«Technological paternalism»: current trends in domestic data journalism

The article considers the further growth of the role of big data in society, the widespread use of new practices and methods of obtaining information, such as profiling consumer information, biometric data, automation, new opportunities for news reporting. Modern journalistic practices of news information presentation journalism are discussed. Because big data-based algorithms, which have recently been widely implemented to «optimize the performance» of social networks and search engines, often determine what information will be displayed and which sites respond to search queries. By creating and training neural networks, our preferences are analyzed — likes, reposts, comments — and on this basis, an individual news feed is formed for each account. As a result, the views that users do not share are gradually disappearing from the feed, and those that they like are emerging. The news world is becoming comfortable and understandable. The combination of machine and journalistic selection results is particularly interesting through the prism of data journalism, as this type of journalistic activity can be seen as the result of journalistic and technological practices. Based on a qualitative statistical analysis of news sites, the study examines how data journalism works in the news cycle of professional newsrooms. In addition, the publication explores the innovations that data journalism brings to storytelling, news gathering, and dissemination. Through statistical analysis of the content of these Internet resources, a clear direction in the information policy of media companies to give preference to linear formats of information messages. This direction of consumer information is more effective compared to truly interactive and less paternalistic data journalism projects. Thus, paternalism is probably the best from a commercial point of view. Professional paternalism is an important source for maintaining journalistic autonomy, while in public debates and on technology platforms «bubble filters» and delegating decision-making to machines are considered negative paternalism. In an age when journalism merges with artificial intelligence and journalists and engineers create algorithms side by side to protect their immunity, journalists need to make sure that the audience is informed about the methodology, the validity of the choice of design in interactive programs, clearly motivated. In our opinion, problems arise only if the auditor (journalist or program / developer) does not pay attention to the difference between filtering and selection in different digital texts.