Data journalism’s many futures: Diagrammatic displays and prospective probabilities in data-driven news predictions

Abstract

This article explores how newsmakers exploit numeric records in order to anticipate the future. As this nascent area of data journalism experiments with predictive analytics, we examine its reports and computer-generated presentations, often infographics and data visualizations, and ask what time frames and topics are covered by these diagrammatic displays. We also interrogate the strategies that are employed in order to modulate the uncertainty involved in calculating for more than one possible outlook. Based on a comprehensive sample of projects, our analysis shows how data journalism seeks accuracy but has to cope with a number of different prospective probabilities and the puzzle of how to address this multiplicity of futures. Despite their predictive ambition, these forecasts are inherently grounded in the past because they are based on archival data. We conclude that this form of quantified premediation limits the range of imaginable future thoughts to one preferred mode, namely extrapolation.

A holistic framework for the analysis of predictive rhetoric in digital visualizations

“…Those same qualities extend to visualizations that promote predictive narratives (Allen et al, 2023;Amit-Danhi, 2022a;Pentzold and Fechner, 2019). They are especially prominent in the temporal mediation work expected from journalists (Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2013), but can also be found in candidates' campaign materials (Amit-Danhi, 2022a), government officials' pandemic visualizations (e.g., Allen et al, 2023), and social media content related to future-oriented topics such as climate change (e.g., Wang et al, 2018).…”

The binomial of interaction and visualization in digital news media: consolidation, standardization and future challenges

“…It is, however, also in the process of digitization and transformation from the analogue media system to the digital media ecosystem that different ways of visually representing information have assumed crucial importance. In the cybermedia, their use has increased significantly and become one of the main strategies currently employed by the media to tell stories (Segel; Heer, 2010; Klanten; Ehmann; Schulze, 2011; Chen; Guo, 2020) and to convert data sources into visual information (Weber;Rall, 2012;Pentzold;Fechner, 2020). In contrast with traditional media in which the text of a journalistic article might have told a story using graphs or visualizations to back it up or prove what was being narrated, in new digital media these no longer play this secondary role.…”

When the ‘Messiah’ went to ‘Mecca’: Envisioning and reporting the digital future at the CeBIT tech fair (1986–2018)

“…On the other hand, it is also relevant in media coverage terms. As Pentzold and Fechner (2019) put it, news narratives also provide templates for interpreting, classifying, and evaluating events and experiences to be made in the future. So, the recurrent annual character of fairs allows events to be looked forward to with anticipation, event representation, and between-event thinking to take place, often combining retrospective experience with arguments for the relevance of anticipated new developments.…”