2 Comments

Congratulations on the anniversary and thanks again for all your work.

I really liked this astute observation "very little data literacy in the non-data world" and "very little media-literacy in the data people" and data journalism can help with this (even though I am not a journalist I try to do something similar from an analytical and theoretical perspective in my newsletter).

I do wonder, how the "data world" and the "media world" overlap and what matters for reporting and the digital public sphere (btw, you might find this new Yale White paper series useful: https://law.yale.edu/yls-today/news/isp-launches-digital-public-sphere-white-paper-series).

Some random thoughts. ​À la Marshall McLuhan if "the medium is the message" then is "data the new message" now? Is that what data-driven journalism means? I totally agree that we need to talk about the "flawed vision of what data". But how do we think about this "message" McLuhan was talking about (basically the media content and structure). Where/what is the medium now in this data-driven world? I am thinking about the public sphere and the role of "traditional" media (like newspapers, public media etc) and data.

Expand full comment
author

It think it is easier than that. I feel that data scientists at large and media people at large feel that they do not need someone in the middle to make the best of the two worlds. There is a McLuhan-derived aspect about the adherence of message the message to its medium, but it is not enough. If you see how the public sector works, firms are organized in silos with very little interdisciplinary exchange. This implies that jobs are mostly about trivial tasks and reducing complexity. When these organizational models hit the public sphere, we are in the environment I describe.

Thanks for your reply -- and kudos to your amazing newsletter

Expand full comment