Analysis of the infographic news in digital newspapers from digital transformation to data journalism

Technological advancements provided easier access to information and its distribution. In today's world, society is rapidly digitalizing. Digitalization has opened a new field in journalism by changing the data collection, data mining and the storifying processes. Nowadays, collection and association of information of different kinds cannot be handled without the help of computers. The advancements in informatics technologies have created new communication platforms. Considering that even daily lives are digitalized, people contribute to this data accumulation by sharing photos, videos, or information in digital platforms. Analysis of this enormous amount of information became important as well as the visualization and turning them into news that increase their comprehensibleness are the practices of data journalism. This study investigates the new practices of journalism brought by the technological advancements and discuss the data journalism field by integrating the new mentality and needs with classical journalism practices. In this study, digital media in Turkey is examined by starting with the definitions of the data journalism and the infographics and following with a detailed discussion on the theoretic and practical uses of infographic news by providing examples. The infographics published between August 1st, 2020 and October 31st 2020 in Yeni Safak and Haberturk websites were selected as data samples and their subject of focus, visual elements, and infographic types were investigated. In addition, the distribution of these infographics in the social media platform Instagram is also explored. Furthermore, personal interviews were done with journalists from TRT Haber, Yeni Safak and Hurriyet who are studying in data journalism and infographics fields. Results of the content analysis indicated that %90 of the infographics in Yeni Safak are informational-type infographics while 70% of the infographics in Haberturk consists of statistical-type infographics.