The second edition of The State of Data Journalism Survey results is now public! Explore the insights from the largest data journalism survey of the year. We covered the industry’s demographics, skills, tools, and work practices, and the impact of the Russia-Ukraine War and the Covid-19 pandemic on the field. The 2022 edition also marks an important milestone: more than 1800 people have taken our survey, a statement to the growing nature of this industry.
Have you partaken in our raffle? We have now announced our winners! We have also released an open and anonymised version of the dataset, and we would love to see what insights you can extract from the data.
You can also explore the 2021 survey, including results, methodology, and data.
Results
Demographics | Employment | Skills and Tools | Work Practices | Challenges | Russia-Ukraine coverage | Pandemic
Key Takeaways
Have a look at a few of our main takeaways from the survey.
Our Mission
Data journalism plays a crucial role in the media landscape as a rapidly evolving field. With many newsrooms having a dedicated data team and others striving to create one, it’s important to keep up with the latest developments in the field. Our last edition of the Data Journalism Handbook explores this constantly changing landscape and provides insights into the possibilities of data journalism.
At its core, data journalism blends together different data sources, analysis tools, and visualizations to create powerful stories. However, this also comes with the challenge of upskilling in non-journalistic domains such as statistics, data visualization, and programming. Data journalists face the same challenges as other media players, including shrinking resources and time scarcity, which the COVID-19 pandemic has further exacerbated.
Data journalism is an established field within journalism, which is often at the core of factual reporting, and as such its development should be tracked.
In 2021, we conducted the first State of Data Journalism Survey, the largest and most recent survey on data journalism. Its results highlighted the widespread practice of self-teaching and unequal data access and quality across different countries.
With the 2022 survey, we sought to resurface the aforesaid information. Also, adding a module on how the Russian invasion of Ukraine was covered.
This report reflects Datajournalism.com’s commitment of continuous support to the data journalism community. Join us in our mission to monitor and map the state of data journalism and stay on top of the latest trends and best practices in this exciting field.
Methodology
The State of Data Journalism 2022 Survey comprised a total of 63 questions and had 1809 respondents, of which 1751 were used for the analysis. The survey was organised in seven sections: demographics, industry structure, skills and tools, work practices, challenges and opportunities, and the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and of the COVID-19 pandemic on data journalism. It was available in four languages: English, Italian, Arabic, and Spanish.
1. Population of interest and sampling strategy
The population of interest was the global community of individuals involved in data journalism. Targeted respondents included full-time and part-time employed data journalists, freelancers, data editors and team leads, trainers, faculty members, educators, and students. In the absence of a directory of people who are part of the data journalism industry in 2022, we discarded the possibility of drawing a random or representative sample. Instead, we followed the approach of trying to reach respondents as widely as possible through a variety of channels.
2. Outreach strategy and incentives
The survey was open between November 15 and December 31, 2022. Participation was encouraged through various communications channels to minimise bias obtained by targeting solely one online community. We used direct mailing, and social media promotion and asked the DataJournalism.com and European Journalism Centre communities to help spread the word.
3. Survey logic
Questions targeting a specific subgroup were only shown to those respondents to minimise survey length while maximising survey inclusion. Still, questions about journalistic practices were left open to all (this was done to reflect that students, educators, and editors might be involved in producing and publishing journalistic data work from time to time). Most survey questions were optional, however, we obtained full response throughout the entire questionnaire (the median response rate was 96%).
4. Data Cleaning
For the analysis, only complete questionnaires were retained. Unlike last year, where we considered “Complete” the questionnaires in which the respondent had clicked “Submit” at the end, here we took a wider approach and included all questionnaires where respondents had taken all our mandatory questions or completed our demographics page.
We found 47 duplicate names and email addresses. We randomly selected which questionnaire to keep for each of these duplicates..
5. Metadata
The reported statistics have a 95% confidence level and a margin of error of ±2.34 percentage points. With the survey in its second edition, we asked participants whether they had previously participated in the survey: 22% of respondents took the survey both in 2022 and in 2021. The median time spent on the survey was 16 minutes.
81% of respondents took the survey in English, 9% in Spanish, 6% in Italian, and 4% in Arabic. 51% of cent found the survey just right, while 37% found it a bit long, which is an overall improvement from the 2021 edition (48% and 41%, respectively). We appreciate the feedback, and we will continue to improve our questionnaire.
Thank you
A warm thank you to all of the people involved in data journalism which took the time to participate in our survey.
A heartfelt thank you to all those who helped us craft and polish our survey before launch.
Without the support of other organisations, whether financial or in-kind, the European Journalism Centre would not be able to support the data journalism community. We welcome conversations with those who appreciate our work and want to support initiatives such as this report.
And to the supporters of Datajournalism.com, for offering tools, goodies, and insights:
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Contact
If you have any questions about the survey and the results, you can reach us at [email protected].
To share your thoughts with the community, head to our Discord community, where we meet regularly to discuss data journalism.