The news: a changing entity.
Will it stay the same? Really?
To inform, not to advocate.
For some of them, it's too late.
A new generation taking hold.
Making way for the young instead of the old.
Will they keep up or fall back?
time will tell if they can or they lack.
Research and proof, I present.
Time well spent.
The future is here but not solid.
Some think of me as squalid.
Let me prove myself this day,
with what I gathered and say.
Thanks for the chance to make the world new,
after this adventure, I bid you all adieu.
Beginings
As a journalism emphasis, I knew that I could have pursued a story and used it for my Senior Project. But, as a self-aware journalist working for BYU-Idaho Radio, I knew that people don’t like what I’ve been doing because of the profession that I seek.
I have a vision of restoring truth to the world. Not only in the gospel, but also the objective truth. But first, I wanted to know what people thought of the news before I continued down this path, so I ran a survey and sent it out into the campus’s walls and realms.
Let’s get started.
The first thing I needed to do was to consult a good friend of mine. Brother Lane Williams is one of the main journalism professors on campus and is a mentor/good friend of mine.
He was the first one to teach me all about data journalism, which is organizing data to form a story. I needed to create several good questions to ask the students to reflect on what I needed to know, namely, what they thought of the news in the year of our Lord, 2025.
Questions: They need to be asked.
Above is the raw draft of all the questions that I have written. With help from my mentor, I was able to clear the grammar of the questions and put them into an XM Qualtrics survey.
“Surveys, does anyone want to do them?”
While surveys can be tedious and nobody wants to complete them, they are essential for data collection and gathering. With the one I assembled, I formed an XM Qualtrics survey link so that I could send it out with campus approval.
https://byui.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_24gBZTLAXA672FE
The link is to the original survey, and you can even fill it out if you want, but it may not go to anything. It was perfect and even got my mentor’s approval. However…
This is why we can’t have nice things.
When I submitted my survey to the people in charge, they denied it. When asked about the reason, they stated that asking about people’s political positions was tantamount to having personal information, and since I’m not a steward of such, I was denied. But lo and behold, my mentor came in and said that he would do it.
These are the numbers, and more are generated from 66 students out of 300 sent out who answered, making a response rate of over 20%, which is a good goal to have. With the data in hand, I started to organize it into charts by the methods that were taught to me in News in the 21st Century class.
Datawrapper, my beloved.
I have created at least 25 graphs from the different datasets that were gathered together. With the aid of the tips and techniques from Brother Williams and others, I used Excel to create several pivot tables to reflect it best. Then, I put the data sets into Datawrapper, a kind of tool that makes graphs of different like pie graphs and more. I used bars to show my findings.
You get a graph, you get a graph, everyone gets a graph!
Okay, I’ ll share a couple of graphs here but still, it’s worth it.
For example, this graph shows that people trust more of the news when they get it from social media. This is an interesting finding since the news has been trying to get into social media but not succeeding. This is causing a major change in how the news is being transmitted.
This graph illustrates the correlation between watching or reading mainstream news and the level of trust in it. While the graph does show some trust, it’s not as much as social media. This was a new conclusion that my mentor and I came to. He thought it was because friends and family members shared what’s on social media, and they inherently trust them, so they trust the news the same way. It’s fascinating from a research and journalistic perspective.
This is a bar graph that I have used to show people the data that was collected. This is the average response of the people saying that freedom of speech is important. This would conclude that, still, freedom of speech and by extension, the spreading of the news, is important by the same token.
Finally, the point.
The point of this project is to show that through hard work and a few good tips, you can become a data journalist too. Remember, the truth is out there. All you need to do is reach for it, and it will work. Thanks for accompanying me on this journey of mine.