数据新闻:“讲一个好故事”?——数据新闻对传统新闻的继承与变革

Tell a Good Story? How Data Journalism Inherits and Transforms Traditional Journalism

新闻生产研究表明,媒介会试图发展出一定的样式来组织、构建及展示讯息并形成常规。对样式常规的认识有助于人们反思固定样式所带来的认知局限与偏见。而正在兴起的数据新闻实践中,"故事"作为传统新闻样式常规之一,在众多数据新闻生产者的话语里频繁出现。数据新闻是依然在讲述传统价值与假设下的故事,还是已经形成了新的结构样式?如果是后者,这种样式体现出哪些特征?蕴含着何种价值观及潜在意义?通过分析数据新闻生产者的认知经验性文本及其建构的文本——数据新闻作品,既可以看到新技术条件下重组后的新闻编辑室对传统新闻价值与样式的继承,也可以看到新闻采集、呈现及其理念的变革。数据新闻依然以叙事为中心,但这种叙事已经建立在新的技术与理念的基础上,并且是讲述一个由数据驱动的、可视化的新闻故事,一个关乎读者且读者可以自己讲述的故事,一个更能把握真实、抵达真相的故事。

News production research points out that the media will try to develop some styles to organize,construct and display information,which then forms the news routines.Recognizing the style routines help people to reflect on the cognitive limitations and biases of the fixed style pattern.In the emerging data-journalism practice,the traditional news style routine″story″frequently appeared in the numerous data journalists' discourse.The data journalism tells the stories under the traditional values and assumptions,or says that it has formed some new structure and style?If it does,what characteristics is the data journalism story of,and what kind of value and potential meaning?Based on the assumption that the news routine will be reflected in the cognition of the journalists and the text they constructed,this paper attempts to return to the news production practice,It takes the cognitive empirical discourse and corresponding news text as research material to discern how data journalists understand the news story and turn the events to stories in daily practice.The research text is of″model″significance,two key parts of the world's first data news production guide book Data Journalism Handbook.One part″In the Newsroom″covers 11 newsrooms in the world to display their experience and beliefs of data news production,the other part″Case Studies″mainly involves the analysis of the production process of 18 classical cases.Research method combines the corpus and text analysis by means of corpus analysis to provide systematic retrieval and statistics,show the language forms and examples reflecting the language phenomenon,thereby to strengthen,refute or modify the researcher's intuition,and moreover by means of qualitative text analysis to find the inherent clue and in-depth meaning of the research material.The research finds that in the data journalism production the mixture of tradition and change,the reconstructed newsroom under the condition of new technology both inherits the traditional news production values and styles and at the same time embraces the change of news gathering,rendering and ideas in the style field of″story.″Data journalism which still takes the narrative as the production center,is now based on the new technology and idea,develops better processing,transmitting and receiving information models and tools such as data mining,data analysis,visualization,interactive apps, and combines traditional news to create new possibilities.Complex stories can be clearly and appealingly told by its data driven and visualized way.The news story in the past that required lengthy descriptions or interpretation now becomes clear and easily controlled in static or dynamic views under the big data processing technology.The definition of the importance of news changes from the pursuit of the latest news report to the news about the real development and meaning of social events and phenomena.More attention is paid to such complex issues as social problems,economic structures,political structures and non personalized social processes,etc.By telling complex stories to arrive at the truth is now internalized and pursued by the data journalists.Data journalists also emphasize on helping the public,user participation,interactivity,telling the story of multidimension,helping the readers to explore related news information and encouraging readers to participate in the process of creation and evaluation of the news story.Participation,interaction and open sources become the new features of the data news stories.Briefly,data journalism can and is telling one kind of news story which is data driven and visualized,one about and told by readers themselves,and one more complex to grasp and arrives at the truth.