It’s not just a new craze, people, it’s a movement!
It’s Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, and Vox, and The Upshot at The New York Times, and now–a new entrant–Storyline at The Washington Post.
“Explanatory journalism,” writes media analyst Ken Doctor at Nieman Journalism Lab, is “the new craze of the past year, built on ideas as old as good journalism itself. Or call it the wonk wars…How do we explain this movement?”
Doctor’s post–mostly an interview with David Leonhardt, who runs The Upshot–says the “craze” arose from the explosion of data and the more conversational tone of the Internet, and attributes those assertions to Leonhardt. Neither point is substantiated in the post.
What’s missing? That’s right–science, environment, and medical reporters have been handling data for decades, developing great expertise and often doing a superb job of extracting important data points and explaining the implications to the public. Leonhardt acknowledges that some reporters “have been doing this work for a long time,” and he cites four business and financial reporters.
Is Washington’s world view so narrow that politics and business are the only things they read, or are aware of? How could Doctor write a post like this and ignore science writers? In the comments, I asked him, and we had this exchange:
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