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News — the industry, the product, the hashtag — took a haymaker from a heavyweight Jan. 10 when then-President-elect Donald Trump called one of its largest purveyors, CNN, “fake news.”
If not the antidote to “fake news” then certainly its antipode is “data journalism,” darling of special projects desks (like the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team). Data journalism is the application of great sets of data to working hypotheses. To find out what’s killing Arkansans, for instance, the data journalist might begin with what. is. killing. Arkansans. — each deceased a data point, each point an Excel doc box, and each row and column an eventual pie slice or vector. Where a Capitol reporter is proud to acquire a working shorthand, the data journalist acquires a working knowledge of computer coding.