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
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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. The Telegraph’s Conrad Quilty-Harper: Start reading: http://www.google.com/reader/bundle/user%2F06076274130681848419%2Fbundle%2Fdatavizfeeds Keep adding to your knowledge and follow other data journalists/people who
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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
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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: Jonathon Richards, The Times: 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
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I’ve tweeted a couple of times recently about frustrations with BBC stories that are based on data but treat it poorly. As any journalist knows, two occasions of anything in close proximity warrants an overreaction about a “worrying trend”. So here it is. “One in four council homes fails ‘Decent Homes Standard’” This is a good piece of newsgathering, but a frustrating
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PriceOfWeed.com is a great example of when you need to turn to crowdsourcing to obtain data for your journalism. As Paul Kedrosky writes, it’s “Not often that you get to combine economics, illicit substances, map mashups and crowd-sourcing in one post like this.” The resulting picture is surprisingly clear. And news organisations could learn a lot from the way this has
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