Browsing by Subject "http://www.yso.fi/onto/yso/p18440"

The Information Age has brought enormous changes for journalism. At Svenska Yle the journalism team Grävnavet has specialised in learning new technology for doing Data journalism and Investigative journalism, while also attempting to teach their collegues about new methods and providing them with new content and ideas. Swedish-language news organisations in Finland have, like many others, been struggling to adapt to the Internet era and at the time of the study Grävnavet was the only team focusing on Data journalism. This case study examines the role Grävnavet plays for Swedish-language journalism in Finland through participant observation and a group interview with the journalists in the team. The study shows that the team gained a lot of liberty through specialising in a field that their supervisors didn’t comprehend, while still having to produce results. The team invested a lot of time in fewer projects, attempting to reach larger audiences or creating automated content. The audience was constantly monitored as the team tried to make the content attractive through Data journalism or interactive content. The biggest challenge for the team was writing code. The team members were not programmers, but journalists who had learned to use code in their work. At the same time the team’s working methods and goals were very different from those of the technicians, which complicated their collaboration. The study supports the idea that Data journalism is a useful journalistic method, also in Swedish-language media in Finland. Grävnavet can also be seen as a research and development project, with the aim to develop journalistic working practice. As such, the team can be seen as a cost effective investment in innovation, since they simultaneously provided content.