Describing dynamic data journalism: developing a survey of news applications
Katherine Boss, Meredith Broussard · Qucosa (Saxon State and University Library Dresden) · 2017
Preserving dynamic, born-digital data journalism requires more than web scraping, as news stories today are built from much more than just text and images. Data journalism projects like news applications, or “news apps,” are composed of a database, the data in the database, the graphical interface that appears in the browser, accompanying text, and often images, videos, audio, and other multimedia components. Existing Internet archiving methods are not sufficient to save these data journalism projects for the future. This paper summarizes the context and history of news apps archiving, and describes the development of a survey of news applications. This survey will be used to create a working list of news organizations that are producing data journalism in the United States and a better sense of how and where these projects are currently being stored. The results of the survey will inform recommendations and processes for archiving dynamic data journalism.