Journalists and educators largely agree at this point that by the time journalism students graduate they should have some experience with data. The Dow Jones News Fund, one of journalism’s most prestigious education programs since the 1950s, debuted a data internship this year. Data has become a more common topic at education convenings, and NICAR, […]

Perhaps the biggest challenge universities face is that the staff they have on hand aren’t as skilled in data as their students need them to be. Teaching teachers to use data, University of Illinois professor Brant Houston said, may not be the best approach. There are a few, he said, who take it upon themselves to […]

Most schools have some kind of computer science program. Some educators have proposed partnering with these departments. One of them is Houston, at the University of Illinois. He said he hasn’t crafted a course that combines journalism and computer science, but he has offered credit for journalism students who take computer science courses, or had […]

Hiring part-time staff, collaborating with Computer Science departments and holding open labs won’t work for every school. Luckily, there’s a wide array of resources available to students — and their instructors — who want to learn on their own. “It’s gotten much easier to get a foothold as a student,” said Houston, in Illinois. “The […]

Now that we’ve gained some basic data knowledge and are putting it to use, we need to take care not to get entangled in a mistake or misunderstanding. The downsides to data reporting are, for the most part, identical to those of regular reporting: misleading or biased sources, honest error, and so on. Data, however, […]

Tutorials Using Excel to do Precision Journalism by Steve Doig: Here you can learn the “basic spreadsheet knowledge” we talked about – sorting, filtering and basic calculations – in about one to two hours. If you’re interested, Doig goes on to cover formulas and tables, which are slightly more advanced. Google Sheets support from Google: If you […]

“Data and journalism have become deeply intertwined, with increased prominence,” journalist Alex Howard wrote in in a report for the Tow Center at Columbia University entitled “Debugging the backlash to data journalism.” “To make sense of the data deluge, journalists today need to be more numerate, technically literate and logical.” These changes come to the […]

A few years ago, the digital revolution sparked upheaval — and in many newsrooms, concern. As technology brought data journalism and other new practices into newsrooms, some editors and publishers fretted that revered principles of shoe-leather reporting, experience, and intuition might decline or even disappear. But when the fear subsided, it became clear that the […]

The definition of data journalism is at once both painfully simple and frustratingly vague. “When you say data journalism, it means something different to just about everyone,” said Aron Pilhofer, visual editor at The Guardian. In his Tow Center paper, Alex Howard offered a more detailed definition for data journalism: “gathering, cleaning, organizing, analyzing, visualizing […]

Once you’ve decided data is something your staff should be able to handle, the question is how to incorporate it into their workflow. Every newsroom is already busy, and many are strapped for funding and staff. This section will address how to train journalists in data journalism while ensuring that it gets folded into the […]