Today data from the web is generating a revolution in the way of creating and telling stories. The sources from which data can be extracted are practically unlimited, and allow interpreting and visualizing a variety of data aimed at explaining an existing news story or finding a story, not obvious, within the data. Definitely, the push of web scraping technologies for data journalism is huge.
Do you want to improve the quality of your stories told with data? Do you know the benefits of hiring web scraping services for media?
Traditional journalism commonly seeks to investigate a topic or an event and then publish that knowledge in a systematic and organized way. While data-driven journalism encompasses the collection of large amounts of information and then – with the help of procedures such as information filtering, handling, and evaluation – attempts to conclude journalistic details: explaining a news story and existing event on the media agenda or a new story that is found in the data set -for example, it could be a comparison of house prices in a city to find out the state of the market or the success of a new series that was recently launched in a platform.
At this point, web scraping becomes the backbone of data journalism. On the one hand, due to the complex task of obtaining accurate information that has value, it is necessary to process and analyze a large amount of data. On the other hand, journalists must maintain quality, precision, and authenticity in the information they wish to expose to their audience: data extraction is an effective service to guarantee rigorous information and consistency in the work.
Historically, data journalists would spend several weeks manually compiling the information and statistics required for a special report. But now much of this work can be automated by pulling data from the Internet. At the same time, the sources became almost limitless from public databases or open data, freely available on the web.
Key advantages of data journalism
The main benefits that a media outlet or a team of journalists obtain by hiring web scraping services are:
1) Gain credibility: by backing up your stories with data analytics, you will gain credibility and trust with your readers.
2) Find hidden patterns in the information: web scraping is very advantageous because it helps the process of organizing the information and looking for non-obvious patterns in the data.
3) Increase transparency and access: journalism supported by web data scraping can help people understand data that is often confusing to the average citizen.
4) Save time and energy: web scraping large amounts of data saves time during the investigative phase and gives journalists more freedom to interpret the data and find creative ways to show it.
5) Find your audience: tracking social media sites can provide an opportunity to determine the scope of current ideas in data journalism, specifically measuring whether or not those who follow a media outlet are actively interested in a topic.
More information? Schedule a meeting with our Scraping Pros specialists.
