This story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.net/en/.

This story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.net/en/.
License: Creative Commons 4.0 - Attributions/No Derivities/
international.
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Data journalism as tested by the COVID-19 pandemic: Lessons from Italy
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Graphs, statistics and data analysis have populated the coverage of the pandemic for over a year, becoming the most common journalistic strategy for communicating updates to the public. Financial Times reporter John Burn-Murdoch defined the COVID-19 pandemic as “the biggest story ever encountered” as a data journalist. Every newsroom had to face a deluge of data from a variety of institutions providing regular updates about the spreading of the new coronavirus.

Journalists in Italy, the first European country to be massively hit by COVID-19 in early 2020, were among the first to deal with the ‘datafied’ side of the pandemic. Italy’s Civil Protection Department’s daily data briefing about new infections and deaths due to COVID-19 became a powerful and ritual event, setting the media agenda with new figures each day. The media then had to produce, reproduce and publish data analysis on the spread of the virus in the country. Yet this data reporting never occurred in a frictionless way and a series of controversies emerged, which were debated by journalists and data scientists in the media and on social media.

Data journalists frequently pointed at irregularities and inconsistencies in the Italian data. For instance, it has been underlined how the comparability of data gathered in different Italian regions was problematic, due to the very different approaches the decentralized Italian health system offered in terms of testing, data gathering and overall care strategy.

Moreover, data journalism is still struggling to become a mainstream and widely adopted practice in Italy – it is not yet a routine practice like in other Western countries. No major Italian media outlet is equipped with a dedicated data newsroom and most of the data journalism produced in the country comes from freelancers who built their skills independently. Journalistic education in Italy is loosely organized and most of the data journalism training activities are offered on an irregular basis or by activist organizations.

These structural limitations of Italian data journalism influenced the coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic in a country that is, in general, far less structured and institutionalized than countries such as Germany or the UK. These peculiar circumstances and characteristics make Italy an interesting case study to understand how data journalism has been pivotal in the journalistic understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting also certain limitations in regard to how data-driven reporting may effectively help the public in making sense of major global events.

Italian data journalists

How did Italian data journalists respond to the ‘datafied’ side of the pandemic? I initiated a study on their coverage of COVID-19, which was published in a special issue of ‘Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics’. For this research, I conducted a series of qualitative interviews with a sample of some of the most active Italian data journalists (of whom previous research has estimated that there are at most 20). Interviewed journalists included those working for national dailies (Il Sole 24 ore), local dailies (Eco di Bergamo), independent collectives of data experts and science communicators (Dataninja and Formica Blu) and freelancers working for specialized outlets (Wired and Rai Radio 3 Scienza).

The interviews were later used as the basis of a thematic analysis, aimed at identifying recurring topics and themes from journalists’ views on the topic of the research. Overall, four major themes emerged, mostly related to sourcing and investigative strategies and the ongoing structural limitations and constraints still faced by data journalism in Italy.

These were: ‘data flaws’ and critical views on the usefulness of the official figures; the need to find different strategies and sources of data to effectively report on the pandemic; a lack of ‘data literacy’ among Italian journalists and their unpreparedness and diffused ‘dataism’; and the impact of the structural limitations of the Italian market for data journalism.

[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/data-journalism-tested-covid-19-pandemic-lessons-italy/