Keyword – infographics

Szabó, Krisztián:

Data-driven visual journalism in Hungary

This paper presents the improvements of data-driven visual journalism in Hungary in the past twenty years, comparing it with international trends and tendencies. Data journalism has a three-hundred-years long history in the Anglo-American world. To date, the genre is present in the newsrooms in many countries, including in Hungary, where its practices are lagging behind those of international news sites and papers. To verify the assumption that Hungarian tendencies in data journalism are underdeveloped as opposed to international ones, this paper relies on content analysis and semi-structured interviews. The reasons for underdevelopment lie in the readers’ attitudes, the newsrooms, the Hungarian educational system, the word-centred and visually underdeveloped Hungarian mentality, the unavailability of data and the interaction of all of these aspects. In order to achieve substantial improvement in the genre, fundamental changes must be implemented in both the Hungarian data supply system and the Hungarian mentality in the forthcoming years.

Keywords: chart, data journalism, data visualisation, diagram, infographics, information graphics, news media, visuality