There’s an interview with me in both Spanish and English at Mas Investigacion covering a number of questions about data journalism, Help Me Investigate, MOOCs, and teaching.
Although the introduction is in Spanish, scroll down and click on ‘Read the interview in English’ if you want that version.
French data journalist Nicolas Kayser-Bril (and former OJB contributor) gave the keynote speech at news:rewired. He used to work for OWNI, but since 2011 has been the CEO of Journalism++, a start-up that ‘accompanies newsrooms in their transitions towards the web of data’.
During his presentation he tried to explain the first steps that anyone interested in this area should follow to start producing stories, like building a datastore.
After the speech we had a quick chat with him about the importance of introducing data in newsrooms, the situation in France (where he feels data journalism is very dynamic - ”a lot of people are doing stuff, like in Liberátion or Le Monde”) and the skills that a journalist should have to get started. ”There are some stories nowadays that require the use of data intensely,” he says. “Especially when it comes into public policies.”
“As a data journalist you need curiosity and the ability to teach yourself: the basic skills of any journalist.”
In a guest post for OJB, Jerry Vermanen explains the background to RegioHack
The internet is bursting with information, but journalists – at least in The Netherlands – don’t get the full potential out of it. Basic questions on what data driven journalism is, and how to practise it, still have to be answered. Two Dutch regional newspapers (de Stentor and TC Tubantia) have launched RegioHack, an experiment with data driven journalism around local issues and open data.
Both newspapers circulate in the eastern and middle part of the Netherlands. In November, journalists will collaborate with local students, programmers and open data experts in a 30 hour coding event. In preparation for this hackathon, the forum on our website (www.regiohack.nl) is opened for discussion. Anyone can start a thread for a specific problem. For example, what’s the average age of each town in our region? And in 10 years, do we have enough facilities to accommodate the future population? And if not, what do we need?
The newspapers provide the participants with hot pizza, energy drink and 30 hours to find, clean up and present the data on these subjects.
After the hackathon, the projects are presented and participants will be named in the publications. That’s what RegioHack is all about: making unique stories with data, helping each other to develop new skills and finding out how to practise data driven journalism.
If you happen to be in The Netherlands on November 10th and 11th, contact me on jerry@regiohack.nl or Twitter (@JerryVermanen) for an invite to the final presentation.
We’re also searching for guest bloggers – and yes, that can be in English.
I went to News Rewired on Thursday, along with dozens of other journalists and folk concerned in various ways with news production. Some threads that ran through the day for me were discussions of how we publish our data (and allow others to do the same), how we link our stories together with each other and the rest of the web, and how we can help our readers to explore context around our stories.
A week ago I blogged about how the Manchester Evening News were using data visualisation to provide a deeper analysis of the local police force’s experiment in tweeting incidents for 24 hours. In that post Head of Online Content Paul Gallagher said he thought the real benefit would “come afterwards when we can also plot the data over time”.
Now that data has been plotted, and you can see the results here.
In addition, you can filter the results by area, type (crime or ‘social work’) and category (specific sort of crime or social issue). To give the technical background: Carl Johnstone put the data into a mysql database, wrote some code in Perl for the filters and used a Flash applet for the graphs. Continue reading
Richard Pope and Jordan Hatch have been building a very useful site tracking recent budget cuts, building up to this week’s spending review.
Where Are The Cuts? uses the code behind the open source Ushahidi platform (covered previously on OJB by Claire Wardle) to present a map of the UK representing where cuts are being felt. Users can submit their own reports of cuts, or add details to others via a comments box.
It’s early days in the project – currently many of the cuts are to national organisations with local-level impacts yet to be dug out.
Closely involved is the public expenditure-tracking site Where Does My Money Go? which has compiled a lot of relevant data.
Meanwhile, in Birmingham a couple of my MA Online Journalism students have set up a hyperlocal blog for the 50,000 public sector workers in the region, primarily to report those budget cuts and how they are affecting people. Andy Watt, who – along with Hedy Korbee – is behind the site, has blogged about the preparation for the site’s launch here. It’s a good example of how journalists can react to a major issue with a niche blog. Andy and Hedy will be working with the local newspapers to combine expertise.
I’ve written a piece on ‘How to be a data journalist’ for The Guardian’s Datablog. It seems to have proven very popular, but I thought I should blog briefly about it if you haven’t seen one of those tweets.
The post is necessarily superficial – it was difficult enough to cover the subject area for a 12,000-word book chapter, so summarising further into a 1,000 word article was almost impossible.
In the process I had to leave a huge amount out, compensating slightly by linking to webpages which expanded further.
Visualising and mashing, as the more advanced parts of data journalism, suffered most, because it seemed to me that locating and understanding data necessarily took precedence.
Heather Billings, for example, blogged about my “very British footnote [which was the] only nod to visual presentation”. If you do want to know more about visualisation tips, I wrote 1,000 words on that alone here. There’s also this great post by Kaiser Fung – and the diagram below, of which Fung says: “All outstanding charts have all three elements in harmony. Typically, a problematic chart gets only two of the three pieces right.”:
On Monday I blogged the advice on where aspiring data journalists should start in full. There’s also the selection of passages from the book chapter linked above. And my Delicious bookmarks on data journalism, visualisation and mashups. Each has an RSS feed.
I hope that helps. If you do some data journalism as a result, it would be great if you could let me know about it – and what else you picked up.
In writing last week’s Guardian Data Blog piece on How to be a data journalist I asked various people involved in data journalism where they would recommend starting. The answers are so useful that I thought I’d publish them in full here.
http://www.google.com/reader/bundle/user%2F06076274130681848419%2Fbundle%2Fdatavizfeeds
Keep adding to your knowledge and follow other data journalists/people who work with data on Twitter.
ONS stats release calendar is a good start http://www.statistics.gov.uk/hub/release-calendar/index.html Look at the Government data stores (Data.gov, Data.gov.uk, Data.london.gov.uk etc).
Check out What do they know, Freebase, Wikileaks, Manyeyes, Google Fusion charts. Continue reading
The following is an unedited version of an article written for the International Press Institute report ‘Brave News Worlds (PDF)‘
For the past two centuries journalists have dealt in the currency of information: we transmuted base metals into narrative gold. But information is changing.
At first, the base metals were eye witness accounts, and interviews. Later we learned to melt down official reports, research papers, and balance sheets. And most recently our alloys have been diluted by statements and press releases.
But now journalists are having to get to grips with a new type of information: data. And this is a very rich seam indeed.
Data is a broad term so I should define it here: I am not talking here about statistics or numbers in general, because those are nothing new to journalists. When I talk about data I mean information that can be processed by computers.
This is a crucial distinction: it is one thing for a journalist to look at a balance sheet on paper; it is quite another to be able to dig through those figures on a spreadsheet, or to write a programming script to analyse that data, and match it to other sources of information. We can also more easily analyse new types of data, such as live data, large amounts of text, user behaviour patterns, and network connections.
And that, for me, is hugely important. Indeed, it is potentially transformational. Adding computer processing power to our journalistic arsenal allows us to do more, faster, more accurately, and with others. All of which opens up new opportunities – and new dangers. Things are going to change. Continue reading
In researching my book chapter (UPDATE: now published) I asked a group of journalists who worked with data what led them to do so. Here are their answers:
The flood of information online presents an amazing opportunity for journalists, but also a challenge: how on earth does one keep up with; make sense of it? You could go about it in the traditional way, fossicking in individual sites, but much of the journalistic value in this outpouring, it seems, comes in aggregation: in processing large amounts of data, distilling them, and exploring them for patterns. To do that – unless you’re superhuman, or have a small army of volunteers – you need the help of a computer.
I ‘got into’ data journalism because I find this mix exciting. It appeals to the traditional journalistic instinct, but also calls for a new skill which, once harnessed, dramatically expands the realm of ‘stories I could possibly investigate…’ Continue reading