I translated this essay by Civio Co-Director Eva Belmonte for DataJournalism.com:

Some of the best examples of data journalism are big investigations, where you spend months understanding a complex issue, discovering data where there was none or diving into huge amounts of information to find something invisible to the naked eye. Bringing new light to an issue. But to understand the complexity of this data you need time, resources, and a lot of digging. 

By the end of that odyssey, you no longer consult experts, you are the expert. And it is a waste to not take advantage of all that knowledge to try to fix the problems you encountered along the way. 

Now, you might say: “We are journalists. We are here to narrate the world, not to fix it.” 

I’m not so sure.

Read the rest of Belmonte’s essay at DataJournalism.com: [html] [pdf].