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can also be attributed to the weakness of an open data culture in most Spanish-speaking countries, differentiating the fact that “visualizing the data is not the same as accessing it” (Crucianelli, 2013: 110).

The popularization and development of the Internet as a source and channel has created a situation in which the volume of information stored on the Internet grows daily (López-García, Toural-Bran, Pereira-Fariña and Barbosa, 2009). However, as a general rule, this huge amount of data in the cloud needs to be treated, analysed and transformed into simpler and clearer publications in a way that is understandable to the general public. The data is converted to interpretive reports and stories typical of Investigative Journalism that goes back to Precision Journalism (Meyer, 2002; Dader, 1997), which has evolved in a digital context of multimedia narratives in which visualization/comprehension is a key factor in offering a clear explanation to the audience of the data obtained (Crucianelli, 2013, Antón, 2013), through the use of infographics, diagrams and interactive applications accompanied by journalistic texts. That is to say, journalism performs the task of ‘data literacy’ (Gray, Chambers, and Bounegru, 2012) and focuses on a quantitative perspective of professional reality (Coddington, 2015).

Its establishment in the media of different countries is uneven, to the point where some authors continue to mention the idea that we are still ‘waiting for Data Journalism’ (De-Maeyer et al., 2015), although there are important references in the USA, Europe and Latin America (Ferreras, 2016). In the case of the Spanish media, development has been slow, though it is still considered to be a scarcely exploited specialization (Chaparro, 2013, Ferreras, 2012, 2013, Peiró and Guallar, 2013). From a professional perspective, this is considered a minority discipline due to the fact that although it has experienced a boom phase, its development has stagnated and provides work for a mere 17% of professionals (APM, 2016). In fact, in Spain there are less than twenty media outlets that have specific departments in this discipline (Ferreras, 2016), and they coexist with the impetus of private organizations, with the most well-known case being that of the Civio Foundation, among others. However, media that have been born on Internet are the places where this specialization finds the most support (Chaparro, 2014), and in many cases it is integrated into the innovation laboratories of the media (Salaverría, 2015).

Regarding the academic research on Data Journalism, the concept has been approached from different perspectives that could be grouped into three main categories: continuist, rupturist and integrationist. The continuist position considers this not to be a new type of journalism (Rogers, 2013), since journalists have always used data to produce news content, so it can be viewed as information specialization (Chaparro, 2014), seen as an evolution of Precision Journalism. But in the context of media convergence (Jenkins, 2008), driven by the digital and technological environment of Big Data, this is considered a recent discipline that explains why Data Journalism is still a new concept, a ‘new type of journalism’ (Gertrudis-Casado et. al., 2016), which is in continuous development as a different kind of journalistic discipline because “it works with large volumes of data and uses interactive visualization of such data” (Crucianelli, 2013: 106), and also because the abundance of information differentiates it from Computer-Assisted Reporting (CAR or PAC) (Ferreras, 2013). It is precisely the emergence of Big Data and digital technology that gives it this new dimension (Bradshaw, 2012), which has led to the development of this discipline, understood as a new modality. From this point of view, reference is made to ‘data mining’ (Riquelme, et al., 2006), which requires different access to the sources and statistical analysis of the data that allows journalists to have immediate access to thousands of files, images and audiovisual material they use to make their information much more elaborate (López et al., 2009).