Jayden, our data analyst and graphic designer, tells what interested her the most inside journalism and reflects on the importance of the digitalization of media. Continue reading...
Hello! I’m Jayden (or Jade) Khatib, and I’m a third-year journalism and interaction design student at Northeastern University and currently on exchange at Carlos III University. On the Teenformation team, I’m in charge of data and graphics.
I got into journalism while I was in high school because it presents the opportunity to learn lots of new things and then help others understand those concepts. Later on, while in university, I specifically started working in data journalism and digital journalism because that space allows me to combine my interests in editorial design and numbers with helping people understand the world around them.
I believe that the opportunity to report on stories in ways that previously would have been impossible or too time-consuming is the most exciting thing about online journalism.
For example, during my time as a Business Insider healthcare fellow, I was assigned a story about what salaries the world’s largest biotechnology companies were paying. Pre-internet, this story likely would have been impossible to write. Large companies, especially American ones, hate disclosing what they pay their workers, and I have the curt emails from PR representatives to prove it. In the U.S., what companies pay employees that hold work visas is publically available via FOIA request, but individually compiling that data would take way too much time. However, today it’s possible to use Python to automatically keep that information from certain companies in a database, and thus, I was able to write that story.
Moreover, online journalism makes it easier to cover niche topics for general audiences. Take the aforementioned example of healthcare business reporting. Most large print newspapers only have a few, if any, journalists covering healthcare. There have long been trade news outlets that cater to healthcare professionals, but those publications tend to be expensive to subscribe to and are usually written assuming that the reader has a fair amount of knowledge on the sector. However, because online journalism allows news organizations to reach a wider audience than was possible with print media, now places like Business Insider, Bloomberg, and STAT+ can employ entire teams of healthcare journalists to cover various aspects of the market and have their reporting reach beyond just people working in healthcare vía the magic of SEO.
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