Beg Seun Onigbinde to do it. Oh, he’s already trying to do it? But I’m sure if we ask him, he’ll tell you that journalism of any kind is hard to do in Nigeria.
Look for a fresh diasporan Harvard grad and convince them that attempting to become a Nigerian Nate Silver is a smarter thing to do than working for Accenture or McKinsey.
Wisecracks aside, the need for data journalism, and where possible, driven by technology is in fact more acute in opaque regions like Africa, where this information is needed to reach actionable insights. But just because there is a great need does not mean it’ll be easy to do.
First, information in Africa, where it exists in the first place, is more often than not unstructured and analog. Before you can even talk of using data to drive anything, you’ll first have to invent the wheel of structure to harvest the data. Until we get the systems that African society runs on – hospitals, schools, government agencies and parastatals, and so on, to proactively store the data they generate in structured formats, and digitise their existing analog information repositories, data driven anything will remain a challenge. Again, just ask Seun.
Second, until someone figures out a business model for media that makes “brown envelope journalism” obsolete, ain’t nobody going to be interested in using data to drive anything.
Data Journalism requires a fundamental understanding of the DIKW model, Open Data, Engagement journalism via empathy, understanding of user’s behavior and usage of pervasive tech, method Journalism, News consumption patterns in the digital space and a change of attitude for it to be successful.
These can be fused into creating an outcome like the following products: Yahoo news digest, buzzfeed, fivethirtyeight, circa, etc.
Method Journalism is about seeing news as a product and creating a user experience out of it.
To be clear, Data Journalism is possible but I am not a fan of standalone solutions. We need to finally integrate thins into mainstream newsrooms and we need coders, wonks and journalists not pressed for tight deadlines and quick box but wiling to do it hard and data driven. The commercial purpose is also difficult but this is the future as the environment gets more tuned to data. Who will bell the cat? I am experimenting stuff with Fitila.ng.
On a serious note, I was really pissed off that none of our many news agencies could do a proper analysis of the presidential election results as they were flowing in, not even a pie chart done in excel, these guys need to step up and learn how to tell good stories using numbers.
