Location
Greenspun Hall, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Description
People killed by police have become a focus of current political and social discourse related to criminal justice reform in the United States. Two data journalism projects by respected news media have been central to many of these discussions. The Guardian’s The Counted and Washington Post’s Investigation: Police Shootings have each attempted to create a running log of fatalities at the hands of law enforcement. Such an endeavor not only has added to a collective consciousness about the scope and commonality of deadly police encounters, but also has led to legislation toward police accountability reforms, including greater use of cameras by law enforcement. These two journalistic projects – one by an acknowledged leader in data journalism, the other with a legacy of Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalism – presented an opportunity to compare and contrast two exemplars of data journalism in a postmodern media context, and revealed two different approaches to the practice. I conducted a comparative case study consisting of content analysis triangulated with interviews and other current-event research. By examining their different approaches, I was able to analyze an evolving relationships between journalists, readers, and data – including data-handling practices as they relate to reader engagement. The findings revealed here showed how not all reader engagement was the same, how different views of crowd sourcing existed, and how transparency can have limits. In the end, a new dimension on which to consider media interactions with the public over data emerged – the vision of self, which assessed binary choices of journalism as a public service or hard news.
Keywords
Digital media--Social aspects; Journalism--Social aspects; Press
Disciplines
Journalism Studies
Language
English
Engagement and Control: Comparing Participation Structures in The Guardian and Washington Post's Coverage of People Killed by Police
Greenspun Hall, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
People killed by police have become a focus of current political and social discourse related to criminal justice reform in the United States. Two data journalism projects by respected news media have been central to many of these discussions. The Guardian’s The Counted and Washington Post’s Investigation: Police Shootings have each attempted to create a running log of fatalities at the hands of law enforcement. Such an endeavor not only has added to a collective consciousness about the scope and commonality of deadly police encounters, but also has led to legislation toward police accountability reforms, including greater use of cameras by law enforcement. These two journalistic projects – one by an acknowledged leader in data journalism, the other with a legacy of Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalism – presented an opportunity to compare and contrast two exemplars of data journalism in a postmodern media context, and revealed two different approaches to the practice. I conducted a comparative case study consisting of content analysis triangulated with interviews and other current-event research. By examining their different approaches, I was able to analyze an evolving relationships between journalists, readers, and data – including data-handling practices as they relate to reader engagement. The findings revealed here showed how not all reader engagement was the same, how different views of crowd sourcing existed, and how transparency can have limits. In the end, a new dimension on which to consider media interactions with the public over data emerged – the vision of self, which assessed binary choices of journalism as a public service or hard news.