Open data journalism: a domain mapping review

Journalism is highly important in modern societies, both for shaping public opinion and also as gatekeeper of transparency and accountability, being considered as 'the fourth constitutional power'. The increasing dissemination of digital technologies and data had a profound impact on journalism, giving rise to the development of 'data journalism'. The advent of open data provides great opportunities to journalism, towards gaining a better insight into important social problems and government activities, and based on them develop high quality 'evidence-based' journalistic articles and work in general, giving rise to the development of 'open data journalism'. Even though this is of great importance for our societies, and journalists are a very special and important user group in open data research, there is not much research literature about it. This paper conducts a systematic literature review on open data journalism scientific research, and provides a 'map' of this important domain, which includes the main research themes that have been investigated; based on them three main future research directions have been formulated, and for each of them appropriate theoretical foundations are proposed. The findings of this study reveal as a main issue the need for new competencies concerning digital technologies as well as data analysis that journalists will have to develop, as well as the necessity for co-operation with other actors for a higher exploitation and more sophisticated analysis of open data, which might result in the development of open data journalism ecosystems.