Data Story Ideas for Reporters

Data stories use data to explain how power is wielded to shape people’s lives.  Well-built data sets, which can include administrative data (e.g., school enrollment) or survey data (e.g., the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey) can help us to understand how structures, systems, processes, and policies impact whole populations and disparately impact sub populations.

Proceed with caution. Without a thoughtful process of story construction, a data story may reinforce the biases and preferences of the powerful. Building data sets well is expensive, which means that the types of data that are collected and the methods for collecting data will exhibit bias towards well-resourced groups.

Data stories should

• Use data to understand policies and structures, not people or groups of people.
• Ask whether the data were produced by/for the people with the largest stake in the outcome of the policy.
• Share perspectives on the data from people with the largest stake in the outcome of the policy.
• Make discussions of racism explicit.  Also consider gender, class, disability, etc.
• Use a limited number of data points in telling the story to keep the narrative clear.

Consider the following clip that makes use of data to tell a news story. How well does it attend to the attributes of data stories listed above?

Impacts

The word “impact” has a very specific meaning in data science and social scientists will not use this term unless an evidentiary standard has been met. For the purposes of this guide we will use the term “impact” more loosely to describe situations where an impact of a policy could be hypothesized and a story could be offered as a consideration of the hypothesis.

To find impacts, always compare something to something else.

This guide will show you how you can browse websites that aggregate large data sets to look for data stories.  By making comparisons you will look for the impacts of policies on conditions and behaviors in the data.  Once you have your story idea you will use the craft of journalism to find and report the policies that may have made the impacts you saw.  Here are some stories from the news that start with the premise of an impact and investigate the policies.