Graphs, statistics and data analysis have populated the coverage of the pandemic for over a year, becoming the most common journalistic strategy for communicating updates to the public. Financial Times reporter John Burn-Murdoch defined the COVID-19 pandemic as “the biggest story ever encountered” as a data journalist. Every newsroom had to face a deluge of data from a variety of institutions providing regular updates about the spreading of the new coronavirus.
Journalists in Italy, the first European country to be massively hit by COVID-19 in early 2020, were among the first to deal with the ‘datafied’ side of the pandemic. Italy’s Civil Protection Department’s daily data briefing about new infections and deaths due to COVID-19 became a powerful and ritual event, setting the media agenda with new figures each day. The media then had to produce, reproduce and publish data analysis on the spread of the virus in the country. Yet this data reporting never occurred in a frictionless way and a series of controversies emerged, which were debated by journalists and data scientists in the media and on social media.
Data journalists frequently pointed at irregularities and inconsistencies in the Italian data. For instance, it has been underlined how the comparability of data gathered in different Italian regions was problematic, due to the very different approaches the decentralized Italian health system offered in terms of testing, data gathering and overall care strategy.
