Data Journalism

Learn to ‘interview’ data for original stories or to support your investigation.

First, we cover the questions you can ask of data. Then we use simple statistics to answer those questions. Discover differences, trends, typical examples, exceptions, proportions and relationships you would never have spotted without data.

We do not treat the techniques ‘separately’ but as parts of a logical workflow; you also learn to organise a data project. Other topics covered are: finding data, building your own databases, scrapping with Google and simple web scrapers, cleaning up with OpenRefine, merging tables, statistics with formulas, analysing with pivot tables and visualising with Flourish. After this course, you will master 90 per cent of the techniques used by typical data journalists.

The course includes a reference book explaining the working process and all techniques.

What you will learn‍

• Devise angles for data stories
• Search and find data
• Import data from the internet and from PDFs
• Use simple scrapers
• Merging datasets
• Cleaning up data before analyzing it
• Keep a grip on your workflow with a data logbook
• ‘Interview’ data with formulas and pivot tables
• Collaborate on data projects
• Talk to statisticians
• Work in Google Sheets
• Use tools to visualize data
• Expressing data in text