Here’s an example of how APIs can be useful to journalists when they need to combine two sets of data. I recently spoke to Lincoln investigative journalism student Sean McGrath who had obtained some information via FOI that he needed to combine with other data to answer a question (sorry to be so cryptic). He had spent 3 days cleaning
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If you have a spreadsheet containing geographical data such as postcodes you may want to know what constituency they are in, or convert them to local authority. That was a question that Bill Thompson asked on Twitter this week – and this is how I used Google Refine to do that: adding extra columns to a spreadsheet with geographic information.
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This post by Tony Hirst should be recommended reading for every journalist interested in the potential of computers for reporting. Why? Because it shows you how you can use Google spreadsheets to interrogate data as if it was a database; and because it demonstrates the importance of news organisations releasing data to their users. Put aside any intimidation you might
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