In the data era, the trend of media transformation and integration has posed great challenges to the training of media talents. The School of Journalism and Communication of South China University of Technology has kept pace with the times, focusing on the integration of disciplines and developing the characteristics, and data journalism is one of the important directions that has made remarkable achievements. In recent years, the School has offered courses including Data Journalism Theory and Practice, Data Analysis Fundamentals, Information Graphics Design, etc., and has led to complete the Data Journalism catechism, established a school-level research center for data journalism in 2015 (renamed as Data Analysis and Information Visualization Research Center in 2019), published a series of books related to data journalism, published more than 10 academic papers and directed students to win several awards in national data journalism competitions. The School have helped students improve their data literacy and master data journalism techniques through the class and practice.

In July 2020, the Data Journalism Teaching Team under the charge of Professor Su Hongyuan was approved as a provincial teaching team; the acceptance result of Data Journalism under the charge of Professor Wu Xiaokun, which was listed as a provincial series of online open courses in Guangdong Province, was good. The goal of data journalism talents training is to cultivate journalistic talents with the ability of new media news narrative, data analysis and information visualization. To achieve the goal, teachers with the above three specialties are required accordingly. The online open course on Data Journalism is taught by a team of post-80s and post-90s teachers from South China University of Technology, Jinan University, and Shantou University, using the self-authored textbook A Concise Tutorial on Data Journalism Production (Fudan University Press, 2018). To help learners master several data processing skills in the shortest possible time, the course selects and refines each part pair, including how to crawl web data without code, and use Excel, MySQL, Open Refine, Tableau and other tools to carry out data analysis and visualization production. The positive feedback rate on the course reached over 90%.

The teaching of data journalism at South China University of Technology combined theory with practice, and has cultivated students with the ability to practice data journalism. Students' works have been recognized by media and society. Based on the courses related to data journalism, in 2018, the School cooperated with the Paper - Pike on data journalism column The Beauty of SCUT Data, and in 2019, the School cooperated with Tencent - Digital Visibility on the column Reasonable and Digital. The students have published their works under the direction of the two columns.

The College's student team has achieved many successes in domestic data journalism competitions, winning the first prize in the China Data Journalism Competition for two consecutive years, and the instructor has been awarded Excellent Instructor in the National Data Journalism Competition many times, and the College also won the Best Organization Unit Award in 2019. The college also won the Best Organization Award in 2019. Recently, the 2020 China Data Content Competition was officially launched online, and the School became an academic supporter of the competition together with the School of Journalism and Communication of Peking University, the School of Journalism of Fudan University, the School of Journalism of Renmin University of China, the School of Journalism and Communication of Nanjing University, and the School of Media and International Culture of Zhejiang University, etc., which once again shows that the School has become one of the top-ranking institutions in the field of data journalism in China.