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 and The 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