Abstract
The growing capacity to generate large quantities of data as a result of rapid technological change in the recent past has meant that increasingly, journalists everywhere are under pressure to find new ways of handling this information deluge, processing and packaging it in ways that allow ease of access for their readers. These data blizzards have been further intensified by the ever-expanding social media networks that keep churning out large volumes of information at unprecedented speed, making gathering, processing and packaging information in visualisable form all the more important. The rise of data journalism is in part a direct response to this, as it provides journalists the critical tools to manipulate data on complex issues such as national budgets, election manifestos and national census for innovative storytelling. This chapter explores the emergence of data journalism in South Africa and analyses its uptake by three leading mainstream newspapers—The Star, a national daily broadsheet; The Daily Sun, a national daily tabloid; and the Mail & Guardian, a widely respected weekly investigative paper. Using the so-called GuptaLeaks (a terabyte of email data on the links between the Gupta brothers and members of President Zuma’s government and family) as a reference point, the chapter analyses the extent to which the selected newspapers deployed data journalism to build the story of mass corruption that has come to be known as “State Capture.” It explores rationales for adoption or non-adoption of data journalism, as well as the different ways in which data journalism is affecting traditional newsroom practices through interviews interviews with a small sample of journalists and the selected papers.
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Notes
- 1.
A former Business Day journalist recalled that they were told readers liked these data-driven stories, but was not sure if indeed that was the case.
- 2.
The “State Capture” story refers to the massive corruption in South Africa during the era of President Jacob Zuma. While many individuals and institutions have been named in the corrupt practices amounting to capturing the state, it is the Gupta family, with its links to President Zuma, which was at the centre of it all. The “leak” of a huge email cache, known as GuptaLeaks, became a huge data minefield for journalists to pull out stories of state corruption from various angles and involving multiple actors. VBS (formed as Venda Building Society) was immediately linked to State Capture when it advanced a loan to then President Zuma when he was ordered to pay back state money used in controversial renovations at his rural Nkandla home. Other corruption and mismanagement issues at the bank were later to surface, bringing in several politicians from different parties.
- 3.
See: http://academy.code4sa.org/training/short-courses. Accessed 25.03.2019.
- 4.
See, for example: http://datajournalismcourse.net/. Accessed 25.03.2019.
- 5.
Toyi toyi is a dance used in political protests in Southern Africa. It was originally created by the ZIPRA (Zimbabwe People’s Resistance Army) forces during the strugle for independence.
- 6.
All stories curated under this partnership were clearly marked as such in the newspaper.
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Moyo, D., Munoriyarwa, A. (2019). Data Journalism in the Age of Big Data: An Exploration into the Uptake of Data Journalism in Leading South African Newspapers. In: Mutsvairo, B., Bebawi, S., Borges-Rey, E. (eds) Data Journalism in the Global South. Palgrave Studies in Journalism and the Global South. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25177-2_6
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