Simona Bisiani


Postgraduate Research Student
BA(Hons) Journalism, MSc Computational Social Science

About

My research project

Publications

Simona Bisiani (2023)Print and Digital UK Public Local News Datasets Triangulation and Analysis 2023, In: Uncovering the State of Local News Databases in the UK: Limitations and Impacts on Research https://github.com/simonabisiani/Local-News-Datasets-Triangulation

This dataset contains several spreadsheets within which four public datasets of print and digital local news outlets in the UK (JICREG, ABC, PINF, and MRC) are triangulated and combined. In addition, the observations from these four datasets have been manually verified to flag obsolete observations. This helped generate a novel, powerful list of print and digital local news outlets (this can be found in sheet "Stage 2 - clean df with enhancements" and includes any observations marked as 1 under the "Baseline" column). The script where manipulation of these datasets occur can be found here: https://github.com/simonabisiani/Local-News-Datasets-Triangulation. The dataset was used to carry out research which resulted in the following journal article: https://www.mdpi.com/2673-5172/4/4/77.

Simona Bisiani, Andrea Abellan, Félix Arias Robles, José Alberto García-Avilés (2023)The Data Journalism Workforce: Demographics, Skills, Work Practices, and Challenges in the Aftermath of the COVID-19 Pandemic, In: Journalism practice Routledge

In the last decade, data journalism has established itself as a thriving field. Recently, Covid-19 has boosted the demand for data-driven reporting to make sense of the pandemic, increasing the importance of studying the evolution of this rapidly evolving and technology-bounded practice. However, the number of efforts to map and systematically measure the data journalism industry are few. This paper analyses the findings of The State of the Data Journalism Survey 2021, currently the most extensive study on the characteristics surrounding the workforce producing and contributing to the data journalism industry. The outcome is an understanding of an expanding workforce with a geographically uneven distribution, which is still homogeneous in terms of tools and educational paths. Self-taught, resourceful, and multi-skilled, data journalists often work in isolation but share pressures of limited resources, time limitations, and access to quality data. The pandemic appears to have directly increased those struggles, although data journalists agree that the field’s reputation has ultimately benefited from it.