Teaching Data Journalism: Insights for Indian Journalism Education

Abstract

With emergent subspecialties like data journalism bringing new skillsets and job roles, professionals and journalism educators find it difficult to imbibe the fast-changing industry demands. Such challenges in some countries and media industries put journalism educators in an advantageous position, offering them an agency to actively shape the contours of industry practice than getting shaped by it. From this perspective, the present study tries to understand data journalism practices in India and suggests certain insights to integrate data journalism training in programmes offered by Indian journalism education. By probing insights from the literature on data journalism education and by examining existing data journalism practices in India, the study calls for intervention with a pedagogic strategy to impart better data-sourcing practices, coding skills and critical data literacy among the students as an antidote to the prevalent DIY culture and overdependence on data aggregates. The pedagogic strategy should convey the importance of audience centrality and ethics in data journalism practice. It argues that such an approach can, in effect, improve industry practices as well as the quality of journalism education in India.