Türkiye Örnekleminde Veri Gazeteciliği Uygulamaları ve Demokrasi İlişkisi Üzerine Bir Değerlendirm

Abstract

Large data stacks that emerged with digitalisation, which could not be processed in a reasonable time with existing software or human resources, have the potential to develop democracy by transforming people’s approach to world affairs. However, there is a need for data journalists as “digital watchdogs” (Felle, 2015; 2016) that will make sense of the data and reveal the stories hidden in it for public good. The discussion of big data in the context of journalism started with the Wikileaks in 2010. Data journalism has come to the fore as a new practice covering the stages of cleaning, editing, visualising, processing and contextualising data. Investigative data journalism, which seeks to “find what is hidden in the shadows” based on informal/confidential data, and to find the relationships in it, is emphasised as an important tool of democracy. The study discusses this function of data journalism in Turkish context. In-depth interviews with data journalists have been made, along with the examination of content and technical characteristics of the projects applied from Turkey to the Global Editors Network’s Data Journalism Awards. The findings show that data journalism is mostly practised by small-scale and alternative newsrooms, with a human rights-based perspective. However, time shortage and the pressure of preparing publishable stories, prevent journalists from practising accountability journalism. Other obstacles to data journalism to fulfil its democratising potential are; media institutions do not invest in data journalism, accessing reliable data is difficult, professional collaboration is limited, and crowdsourcing for funding and/or news making is not applicable.