As part of an ongoing series on recent graduates who have gone into online journalism, The Telegraph’s new Data Mapping Reporter Conrad Quilty-Harper talks about what got him the job, what it involves, and what skills he feels online journalists need today.

I got my job thanks to Twitter. Chris Brauer, head of online journalism at City University, was impressed by my tweets and my experience, and referred me to the Telegraph when they said they were looking for people to help build the UK Political database.

I spent six weeks working on the database, at first manually creating candidate entries, and later mocking up design elements and cleaning the data using Freebase Gridworks, Excel and Dabble DB. At the time the Telegraph was advertising for a “data juggler” role, and I interviewed for the job and was offered it.

My job involves three elements:

• Working with reporters to add visualisations to stories based on numbers,
• Covering the “open data” beat as a reporter, and
• Creating original stories with visualisations based on data from FOI and other sources.

For my job I need to know how to select and scrape good data, clean it, pick out the stories and visualise it. (P.S. you may have noticed that I’m a “data is singular” kinda guy).

The “data” niche is greatly exciting to me. Feeding into this is the #opendata movement, the new Government’s plan to release more data and the understanding that data driven journalism as practised in the United States has to come here. There’s clearly a hunger for more data driven stories, a point well illustrated by a recent letter to the FT.

The mindset you need to have as an online journalist today is to become familiar with and proficient at using tools that make you better at your job. You have to be an early adopter. Get on the latest online service, get the latest gadget and get it before your colleagues and competitors. Find the value in those tools, integrate it into your work and go and find another tool.

When I blogged for Engadget our team had built an automated picture watermarker for liveblogging. I played with it for a few hours and made a new script that downloaded the pictures from a card, applied the watermark, uploaded the pictures and ejected the SD card. Engadget continues to try out new tools that enable them to do their job faster and better. There are endless innovations being churned out every day from the world of technology. Make time to play with them and make them work for you.

If you know of anyone else who should be featured in this series, let me know in the comments.