Data journalism and audience remains an underresearched topic. Marília Gehrke from University Groningen investigated how a group of Brazilians perceived the disclosure transparency of data journalism articles.
Digital journalism studies have moved from celebrating transparency to critically appraising it. Data journalism in itself is a part of the quantitative turn in journalism, and transparency can be seen as a performative ritual that must be accepted by the audience in order for enhanced credibility.
Audience expectations have been a strand of research: for example Banjac, Miro & Hanusch (2024) argue that expectations are relational and activate role performance. The expectations come from both shareholders and audiences, and the journalists must balance them.
The participants for this study were all Brazilian adults above 21 years old who consumed quantitative news. Those with backgrounds in journalism, computer science or information technology were not included. A total of 15 were deemed sufficient for saturation. There were limitations: they are not representative of the Brazilian population, and all have at least bachelor’s degrees.
In-depth interviews, or “analytical listening” (Cramer 2024) were the methods to achieve a “deep immersion” in the viewpoints of the participants. The interviews lasted for 40-50 minutes and were semi-structured – and the participants were given detailed information beforehand. The interviews were in Portuguese.
The Brazilian audience members generally expected to both remain away from power to maintain their watchdog status, and to be open about other forms of influence shaping the news. One university professor hoped that newsrooms disclose their sources of revenue, and favorably mentioned the initiative by The Guardian, where it banned fossil-fuel advertisements and expanded climate change coverage.
One also hoped that news outlets would be open about their political leanings, finding neutrality hard to believe. Error correction policies were also mentioned: typically the correction is read by far fewer people than the original error.
A minority, such as a 34-year old accounting sciences professor, noted that journalists were not always clear and precise in their analyses. Generally, the explanation on sources was appreciated. Hyperlinks were always noticed but not always opened. However, most still appreciated the extra information. Typically, the possibility of delving deeper and thus having their intellectual facilities respected was appreciated.
The audience members expected the journalists to investigate beyond just the data, and stressed the importance of the watchdog role. This was seen during Covid-19, when the government of Jair Bolsonaro did not share statistics fully and publicly. Many expressed distrust towards official data and expected journalists to investigate better. They also were prone to trust data stories.
In conclusion, previous research has shown that data journalism is popular due to disclosure and transparency (Gehrke 2020; Karlsson 2010), but here, the watchdog role was more prominent in the eyes of the audience. Many of the participants had strong academic backgrounds and appreciated features like hyperlinks.
The article “What Does the Audience Want from Data Journalism? An Exploratory Study About Disclosure Transparency” by Marília Gehrke is in Journalism Practice. (Open access).
Picture: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil by Agustin Diaz Gargiulo.
License Unsplash.
