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The Role Of Journalism And Its Impact On Journalism

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Historically, professional journalism has been built around two fundamentals: visual and textual. While numbers have played a role in journalism as well, journalists have constantly downplayed their importance in making up the professional skillset, which leads to a difficulty in presenting numerical data responsibly and accurately (Maier 2002). A noteworthy is the subfield of computer-assisted reporting, which focuses on examining quantitative data through a journalistic lens. Over the past several years, this data-driven form of journalism has become more important within the profession as it has joined with the increasingly ever-present digitization of personal and public information. As more information continues to become increasingly zeroes and ones at the most basic level, journalism has increasingly been involved in gathering, analyzing, and computing that information as well as quantitative data.
This surge of quantitatively focused journalism has deep democratic roots with numerous forms tied to the public-service tradition of investigative journalism (Cox 2000) and open government advocacy (Parasie and Dagiral 2012). It has great potential to increase journalism’s ability to make democratic institutions more understandable and receptive to the public, but even within this subfield of journalism, views of the public and the journalistic process are different. While the computer-assisted reporting of the 1990s was usually a single, unified concept for both scholars

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