Statistics and the Quest for Quality Journalism

Alessandro Martinisi is Lecturer at the Academy for Digital Entertainment in the Breda University of Applied Sciences in The Netherlands.Jairo Lugo-Ocando is Professor in Residence and Director of the Graduate School at Northwestern University in Qatar.

• List of Illustrations; Chapter 1: Introduction; Chapter 2: Numbers as information in the Information Society; Chapter 3: The never-ending debate on quality in journalism; Chapter 4: Statistics in journalism practice and principle; Chapter 5: The normative importance of ‘quality’ in Journalism; Chapter 6: Journalism meets statistics in real life; Chapter 7: The ideology of Statistics in the News; Epilogue; References; Index.

Martinisi and Lugo-Ocando’s detailed empirical study of data-driven crime and health news coverage in mainstream British papers confirms that “Big Data” is no panacea for achieving “Quality Journalism”. As their book’s wide-ranging literature review shows, this neoliberal fallacy about methods of math enlightenment in the “Infosphere” reaches back to Condorcet’s “Social Mathematics” as a hallmark of the liberal faith during the French Revolution. — Michael Hofmann, Professor of Communication and Multimedia Studies, Florida Atlantic University, US.