Blanshe Musinguzi: Redefining Journalism Through Data-Driven Storytelling

Blanshe Musinguzi: Redefining Journalism Through Data-Driven Storytelling

Data-driven storytelling is not a widely applied storytelling technique among journalists in Uganda. One of the few who have taken to the application is Blanshe Musinguzi.  Blanshe is the winner of the 2024 African Investigative Journalist of the Year Award. He runs 54 Science Africa and writes for The Africa Report Magazine, covering East Africa. 

Data-driven storytelling is redefining how stories are gathered and communicated, offering clearer, more credible narratives grounded in evidence. As news consumption moves online, data journalism is emerging as a powerful tool for building audience trust, gaining insight, and delivering relevance.

Mr Musinguzi is both a data journalist and trainer. His work demystifies data for newsrooms and young journalists, showing that storytelling with numbers is attainable, practical and essential. Through teaching, mentorship and hands-on projects, he is building a new generation of storytellers who can interpret datasets, visualise complex information and turn raw numbers into meaningful public knowledge. 

In this Q&A, he speaks to David Kangye about what it will take to grow data-driven storytelling in newsrooms. 

DK:  As someone who hated mathematics in school, how did you end up majoring in data journalism – a numbers field? 

BM: It is true, I hated mathematics in school. But after joining journalism school, I started reading a lot of international newspapers and magazines like the Economist, Washington Post, New York Times, among others. I noticed that they were using a lot of charts, maps and graphs to tell stories, and that caught my attention. But at that time, I did not know that it was called data journalism. I was mainly drawn to how they were using these simplified formats to tell stories with visuals. 

DK: Did it ever intrigue you that you were going to deal with the numbers you had run away from during your school days?

BM: No. It didn’t. It was after looking at the methodology that it hit me. But most of the journalists at the Economist and a number of those international media houses used to publish on Medium how they arrived at the numbers, why they made certain charts and not others. That gave me an idea of how they arrived at their findings. Then I went back to school and studied all these processes and methodologies of making a map that communicates. I also learnt that although it is difficult, it does not involve a lot of mathematics, nothing like finding square roots and such concepts. For beginners, when you are dealing with data, you only need to know the basics. It is easy to hate data when you do not know how it works. For example, I hated mathematics in school because I did not understand how it worked. In my data journalism class at graduate school, the concepts were clearer. 

DK: Part of your current work is to teach data journalism. From a trainer’s point of view, how different is the appreciation of data journalism in the classroom from that in the newsroom? 

BM: It is not much. First of all, it is about perception. Many still maintain that data journalism is a challenging field. True, it introduces you to a lot of new tools, which you need to play with to get conversant and comfortable. Tools like Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, Data Visualisation Tools, etc. If the person does not take time to play around with these tools and be conversant with them, they are likely to have trouble. 

Secondly, when you introduce people to the tools, they tend to leave them in the classroom. This kind of work needs a lot of practice. You have to work with the data and break it down over and over. It does not have to be all at once.

DK: What do you tell your learners that data journalism is?

BM: I tend to make it simpler by telling them that data journalism is another way of sourcing information for your story. You go out to interview someone or sit down and examine the different data sets that exist, breaking them down. For example, we are entering an election season, so you may want to review the results of the previous presidential elections. Who won where? What percentages? Such questions help you to extract the data which you use as another component of storytelling.

DK: What are some of the challenges you have faced in selling the idea of data journalism to fellow journalists?

BM: The first thing is that the community of people interested in this kind of work is not growing. It takes self-motivation to be conversant with the tools and to expand your knowledge of the tools. When you do not have a community of like-minded people, it becomes very hard. 

Two, data in Uganda is not available. People who have data are not putting it out to the public. Data has to be made available and usable. The two are different. Data can be available but not usable. A dataset in PDF format, for example, may not be as useful until it is converted into another format, such as Microsoft Excel. Institutions have a wealth of data, but make it hard to share it because they fear it might be distorted. You find that the Ministry of Education releases an annual report in PDF format, but half of it consists of tables. 

DK: Why is it important that newsrooms should interest themselves in the craft of data journalism?

BM: The media industry has changed. We are no longer in the era of newspapers; we are in a digital world. Most of the information consumed today is in digital form. A person with a smartphone has numerous things competing for their time. The question then becomes, why should I read your 500-word story? One way to communicate is to use visuals such as maps and charts. If your story begins with a map, can it attract a bigger audience? 

When you are doing visualisations, you have to make them simple for an ordinary person to understand. You use elements like colour, lines and other techniques to make it simple and easy for an ordinary person to understand. 

DK: What does the future of storytelling look like? 

BM: This is something that I have been thinking about for a long time. The future of storytelling is not with data visualisation and data journalism but with mostly multimedia short-form content. Storytellers must consider the different media through which their stories can be shared. Someone on Instagram wants a story told in picture format, someone on TikTok wants a story summarised in three minutes. The population that reads (print) newspapers keeps reducing and will soon be phased out. The future of storytelling lies in being able to tell yourself in different multimedia formats. Different audiences consume stories differently. 

DK: Regarding multimedia storytelling, who should take it up? We are currently seeing several journalists leaving the newsroom to start their own shows. 

BM:  I think it should be the role of the big newsrooms to embrace these data-driven skills and projects. When journalists have a passion for something that is not in your newsroom, they will look for it elsewhere. That is how journalists end up starting their own platforms because they have the freedom to innovate and practice. Some succeed. Some fail. What matters is that they give it a try. 

DK: What would you advise someone who would like to embark on the journey of data-driven storytelling? Where do they start from?

BM: You start from having interest and passion. Then you look for where to learn from the basic skills of Excel, data visualisation and using these other tools, all of which are easier to understand.  You learn how to make charts, how to visualise and how to extract a story from the datasets. Learn from what other data-driven storytellers are doing and challenge yourself. There is a future around centering data-driven storytelling but we still need to support one another. We need more people to teach others. 

DK: Knowing what you know today, what is that one thing you wish you had known at the start of your career?

BM: Several things. One of them is being able to utilise the tools I have. I recently went back to using the Python programming language, but I had forgotten. Keep learning and applying what you have learnt. Do not take long without putting your skills to use.