Entrevistando planilhas : estudo das crenças e do ethos de um grupo de profissionais de jornalismo guiado por dados no Brasil

Abstract

This thesis investigates the values, beliefs and behavior of Data Driven Journalism professionals in Brazil. The study is based on a participant observation conducted with the staff of Estadão Dados, in the newsroom of the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo, and also on open interviews with individuals relevant to the formation and diffusion of this new specialty of journalism. The research departs from the assumption of a crisis in journalism, both at the professional and organizational levels, the causes of which refer to structural changes in communication practices, engendered by the development of computing technologies and data transmission via telecommunications networks. These technologies are imbued with a hacker ethic, characterized by technophilia and cooperativism. To the extent that the logic of network communication is incorporated by digital journalism, these two typical values of the hacker figure spread to the journalistic professional culture, whose central etchical element is objectivism. The colonization of the journalistic ethos by the values of hacker culture manifested clearly among practitioners of Data Driven Journalism, whose duties require technical expertise and collaboration with professionals and dilettantes in the field of computer science. The results of the field research indicate that Data Driven Journalism is the response elected by a group of professionals to react to the economic and identity crisis now facing contemporary journalism. This response is mediated by a belief in the ability of technology to solve problems of any kind, which leads them to seek the application of informatics to news production routines as a way of overcoming the contradictions of journalism. This overcoming is seen as a closer approximation to the ideal of objectivity than allowed by common calculation techniques, or even their realization. This form of technological thinking seems to be an epiphenomenon of the trivialization of cyberculture in all instances of contemporary life.