Monthly Archives: February 2023

VIDEO PLAYLIST: An introduction to Python for data journalism and scraping

Python is an extremely powerful language for journalists who want to scrape information from online sources. This series of videos, made for students on the MA in Data Journalism at Birmingham City University, explains some core concepts to get started in Python, how to use Colab notebooks within Google Drive, and introduces some code to get started with scraping.

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Availability bias: a guide for journalists

Diagram showing a large circle labelled 'All the information about a subject' and a smaller circle within that labelled 'The information that is easiest to recall'

I’ve written previously about the role that cognitive biases play in journalism, how to avoid confirmation bias, and anticipate criticism based on fallacies — but one cognitive bias I haven’t written about yet is the availability heuristic — or availability bias.

Availability bias is the tendency to reach for the most available reason, event, or tool, when confronted with a problem or decision.

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Here’s how the ‘8 data story angles’ can help you get stories from company accounts

8 common angles for accounts stories
Scale: of profit/loss, of bonuses, payoffs, cuts
Change/stasis: profit/loss/bonuses going up/down
Outliers/ranking: based on any metric
Variation: within a sector
Exploration: a company structure; a director; payments
Relationships: mapping a corporate network or director’s interests
Bad data: Undeclared interests
Leads: Background, conflicts of interest, factchecks

A couple of years ago I mapped out eight common angles for identifying stories in data. It turns out that the same framework is useful for finding stories in company accounts, too — but not only that: the angles also map neatly onto three broad techniques.

In this post I’ll go through each of the three techniques — looking at cash flow statements; compiling data from multiple accounts; and tracing people and connections — and explain how they can be used to get stories, with examples of articles that have used those techniques successfully.

We start, naturally, with the money…

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9 способов найти историю в финансовых отчётах компаний

Моя статья на русском здесь.

This is a masterclass in writing a story about company directors’ pay — so I reverse-engineered it

Owner of UK care home group paid himself £21m despite safety concerns

Company directors’ pay regularly provides material for stories — and this front page story by The Guardian’s Robert Booth was such a masterclass in the genre (as well as other open source intelligence techniques) that I decided to reverse-engineer it for a Twitter thread.

I’ve embedded the thread below, or you can read it on Threadreader here.

Using company accounts in journalism

You can find other posts about using company accounts at the following links: