With local elections looming this is a great 20-30 minute project for any journalist wanting to create an interactive Google map of council ward boundaries.
For this you will need:
I’ve contributed to a “free, open-source book that aims to help journalists to use data to improve the news” – and it will be has now been published online tomorrow (Saturday 28th April)
Following my previous posts on the network journalist and community manager roles as part of an investigation team, this post expands on the first steps a student journalist can take in filling the data journalist role.
Before you begin digging for data, it’s worth mapping out the territory you’re working in. Some key questions to ask include:
Data is so central to the decision-making that shapes our countries, jobs and even personal lives that an increasing amount of data journalism involves scrutinising the problems with the very data itself. Here’s an illustrative list of when bad data becomes the story – and the lessons they can teach data journalists:
This investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism demonstrates an important question to ask about data: who decides what gets recorded?
In this case, the BIJ identified “a number of cases not included in the official tally of 16 ‘restraint-related’ deaths in the decade to 2009 … Some cases were not included because the person has not been officially arrested or detained.” Continue reading
OpenlyLocal are trying to scrape planning application data from across the country. They want volunteers to help write the scrapers using Scraperwiki - and are paying £75 for each one.
This is a great opportunity for journalists or journalism students looking for an excuse to write their first scraper: there are 3 sample scrapers to help you find your feet, with many more likely to appear as they are written. Hopefully, some guidance will appear too (if not, I may try to write some myself).
Add your names in the comments on Andrew’s blog post, and happy scraping!
A must-read for any data journalist, aspiring or otherwise, is Simon Rogers’ post on The Guardian Datablog where he compares public and private sector pay.
This is a classic apples-and-oranges situation where politicians and government bodies are comparing two things that, really, are very different. Is a private school teacher really comparable to someone teaching in an unpopular school? What is the private sector equivalent of a director of public health or a social worker?
But if these issues are being discussed, journalists must try to shed some light, and Simon Rogers does a great job in unpicking the comparisons. From pay and hours worked, to qualifications and age (big differences in both), and gender and pay inequality (more women in the public sector, more lower- and higher-paid workers in the private sector), Rogers crunches all the numbers: Continue reading
Here’s a solution to a problem that aspiring data journalists have come up against time and time again: how to quickly create a searchable interface to your dataset.
freeDive is quick and – if you can follow the wizard‘s instructions – easy too. Continue reading
Guest post by Duarte Romero
Since the start of the year the Argentinian newspaper ‘La Nación’ has been publishing ‘Nación Data’, a blog dedicated to data visualization, interactive projects and especially, all the news related with data journalism.
During this time they have been posting interviews with experts from the community, reporting popular events such as NICAR and sharing the most innovative pieces made by other newspapers.
The multimedia development manager of ‘La Nación’, Momi Peralta, pointed out that their main goal so far is to release as much data as they can. Continue reading
Over the weekend Fleet Street Blues has had a bee in its bonnet about the “pretence” of data journalism and Saturday’s Guardian front page: “Half UK’s young black men out of work“.
This, says FSB, is a lie that demonstrates the ”pretence” that “‘crunching the numbers’ is somehow an an abstract, scientific, mathematical task”. Continue reading
There’s a persuasive argument being made by Francis Irving and Rufus Pollock in a joint blog post about the growth of data management systems – the ‘DMS’ to content management systems’ ‘CMS’:
“Just as then we wrote HTML in text files by hand and uploaded it by FTP, now we analyse data on our laptops using Excel, and share it with friends by emailing CSV files.
“But it reaches the point where using the filesystem and Outlook as your DMS stretches to breaking point. You’ll need a proper one.
“Nobody really knows what a proper one will look like yet. We’re all working on it.”
Their post lists what a DMS needs to do and the companies already trying to solve the ‘DMS problem’ from different directions: a list which includes Google Docs (“coming from the web spreadsheet direction”), the data social network BuzzData, visualisation tool Tableau, data marketplaces, operating systems, Scraperwiki, and PANDA (“making a DMS for newsrooms”)
It’s a well-drawn picture from an angle which I haven’t seen before. Certainly, a number of news organisations are trying to reduce the friction of producing content for different platforms by ‘atomising’ it in data-driven production processes (where a piece of content might be assembled and presented differently depending on the platform it is accessed through, for example), and their internal systems can probably be added to the list above.
What do you think? Is this a problem that’s being addressed in your own organisation?
