More Than Just a Number: How do the UK’s data desks operate?
Data journalism has been around for a very long time…but the existence of dedicated data desks in UK newsrooms is a relatively new concept. In fact when the CIJ started teaching data journalism – then called Computer Assisted Reporting – in the early 2000s, very few people were interested. Until the 2009 MPs expenses scandal – and then everyone wanted to learn data journalism!
In this panel we hear from some of the key people on data desks from the Guardian, the BBC, and the Times/Sunday Times about what makes them tick (and ticks them off); what they look for when they are interviewing for data journalists; and how they see the future of data journalism in the UK and elsewhere.
Pamela Duncan
Pamela Duncan is the editor of the Guardian’s Data Project team, an occasional award-winning journalist (#humblebrag) and a self-confessed data nerd. She can usually be found at her desk poring over spreadsheets and using her coding skills - usually a combination of scraping, regex and pandas/Python - to build and analyse datasets to produce high quality and exclusive data stories.
John Walton
John Walton is a Data Journalism Editor on the BBC’s Visual Journalism team.
Tom Calver
Tom Calver is the Data Editor of The Times and The Sunday Times. He manages a ten-person team of data reporters and developers, and writes a weekly data column called Go Figure. He was named Data Journalist of the year by the Wincott Foundation in 2023, and was on Forbes’s 30 Under 30 list in 2020.
- 26 June 2025 17.10–18.10
Location: PHS 314