Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of a Food Price Monitoring Tool for Supporting Data Journalists

Data journalism is a valuable emergent and growing trend, which can lead to higher quality journalism, based on real-life data and not on prejudice and pre-existing stereotypes. However, the effective realization (i.e., the ‘real-life’ implementation) of this concept requires the development of high-quality software tools that enable journalists to access useful data sources, are easy to use, and provide clear, understandable and intuitive presentations of the data, as well as practices and processes for using them. In this direction our paper is making a contribution. It describes the design, implementation and evaluation of a software tool that utilizes open data sources concerning food prices in Greece, in order to support data journalism on this topic, which constitutes one of the most critical topics that the societies of many countries face. It is a fully automated solution that can generate new visual reports whenever the data provider updates the food prices data and requires minimal intervention from the journalists; this makes the above data usable for journalistic purposes. The results of the evaluation were positive, indicating a high degree of journalists-users satisfaction, and at the same time revealed difficulties in using these open data for journalism purpose due to quality problems, and also revealing directions for future development of the tool.