Data Journalism in the Context of Important Political Events: The Case of Slovakia

Data journalism is one way to provide readers with objective and relevant reports. The study ‎is a content analysis of the use of data journalism by Slovak online news portals. The research sample ‎consists of 11,267 articles published during February 2020, February 2019, June 2019 and November‎2019. The aim was to use a quantitative research strategy to determine whether significant policy events ‎have an impact on the higher frequency of data journalism components in domestic news. The results ‎show that data journalism is an integral part of newsrooms. Despite this, the use of data faces several‎ problems, especially in terms of journalists’ lack of skills and experience in this area of journalism. This ‎is also reflected in the limits of the use of data journalism in reporting on an influential agenda that‎ has an impact on public and political life. Newsrooms do not respond adequately to the presence of a‎ significant political and public agenda, which is mainly processed in the form of text articles, while more‎ sophisticated components of data journalism are used only sporadically.‎