Hey Wonk Reporters, Liberate Your Data! | Mother Jones

"When it comes to data journalism, everyone's a critic. The launch of three major data journalism operations in only a few weeks—the revamped 538, Vox, and the New York Times' The Upshot—have produced a slew of opinion pieces. They are summarized quite nicely in this piece by Guardian journalist James Ball, but the one critique that sticks with me the most is the idea that we are at a moment in which there is lots of content about data but not so much actual, you know, data ... Here's how journalism used to work: as a one-way process where the reporter, in her or his ivory tower, would selectively throw nuggets down to the world ... Here's how statistics used to work: Data was published in books written by statisticians. They were the only people who understood the numbers and had the tools to deal with that data. Both of those models reflected the technology of the time and both are now broken, forever ... Statistics and data have changed too. Governments everywhere have thrown open their vaults and released it to the world. The transparency revolution is not happening as quickly or as smoothly as we'd like, but since the launch of data.gov in 2009 the idea of data being available in anything other than open formats should be laughable. Now citizens have a sense of entitlement when it comes to raw information. We paid for it to be collected, so why shouldn't we have it?  For a while, data journalism started to bring those two fields together, combining the flood of open data with a new type of reporting. It wasn't just about analyzing the data, it was also about making it available and showing your work; taking the lessons learned from computer-assisted reporting in the 1960s and 1970s and using today's tools to make it easier to lay bare what could be gleaned from the numbers.  This new, improved data journalism could start to perform a valuable democratic function: becoming a bridge between those who have the data (and are terrible at explaining it) and the world, which is crying out for raw information and ways of understanding it.  Wouldn't it be odd if the reverse started to happen, if we moved back to a time when raw data was something only the chosen experts could analyze for themselves? Lots of content, not much data ..."