Grand narratives used to describe the state of society tend to sensitize us to transformation processes that have the potential to lead to a vastly different perception of the social world. Many of these narratives we hear today tell stories of data or even big data. Here we find notions of big data as “a revolution that will transform how we live, work
and think” (Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier, 2013), considerations on “the society of data” (Süssenguth, 2015), and the “datafied society” (Schäfer and Van Es, 2017). This illustrates that the idea of datafication is not only used to describe how digitization is transforming our media environment: in a much more fundamental way it is actually a story about how numerical data have come to represent, and at the same time influence, social reality (Van Dijck, 2014).

This paper situates the datafication of journalism in relation to society’s datafication. This is understood as a useful step in our theorizing of three interrelated elements: journalism, data, and social reality. By bringing these three elements together, I consider journalism as an ideal example to understand how datafication shapes and transforms a social domain and how it influences public communication. This allows us to not only better comprehend journalism’s present transformation towards a more data-based, algorithmed, metricsdriven, or even automated practice, but, to consider this transformation as a reflexive process: a process that is at the same time part of a changing media environment and is journalism’s response to — as well as an act of encouraging — the datafication of society. It is important, therefore, to recognize that journalism does not simply work with media technologies but is operating within a constantly changing media environment. We might frame this reflexive process as the transition towards a datafied journalism within a datafied media environment of a datafied society.

About the author

Wiebke Loosen
Wiebke Loosen is a Senior Researcher for journalism research at the Hans-Bredow-Institut for Media Research in Hamburg as well as a Lecturer at the University of Hamburg. Her major areas of expertise are the transformation of journalism within a changing media environment, theories of journalism, methodology and constructivist epistemology. Wiebke Loosen’s current research includes work on the changing journalism–audience relationship, datafied journalism, the emerging ‘start-up culture’ in journalism, as well as algorithms’ ‘journalism-like’ constructions of public spheres and reality.