Analytic journalism

Analytic journalism is a field of journalism that seeks to make sense of complex reality in order to create public understanding. It combines aspects of investigative journalism and explanatory reporting. Analytic journalism can be seen as a response to professionalized communication from powerful agents, information overload, and growing complexity in a globalised world. It aims to create evidence-based interpretations of reality, often confronting dominant ways of understanding a specific phenomenon.

It is distinctive in terms of research practices and journalistic product. At times, it uses methods from social science research. The journalist gains expertise on a particular topic, to identify a phenomenon that is not readily obvious. At its best, investigative journalism is deeply analytic, but its intent is primarily to expose. Analytic journalism's primary aim is to explain. It contextualizes its subject by describing background, historical details and statistical data. The goal is a comprehensive explanation that shapes audience perception of the phenomenon. Analytic journalism aspires to collect disparate data and make connections that are not immediately apparent. Its effectiveness is often in the analysis between the facts rather than the facts themselves and is critically engaged with other arguments and explanations. In this way, analytic journalists attempt to give a deeper understanding of an issue.

As analytic journalism attempts to transcend regular news reporting—which primarily relays facts—analytic journalists must use critical methods that help them present information in a way that distinguishes it from hard news. Analytic journalism often applies the scientific method of testing and retesting of hypotheses against the evidence. Assumptions are systematically tested by verifying, affirming, and altering hypotheses.

Analytic journalists attempt to construct new frames or angles that reconfigure understanding. They help bring the background into the foreground and "...making it thereby available for conversation and collective notion."

The legitimacy of the author's voice is created by the coherent assembly of facts and evidence.

According to Adam and Clark Analytic journalists should retrieve and adapt methodologies from other disciplines to enlarge journalism so that it incorporates knowledge and methods generated by historians, social scientist, anthropologists, and critics.

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