protests that engulfed Ferguson, Mo., many news outlets around the country, small and big, have done great reporting, helping us make sense out of the tragedy.
Then there was, 1.5 million Missing Black Men by Justin Wolfer, David Leonheardt and Kevin Quealy at The Upshot.
Here’s an excerpt from the piece:
African-American men have long been more likely to be locked up and more likely to die young, but the scale of the combined toll is nonetheless jarring. It is a measure of the deep disparities that continue to afflict black men — disparities being debated after a recent spate of killings by the police — and the gender gap is itself a further cause of social ills, leaving many communities without enough men to be fathers and husbands.
Perhaps the starkest description of the situation is this: More than one out of every six black men who today should be between 25 and 54 years old have disappeared from daily life.
“The numbers are staggering,” said Becky Pettit, a professor of sociology at the University of Texas.
And what is the city with at least 10,000 black residents that has the single largest proportion of missing black men? Ferguson, Mo., where a fatal police shooting last year led to nationwide protests and a Justice Department investigation that found widespread discrimination against black residents. Ferguson has 60 men for every 100 black women in the age group, Stephen Bronars, an economist, has noted.
Narratives are powerful. But they are limiting. They can’t descriptively explain the context; not to mention, why that certain context has come into place in the first place. Data, however, can fill in the gaps.
It is far too easier to frame and dismiss a tragedy into just that: a tragedy. Tragedies bear no need for an explanation and therefore, accountability. Much like accidents, tragedies are constant. They are not discriminatory. The shooting of Michel Brown, an unarmed teenager by a police officer, is a tragedy. Many accounts, from eye-witness to officials, portrayed a conflicting explanations of how the tragedy took place, but not one could answer why this had happened.
But much like evil or good, or everything in this world, really, tragedies do not exist in a vacuum.
And the piece of data Upshot uses -- the ratio between men and women and the heartbreaking disparity between certain cities and race -- pinpoints the context: the context where the death of Michael Brown is not just another tragedy or accident.
All this is to say that I hope to do similar type of data-driven reporting. And to the so many who are already doing the incredible work, I salute you.
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