Data Journalism as an innovation in social communication: The case in sports industry

Data analysis has always been an integral part of journalism but combining it with technology was a novelty for newspapers. Journalism’s combination with technology was an innovation because of processing, interpretation, and visualization of large datasets in a journalistic content. In recent years, newspapers have started to adapt data journalism and integrated it to sports for better storytelling and making sports more understandable for readers. This research aims to analyse sports data journalism practices in Spain with a quantitative approach with content analysis of 1068 data journalism articles published by 6 newspapers (Marca, Mundo Deportivo, AS, El Mundo, El Periódico, El Pais) between 2017-2019. Quantitative analysis focuses on how sports data journalism is being adapted in Spain, technical features of articles, and the similarities and differences between sports and national newspapers to identify integration of sports data journalism.