Parvathi Benu is a journalist with more than seven years of experience. At her current stint with The Hindu BusinesssLine, she predominantly covers data and is responsible for producing data-driven stories in the newspaper, five days a week. She also likes to go the extra mile with data, which has resulted in her breaking a few important stories for the newspaper, including BYJU’s not depositing its employees’ PF money, the many flaws in India’s vaccine side-effects reporting system and how slander pages advertise more on Meta during elections.
Prior to this, she worked as a Principal Correspondent at The New Indian Express, where she wrote about education, gender and politics. She began her career with the newspaper in 2016. She has done extensive ground reporting during her time there, travelling to interior parts of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala.
She is an alumna of the US Department of State’s Professional Fellows Program, where she underwent a fellowship at the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, researching mental health initiatives for school students.
Excerpts from the interview:
Q. What inspired you to get into data journalism?
It all began during the pandemic when I actively started tracking COVID numbers. At that time, I would extensively read data stories from the BBC, the Guardian and The Hindu and marvel at how numbers could tell stories. During the second wave of the pandemic, I attended a free data journalism workshop by the Meta Journalism Project (formerly Facebook Journalism Project) on Data Journalism, facilitated by journalist Gurman Bhatia. I attended the sessions regularly and relied a lot on the tips, tricks and materials she shared during the workshop. I tried integrating data into my stories after that and regularly reverse-engineered existing data stories.
I was planning to apply to the University of Birmingham for an MA in Data Journalism in 2021. That was when I saw an opening for a Data Journalist in The Hindu BusinessLine. I wasted no time in applying, with a few data analysis pieces that I had written until then. The newspaper was kind enough to offer me a job and I was thrilled.
Q. How is the work of a data journalist different to that of a traditional reporter?
A. A data journalist’s work is the integration of data analysis with reportage. One will often find a data reporter spending endless hours in front of the screen, going through datasets, cleaning and analysing them. Otherwise, they are out in the field, talking to their sources to get exclusive access to datasets or filing RTIs. Once the data analysis tells you what the story is, the next step is to talk to relevant people to understand the whys and hows. This is quite important because most of the time, numbers alone don’t tell you the full story.
Q. Describe the challenges you face in doing data stories.
A. Sourcing data from the government is a gargantuan challenge. Most of the time, data is concealed well. The authorities try their best to not provide accurate and full information to journalists and they are getting better at it every day. Many times, the data that you have is quite dated. For instance, you still rely on the census data from 2011. But times have changed drastically since then.
Q. Which is the best data journalism story you have done? Describe how you went about it.
A. It’s quite difficult to pick a single story. One story that comes to my mind, however, is the one on how the total number of income taxpayers in India has come down, despite income tax filings going up. While many had written about an increase in IT filings, no one examined the data closely to find out how many of them were ‘nil returns filings’.
Q. Can data alone be relied on to tell a story? What are its limitations?
A. Not at all. Journalism is and should be about people and it is always important for journalists to talk to people. Many times, numbers alone won’t paint the full picture. Human perspectives are important to address the holes in the story and to understand if the data that you have is manipulated.
Q. What are the skills needed to become a data journalist?
A. I’d say that one needs to be curious and eagerly consume news about anything under the sun. A data journalist covers stories across beats. You may be looking at the data on unemployment on one day and air traffic the next day. They should also know a bit of math and have some analytical skills to put numbers into perspective.
Q. What is your advice to young students who want to be data journalists?
A. I’d ask them to not give up mathematical skills completely. Also, go through datasets and try to identify trends, and reverse engineer existing data stories.
Leave a Reply