This study explores how journalists in highspeed newsrooms gather information, how gathering activities are temporally structured and how reliability manifests itself in information-gathering activities.
Depicting news graphically is considered an apt way to deal with challenges of modern journalism: to disclose big data, and present news attractively, visually, and fast to grasp. This study delves into reported obstacles and challenges for the production of news visualizations. It focuses on the question: what are the decisive factors that make news visualizations ‘work’ for the different people involved: journalists, designers and the public? To answer the research question, a threefold approach was taken: a review of both pertinent professional literature and academic studies on the production process of infographics; in-depth interviews with data journalists on their most extensive productions; and case studies around the production of three Dutch media visualizations. Results show that the quality and the use of visualization for news stories not only depends on the availability and the skills of designers and data journalists, but even more so on the willingness of the editors-in-chief to initiate experiments with new concepts and tools and to opt for new ways of news gathering and dissemination.
Although basic features of journalism have remained the same over the last decades, the tasks journalists perform, the skills they need and the position they have within news organizations have changed dramatically. Usually the focus in the discourse on changes in journalism is on skills, especially on technical multi-media skills or research skills. In this paper we focus on changes in professional roles of journalists, arguing that these roles have changed fundamentally, leading to a new generation of journalists. We distinguish between different trends in journalism. Journalism has become more technical, ranging from editing video to programming. At the same time, many journalists are now more ‘harvesters’ and ‘managers’ of information and news instead of producers of news. Thirdly, journalists are expected to gather information from citizens and social media, and edit and moderate user-contributions as well. Lastly, many journalists are no longer employed by media but work as freelancers or independent entrepreneurs. We track these trends and provide a detailed description of developments with examples from job descriptions in the Netherlands.
