Survey highlights need for use of RTI, sunshine laws by journalists in Pakistan
JournalismPakistan.com | Published: 17 September 2016 | Khalid Khattak
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A survey indicates significant awareness among Pakistani journalists about the challenges in accessing official data. Despite this, many journalists do not utilize available RTI laws for data retrieval.Summary
ISLAMABAD - Over 97 percent of journalists in Pakistan who took a data journalism survey believe that official data is not easily available in the country. But at the same time, most of them, 75.6 percent, said they never used the Right to Information (RTI) laws to get official data!
The survey developed by Data Stories and JournalismPakistan.com was available online from June 22, 2016 to August 31, 2016 and a total of 78 journalists took the survey from across Pakistan.
Of all these respondents 47 (60.3 percent) said official data availability was difficult while 29 (37.2 percent) termed it very difficult. But 59 (75.6 percent) respondents said they never used the RTI laws to get official data. Shouldn’t we as journalists exercise this right?
As many as 24 (30.8 percent) of the respondents said they didn’t use Microsoft Excel for basic data analysis while 16 (20.5 percent) recorded an affirmative response saying they wanted to explore more. Similarly only 15 (19.2 percent) of the journalists said they knew how to extract data from a website while only 8 (10.3 percent) of the journalists said they used free data visualization tools.
As per Google stats 68 (87.2 percent) responses were recorded from male journalists while only 10 (12.8 percent) female journalists responded. Maximum responses 25 (32.1) percent were recorded from journalists with 11 to 20 years in the profession and maximum participation was from print media folks — 42 responses (53.8 percent).
City-wise maximum responses came from Lahore 41 (52.6 percent) followed by federal capital Islamabad 22 (28.2) percent, Peshawar and Karachi 6 from each city (7.7 percent). Of the total 78 respondents 74 (94.9 percent) said they were interested in data journalism workshop.
Key Points
- 97% of journalists believe official data is not easily accessible.
- 75.6% have never used RTI laws to obtain data.
- The survey included 78 journalists from across Pakistan.
- Most respondents indicated a need for data journalism training.
- Majority of responses came from male journalists.
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