There is a notion among some people that data journalism is scary. For them, excel sheets full of numbers, and charts and graphs with colours and lines and legends, can be overwhelming. When the Data Point section was first introduced on op-ed, it was a small square space at the bottom right corner of the page. It merely had charts. With time, the section was expanded to include some text. Later, it was expanded further to include more explanatory text. Despite this, we know that some people continue to read Data Point with some apprehension. And so, when I joined the data team, I saw room for opportunity.
Data stories need not be relegated to paper; they can be brought to life through multimedia. I haven’t seen this being done extensively in India, except in financial publications. This is despite the fact that most young people consume news predominantly through videos and podcasts. This was an opportunity to not only reach a wider audience, but also help them better interpret the numbers and give them a reason to care about these figures by fleshing out the story, beyond the space restrictions of print.
There are two ways to do this: through audio and video. With the Data Point podcast series, I knew that rattling off numbers would push the audience away. As a podcast listener myself, I also knew that the audience would not like to hear my voice alone. So, we came up with a discussion-based format featuring up to three guests — experts on the subject of the data set being examined. While data show us facts, data stories do not always have the ability to draw conclusions or show us the nuances of a subject. For example, a Data Point looking at whether wealth or awareness play a greater role in diabetes incidences pointed to wealth. When this issue, and the corresponding data, were discussed with health experts and researchers on the podcast, we learned that because of changing diets and societal shortcomings (such as the availability of medical services or the kinds of work people do), the issue is much more complex.
