Data journalism came to prominence in 2008 and since then has been significantly incorporated into daily reporting, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Scholars and practitioners often celebrate data journalism’s potential to improve audience engagement (see Ilagan & Soriano, 2019; de-Lima-Santos & Mesquita, 2021; Borges-Rey, 2020; Felle, 2016). The heavy use of interactive data stories presumably brings fun and innovative ways of engaging audiences. Creative crowd-sourcing methods, exemplified by the UK MPs Expenses Scandal (2009) and The Counted (2015/2016), are believed to enhance public participation in social and political issues. Data journalists also expect the publication of datasets to increase trust in their work and encourage audiences to explore the data and draw conclusions through their own analysis. Despite these positive beliefs, it is uncertain if audiences engage well with data journalism for two reasons. First, today’s audiences are active, elusive, and fragmented, which makes engagement particularly challenging. Second, understanding data stories may require levels of data literacy that audiences may not possess.
Most of the existing studies focus on the practices and epistemology of data journalists, the development of data journalism and its integration into newsrooms in different countries (see Appelgren & Nygren, 2014; Fink & Anderson, 2015; Knight, 2015; Maeyer, Libert, Domingo, Heinderyckx, & Cam, 2015; Tabary, Provost, & Trottier, 2016; Cushion, Lewis, & Callaghan, 2017; Tong, 2022). While these studies contribute to our understanding of data journalism in particular and journalism in general in the digital era, they pay more attention to news production than to news audiences. What we know about data journalism and audience engagement is very limited due to the dearth of relevant literature. However, knowledge of data journalism’s audience engagement is crucial, as it offers a new angle of examining data journalism, facilitates the improvement of data reporting and also provides new insights into the role of data journalism in society.
This theoretical and empirical void results in a series of questions. Can data journalism truly boost audience engagement? Can data reporting encourage public participation and news consumption? If so, how and to what extent? Who are data journalism’s audiences? How do audiences perceive data journalists’ practices and data stories? What factors might influence their consumption and perception? How do audiences’ consumption and reception of data stories impact their understanding of reality? How do we measure audience engagement with data journalism? And what implications are there for data journalism’s impact and role in society?
This special Issue of /Journalism: Theory, Practice, & Criticism/ invites the submission of papers. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Mapping data journalism’s audiences
- Crowd-funding and/or public participation in data journalism projects
- Data journalism and news consumption in context
- Audience perceptions of data journalism and data stories
- Data journalism and audiences’ perceptions of data stories
- Data journalism and the identity and everyday life of audiences
- Digital and social inequalities in audience engagement with data journalism
- Measuring audience engagement and data journalism’s impact with metrics and beyond
- Data journalists’ audience engagement strategies
- Theoretical and methodological approaches to studying data journalism and audience engagement
- Comparative studies on data journalism and audience engagement
- Comparisons between different forms of data journalism and their audience engagement
- Other topics that can contribute to understanding data journalism and audience engagement
Please see the key dates below. If you are interested, please submit an extended abstract of 500 words (in English), along with an up-to-150-word bio, introducing your relevant expertise. Abstracts should be sent to (j.tong /at/ sheffield.ac.uk) by October 7, 2022. Upon selection, scholars will be invited to submit full papers of no more than 8000 words in length to the journal by March 31, 2023. All submitted manuscripts are subject to a rigorous, blind peer-review process. Papers must not have been previously published and must not be under consideration for publication elsewhere.
Key dates
October 7, 2022 – Deadline for abstract submission
October 24, 2022 – Notification to authors
March 31, 2023 – Deadline for submission of full papers