With just a few basic data journalism techniques you can tell a lot of data journalism stories. I call these the “three chords of data journalism” — a nod to Simon Rogers’s talk on data journalists as the new punks. Those chords are: sorting; filtering; and calculating percentages.

In this third video first made for students on the MA in Data Journalism at Birmingham City University and shared as part of a series of video posts, I walk through how to use those techniques in practice, using gender pay gap data to demonstrate how those techniques can be used to find outliers and potential interviewees; to drill down to a particular category or area in a dataset; and to put figures into context.