Data Journalism in the Context of Important Political Events: The Case of Slovakia

Abstract

Data journalism is one way to provide readers with objective and relevant reports. The study
is a content analysis of the use of data journalism by Slovak online news portals. The research sample consists of 11,267 articles published during February 2020, February 2019, June 2019 and November 2019. The aim was to use a quantitative research strategy to determine whether significant policy events have an impact on the higher frequency of data journalism components in domestic news. The results show that data journalism is an integral part of newsrooms. Despite this, the use of data faces several problems, especially in terms ofjournalists’ lack of skills and experience in this area of journalism. This is also reflected in the limits of the use of data journalism in reporting on an influential agenda that has an impact on public and political life. Newsrooms do not respond adequately to the presence of a significant political and public agenda, which is mainly processed in the form of text articles, while more sophisticated components of data journalism are used only sporadically.