Statistics and the Quest for Quality Journalism

Martinisi and Lugo-Ocando’s detailed empirical study of data-driven crime and health news coverage in mainstream British papers confirms that “Big Data” is no panacea for achieving “Quality Journalism”. As their book’s wide-ranging literature review shows, this neoliberal fallacy about methods of math enlightenment in the “Infosphere” reaches back to Condorcet’s “Social Mathematics” as a hallmark of the liberal faith during the French Revolution. — Michael Hofmann, Professor of Communication and Multimedia Studies, Florida Atlantic University, US.

Mortality rates, indicators of happiness, drug efficacy, relative risk...Journalists need to tell stories to make the news attractive, and they use quantitative data to make the stories more credible. But where do they get those data, do they really understand their limitations and explain them to the reader? How can they avoid the risk of misinformation? This timely book analyzes the role of data reporting in the information cycle and will be an essential reading in any school of journalism. — Pietro Ghezzi, Professor RM Phillips Chair in Experimental Medicine, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, UK.

In Statistics and the Quest for Quality Journalism: A Study in Quantitative Reporting, communication and journalism scholars Alessandro Martinisi and Jairo Lugo-Ocando offer comprehensive explanations on how journalists use statistics in their news stories and how this practice relates to news quality. Casting doubt on what “quality of news” means and whether the emphasis on numbers improves news quality and revolutionizes journalism, the authors conduct a content analysis, semistructured interviews with journalists, and a focus group with news audiences in the UK. — Gyo Hyun Koo, University of Texas at Austin, The International Journal of Communication (15) 2021