Challenges and Opportunities

Challenges to producing more

Access to quality data is the major hurdle among data journalists (57%). Lack of financial resources (50%) is in second place this year after gaining three percentage points compared to 2021. Time pressure is the third biggest challenge (49%). As in 2021, lack of knowledge in data analysis or visualisation is felt as a bigger hindering factor than lack of adequate software. Comparatively few believe reported lack of interest from consumers as a challenge to producing more (18%).

Data access and quality

How countries rate data access and quality varies. As a rule of thumb, local data fares worse than national data, on both access and quality. And countries that tend to fare worse in one dimension, usually will either outperform or underperform in all dimensions. The first chart shows the gap between local and national data in the biggest countries in terms of sample sizes. In the second chart, you can see that most countries happen to be in either the red or the blue quadrant in both the Access and Quality dimension.

Dataset properties

Data source and data provider are the most important features of datasets considered by data journalists when looking at datasets. On the opposite end, relatively few (24%) look at the status of others who use the dataset.

Barriers to learning

Among educators, the biggest perceived barrier to learning (65%) is lack of time for training or deepening skill knowledge. However, as in the challenges question, lack of financial resources has gained track here to (a two percentage-point difference compared to 2021).

Value of data journalism

Discovering stories (82%) and finding the truth (81%) are deemed by far the two biggest areas of value for data journalism. Making predictions comes last, with only 35% ticking the box. In terms of what data journalism brings to society, the vast majority think it makes a story more reliable (73%), and it helps readers make sense of what they are reading (71%). Less than half (41%) believe data journalism increases impartiality, or that it is a necessity due to an increase of data (43%). Overall, data journalism’s value lies, as above, in discovering stories and anchoring it to facts.