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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MA student Alex Gamela took this image of the Telegraph newsroom during the first year of the MA
My MA in Online Journalism has a new name: the MA in Multiplatform and Mobile Journalism*. It’s still a course all about finding, publishing and distributing journalism online. So why the name change?
Well, because what ‘online‘ means has changed.
For the last 18 months I’ve been talking to people across the industry, reflecting on the past 7 years of teaching the MA, and researching the forthcoming second edition of the Online Journalism Handbook. Here, then, are the key conclusions I arrived at, and how they informed the new course design:
In the last few years a significant change has taken place. Journalism is now increasingly ‘native’, playing to the strengths of multiple platforms rather than just using them as promotional ‘channels’. It went from web and social to chat, keeps remembering email, and in the near future will take in cars, the home and other connected devices too. Continue reading
There is an exchange that sometimes takes place, perfectly described by Beth Ashton, between those who use technology, and those who don’t. It goes like this:
Prospective data journalist: ‘I’d really like to learn how to do data journalism but I can’t do statistics!’
Data journalist: ‘Don’t let that put you off, I don’t know anything about numbers either, I’m a journalist, not a mathematician!’
Prospective data journalist: ‘But I can’t code, and it all looks so codey and complicated’
Data journalist: That’s fine, NONE OF US can code. None of us. Open angle bracket back slash End close angle bracket.
“These people are coding deniers,” argues Beth.
I think she’s on to something. Flash back to a week before Beth published that post: I was talking to Caroline Beavon about the realisation of just how hard-baked ‘coding’ was into my workflow:
These are all logical responses to an environment with more information than a journalist can reasonably deal with, and I have developed many of them almost without realising.
They are responses as logical as deciding to use a pen to record information when human memory cannot store it reliably alone. Or deciding to learn shorthand when longhand writing cannot record reliably alone. Or deciding to use an audio recorder when that technology became available.
One of the things that makes us uniquely human is that we reach for technological supports – tools – to do our jobs better. The alphabet, of course, is a technology too.
But we do not argue that shorthand comes easy, or that audio recorders can be time consuming, or that learning to use a pen takes time.
So: ‘coding’ – whether you call it RSS, or automation, or pattern recognition – needs to be learned. It might seem invisible to those of us who’ve built our work patterns around it – just as the alphabet seems invisible once you’ve learned it. But, like the alphabet, it is a technology all the same.
But secondly – and more importantly – for this to happen as a profession we need to acknowledge that ‘coding’ is a skill that has become as central to working effectively in journalism as using shorthand, the pen, or the alphabet.
I don’t say ‘will be central’ but ‘has become‘. There is too much information, moving too fast, to continue to work with the old tools alone. From social networks to the quantified self; from RSS-enabled blogs to the open data movement; from facial recognition to verification, our old tools won’t do.
So I’m not going to be a coding denier. Coding is to digital information what shorthand was to spoken information. There, I’ve said it. Now, how can we do it better?
Charles Arthur of The Guardian makes his point pretty plain: “If I had one piece of advice to a journalist starting out now, it would be: learn to code”
“Let’s be clear that I’m not saying “code” as in “get deep into C++ or Java” … I mean it in the sense of having a nodding acquaintance with methods of programming, and perhaps a few languages, so that when something comes along where you’ll need, say, to transform data from one form to another, you can. Or where you need to make your own life easier by automating some process or other.
” … None of which is saying you shouldn’t be talking to your sources, and questioning what you’re told, and trying to find other means of finding stuff out from people. But nowadays, computers are a sort of primary source too. You’ve got to learn to interrogate them effectively – and quote them meaningfully – too.”
Online Journalism Blog 