Here’s a great test for eagle-eyed journalists, tweeted by Guardian’s James Ball. It’s a tale of two charts that claim to show the impact of a change in the income tax threshold to £10,000. Here’s the first: And here’s the second: So: same change, very different stories. In one story (Institute for Fiscal Studies) it is the the poorest that
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The Scotsman has a newish data blog, set up (I’m rather proud to say) by one of my former PA/Telegraph trainees: Jennifer O’Mahoney. This is particularly important as so much data covered in the ‘national’ press tends to be English-only due to devolution. The Department of Education, for example, only publishes English education data. If you want Scottish education data you need
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One of the easiest ways to get someone started on data visualisation is to introduce them to word clouds (it also demonstrates neatly how not all data is numerical). Using tools like Wordle and Tagxedo, you can paste in a major speech and see it visualised within a minute or so. But is a word cloud the best way of
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Last year I was commissioned to write a report on ‘Social Media and News’ for the Open Society Media Program, as part of the ‘Mapping Digital Media’ series. The report is now available here (PDF). As I say in the introduction, I focused on “the areas that are most strongly contested and hold the most importance for the development of news
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Yesterday saw the launch of the first (surprisingly) international data journalism awards, backed by the European Journalism Centre*, Google, and the Global Editors Network. There are 6 awards – 3 categories, each split into national/international and local/regional subcategories: investigative journalism; visualisation; and apps. Each comes with prize money of 7,500 euros. The closing date for entries is April 10. It’s
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I’ve been updating a newsroom policy guide for a project some of my students will be working on, with a particular section on objectivity and impartiality. As this has coincided with the debate on fact-checking stirred by the New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane, I thought I would reproduce the guidelines here, and invite comments on whether you think it hits
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Last month you may have read the story of lobbyists editing Wikipedia entries to remove criticism of their clients and smear critics. The story was a follow-up to an undercover report by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and The Independent on claims of political access by Bell Pottinger, written as a result of investigations by SEO expert Tim Ireland. Ireland was particularly interested
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For the first Something For The Weekend of 2012 I want to show how to deal with a common problem when you’re trying to scrape a collection of webpage: they have some sort of structure in their URL like this, where part of the URL refers to the name or code of an entity: http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/scottishschoolsonline/schools/freemealentitlement.asp?iSchoolID=5237521 http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/scottishschoolsonline/schools/freemealentitlement.asp?iSchoolID=5237629 http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/scottishschoolsonline/schools/freemealentitlement.asp?iSchoolID=5237823 In this instance,
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Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, gave a speech yesterday on rethinking the ICT curriculum in UK schools. You can read a copy of the speech variously on the Department for Education website, or, err, on the Guardian website. Seeing these two copies of what is apparently the same speech, I started wondering: a) [...]
While the public image of data journalism tends to revolve around big data dumps and headline-grabbing leaks, there is a more important day-to-day application of data skills: scrutinising the claims regularly made in support of spending public money. I’m blogging about this now because I recently came across a particularly good illustration of politicians being dazzled by numbers from lobbyists
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