Simon Rogers of The Guardian recently reviewed what the publication learned about data journalism after covering the London Olympics. Rogers writes, “There was never a guarantee that it would amount to anything for us. The Olympics may have been the only news story in town last week and would undoubtedly produce great journalism, but would it result in data journalism? At its essence, this is the gathering of stories from data. It’s more than just producing a few charts – data visualisation is often the expression of data journalism, but the process of digging through the data to find the stories that matter, that is at its heart.”

He goes on, “At some levels the omens were not good. The key results data is locked up in lucrative deals between the International Olympic Committee and major news organisations. So, those results tables on our site, the BBC, The Telegraph and so on were paid – The Guardian’s is a feed from the New York Times and we were explicitly banned from releasing that feed as open data for you to download and explore with. As I wrote earlier, while it was not the first Open Data Olympics – it was arguably the first data Olympics. So, what can an open data journalism site do in that situation? This is what we learned.”

Read more here.

Image: Courtesy The Guardian