Tag Archives: percentages

How to (not) write about numbers

Image by Andy Maguire | CC BY 2.0

If you’ve been working on a story involving data, the temptation can be to throw all the figures you’ve found into the resulting report — but the same rules of good writing apply to numbers too. Here are some tips to make sure you’re putting the story first.

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VIDEO: The 3 chords of data journalism

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.