Data matters
Data adds credence to a story, backs up a press release, persuades and engages. Data is infallible. Data is evidence.
The ability to gather, manage and present data effectively is essential for research and reporting.
The cost of good data
To build a compelling argument, a data-journalist may need to gather information from a number of sources, databases, spreadsheets, Web pages. Each source needs a different skill-set to interrogate and compiling the data can be time consuming and difficult.
And, after all that effort, the data might not show anything at all!
A balancing act
As with most jobs, researching a story involves a cost-benefit analysis. How long will it take to gether the data? Are specialist skills needed to access that database? How long will it take to process? Do I need to get a designer involved to produce a visualization?
...And what if the data doesn't back up my theory?
For most researchers the cost of analysing data cannot be justified by the potential benefits.
Tools of the trade
FactMint provide a suite of tools to make querying data easy. To open up the vast resources of the Semantic Web and weave that data into an organizations owned data.
Using the FactMint system a researcher can quickly ask questions of multiple data-sets in one, simple, interface. They can produce reports, normalized spreadsheets and compelling visualizations... in seconds, not days.
To see how easy data-journalism can be, ask us for a demo.
