Why DC Thomson's data journalists are keeping tabs on high street businesses

In a nutshell:

• DC Thomson's pandemic-born data journalism unit keeps track of important news topics
• "Trackers" are an effective news format designed to be visually striking and informative at a glance
• The High Street Tracker monitors properties in five Scottish business hot spots
• It has proved efficient in debunking myths, but reliable data can be hard to come by and verify

Scottish media company DC Thomson has developed a data-led news format to track and update evergreen topics.

The data journalism unit - headed up by Lesley Ann Kelly - started doing "trackers" initially during the coronavirus pandemic, and was regularly updating them to monitor the spread of the virus in a visually dynamic and engaging way. And the format has caught on to report on all manner of subjects from baby names to standards of care homes, from A&E waiting times to house prices.

As Kelly wrote in an op-ed in 2022, this comes from a personal place: she has been frustrated by a multitude of waiting lists for scans, diagnoses and specialists in her own medical journey.

"Our mission statement started out with a promise that we would democratise data for our readers. That we would use our skills to make fairly frightening numbers and statistics more accessible."

She continues: "If 22-year-old me had been able to access this kind of information, it wouldn’t have made an arthritis diagnosis any less devastating, but it would have allowed me to claw back some control. I definitely know there’d be fewer instances of 'lost' referrals, as I would know how long I should expect to wait before making a polite follow-up call."

These NHS trackers have monitored waiting times for MRI scans, cancer services and psychological therapies. This includes key metrics for the number of cancelled operations, or how many beds are being blocked by people unable to be discharged, highlighting the pressure on the NHS.

All of these topics so far have been possible, by and large, through publicly available data, though. However, a more recent "tracker" story threw up a new challenge.

High streets

Elgin is the latest of five Scottish towns and cities to become the focus of DC Thomson's High Street Trackers, when it was launched earlier this month. The team also covers Aberdeen, Dundee, Perth and Inverness. For the non-UK audience, high streets are business hot spots where you will find shops, restaurants, pubs and other establishments.

However, many towns and cities are seeing a decline in the local business and units remain vacant for long periods. So the team's High Street Tracker is a painstaking effort to answer those nagging questions: who are the owners of vacant units? How long have they been unoccupied? Are the owners based locally or abroad? Are there any impending attempts to fill the units? And many more.

Tools for the job

The High Street Trackers are all run via Google Sheets that can be updated manually or automatically. Property ownership can change in a matter of days, so the DC Thomson does a quarterly census - literally walking down the high street - to check if stores have changed.

The team also uses GitHub Actions to run more regular checks. It monitors websites for any changes, like the Scottish Government website, and updates the spreadsheet accordingly. This also changes charts made on Flourish. Note that spreadsheets can break if new inputted data is formatted differently.

For the data visualisation, no geographical data is granular enough to show each individual unit. So the team used Geojson.io to make the illustrations themselves. And with 2,000 units monitored, this was as much effort as it sounds.

"The process of creating these trackers is no easy feat, with every single unit on the high street being meticulously hand-drawn and categorised," explains the data journalist behind the High Street Tracker, Emma Sabljak, speaking on the Journalism.co.uk podcast with Lesley-Anne Kelly.

Screenshot via The Press & Journal

Availability of data

Property ownership data can be murky. Data is sourced via the Scottish Assessors Association and Company House, which provides generally reliable information on vacant units. The team has to contact the proprietors to be certain, though, because some owners verified they no longer own the property.

Data can also be out of date and owners unreachable, and so in three cases, the team had to buy property deeds from the Registers of Scotland (a digital plain copy costs £25 + VAT) to get the right information. In just one case so far, not even the deed could provide verifiable information.

The power of these trackers lies in their ability to challenge preconceptions and provide a data-driven perspective on the complex issues facing high streets. As Kelly notes, the team's investigations into property ownership have helped to debunk myths and shine a light on the realities of commercial real estate in Scotland.

"There was a lot of myths that the council owned all of these properties, were in control of them and were doing absolutely nothing with them," says Kelly. "And we saw a lot of comments on the Facebook post on Emma's latest investigation of people realising that these are all mostly privately owned companies that are just letting these buildings become derelict, not the council."

While tricky to produce initially, once the hard work is done, trackers are relatively low maintenance, can be updated easily and can serve as valuable evergreen content.

"It's the gift that keeps on giving because we've got this database of the High Street Trackers on the [five] cities, and now they are almost an infinite storytelling tool," says Kelly.

For more on DC Thomson's data journalism project, Kelly also recently talked about this topic at a WAN-IFRA webinar below:

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