Big Data and Journalism

TLDR

Big data is a complex social, cultural, and technological phenomenon that combines digital abundance, emerging analytics, myths, and critiques, and scholars have begun to examine its broader media implications, yet its specific effects on journalism remain unclear. The article applies four conceptual lenses—epistemology, expertise, economics, and ethics—to explore big data’s implications for journalism and outlines future research directions. The authors use these lenses to analyze contemporary and potential big data applications in journalism, examining how news organizations seek to understand, act upon, and derive value from data-driven practices. The analysis reveals that journalists and media organizations are actively making sense of, acting on, and extracting value from big data, highlighting significant implications for journalism’s ways of knowing, doing, valuing, and ethical considerations.

Abstract

Big data is a social, cultural, and technological phenomenon—a complex amalgamation of digital data abundance, emerging analytic techniques, mythology about data-driven insights, and growing critique about the overall consequences of big-data practices for democracy and society. While media and communication scholars have begun to examine and theorize about big data in the context of media and public life broadly, what are the particular implications for journalism? This article introduces and applies four conceptual lenses—epistemology, expertise, economics, and ethics—to explore both contemporary and potential applications of big data for the professional logic and industrial production of journalism. These distinct yet inter-related conceptual approaches reveal how journalists and news media organizations are seeking to make sense of, act upon, and derive value from big data during a time of exploration in algorithms, computation, and quantification. In all, the developments of big data potentially have great meaning for journalism's ways of knowing (epistemology) and doing (expertise), as well as its negotiation of value (economics) and values (ethics). Ultimately, this article outlines future directions for journalism studies research in the context of big data.