difficUlTies in The deVeloPmenT of daTa joUrnalism: KazaKhsTan exPerience The paper describes the essential characteristics of data journalism, the conditions and the process of its forming, the basic features of data journalism in social communication. The article discusses a new trend in journalism as "data journalism", which is based on the processing of open data and their use to create journalistic material. The article describes the main characteristics of data journalism, the conditions and the process of its formation, the main functions of data journalism in social communication and its importance in the media sphere of Kazakhstan. The aim of the study is to identify the specifics of the main trends of date-journalism based on international experience and features of the development of regional experience in the composition of modern media, the definition of its structural characteristics. The subject of the research is the key characteristics of the journalist's tool, called data journalism, which helps to provide the public with important information that could go unnoticed in vast amounts of information about contemporary reality. Internet journalism of metadata defines fundamentally new opportunities for the strategic development of media content characteristics and functions of modern journalism as an element of open public management, the formation of the science of media (media dialogue). The use of the Internet changes the systemic and functional properties of journalism and the media, marking the communicative Internet as a stage in the development of mass media, since the characteristics outlined above reflect the fundamental differences in computer communication and information in the Internet and in the characteristics of media content. Because there is an inevitable development of visual journalism, which is a tool for transmitting information. The author determines that the development of data journalism inevitably entails the development of digital literacy. The author concludes that data journalism, as a new format for presenting analytical media content based on the use of digital computer and Internet databases, has successful prospects in Kazakhstan. In this study, the author used the following methods: the method of content analysis (qualitative) and the descriptive method (in its modern interpretation). The areas of application of the results: journalism, mass communications, digital journalism in close accordance with the use of ICT technologies.