Storytelling with Data

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Introduction

Many articles and books do a great job at laying out the data storytelling process; however, given the breadth of data storytelling the process varies depending on the author.

Our treatment of storytelling with data is different for three reasons:

An evolving media environment more heavily leveraging AI
Data storytelling requires a broader set of skills such as data analysis and predictive modeling
Our community comes from different backgrounds

Let's briefly look inside each of these.

We operate within an evolving media environment.

Traditional media, such as newspapers, radio and print, is on the decline. Below is a view of the declining circulation of newspapers with the growth of the Internet.

As a consequence of traditional media declining, the independent and progressive media ecosystem (e.g., the investigative/data-driven journalist, progressive media outlets, social media content creators, etc.) is starting to grow. This is changing the nature and dynamic of the mass media industry – and what it means to be a journalist or content creator.

This evolution demands more knowledge and skill development around data-driven journalism and content, leveraging different AI tools for independent journalism or content creation, data analytics and predictive modeling, and producing content for different platforms and modalities.

The data storytelling process demands more skills.

As an independent content creator, the skills you need to conceptualize, build and publish your next best data story are growing. To gain an edge requires real-time learning of different processes, technologies and tools. For example, an industry survey (2022 State of Data Journalism survey) found several skills required or sought after by data journalists: journalism, data analysis, data visualization, statistics, data wrangling, scraping, and machine learning. And this was just on the data side.

For those creating content in platforms such as YouTube or TikTok, an additional set of skills are required to create, produce and deploy videos and other content. For example, how can you leverage AI to optimize your content creation? How can you build automation pipelines into your workflow to maximize your content scale? The creation and publishing process is becoming more demanding, thus requires special skills.

Our community includes a range of background, such as investigative/data journalists, social media content creators, sports journalists, and more.

Our goal is to operate within the areas of sports, entertainment and news. Helping journalists and content creators within this shifting media environment (across these areas) means ensuring our community has the right level of support from story conceptualization and data management all the way down to analytics, visualization and content release. The nature of how and where data and facts show up within content and across various platforms is varied and more involved.

Now and for the foreseeable future, it is an amazing time for data storytelling. We want to help all you rising stars get the next Pulitzer or Izzy, be the next viral YouTube video, crush it with an amazing TikTok and reach the millions of people all over the globe that you know you can reach.

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