Data-Driven Journalism’s Secrets

From ProPublica's

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I’ve spent the last few weeks in the U.S. on a Douglas Tweedale Memorial Fellowship with the International Center for Journalists, talking to some American newsrooms about how they approach data-driven journalism. Here’s a bit about what I’ve learned.

The best way to start doing data-driven journalism is simply to start. When you’re just getting started, you really have nothing to lose. With every mistake, you gain experience and knowledge for your personal growth and to improve the quality of the journalism you are practicing.

It’s easy to say, simply, “I am not good at math,” and decide that data-driven journalism isn’t for you. Well, I wasn’t good at math either until I decided to tear down that barrier, and found that learning is better and easier by applying theory to real-life projects.

In 2008 before I even knew there was such a thing called “data-driven journalism,” I proposed a small, simple analysis of a data set of international tourists visiting in Costa Rica. On the way, I started to learn about Excel formulas, to calculate variations, to analyze totals by year, seasons, quarters, etc.

Gradually, my skill at correlating data began to increase, as did the complexity of my projects. These days I’m working in the Data Unit of La Nación in Costa Rica.

Here are three things you can start today to increase your data-driven journalism skills:
First, talk to developers and engineers about how to approach a data analysis project – what new software to use, formulas and methodologies, given the goals of your project.

Second, stick with it! Don’t give up too easily when learning to use a new technique or software like Open Refine, Tableau, Tabula or others to clean, analyze or visualize data.

Finally, make sure to share what you’re learning with others. Very often the questions people will ask you show challenges and motivate you to search for the right answers that you hadn’t thought of, increasing your knowledge and encourage you to try different approaches.

What I want to say is: If you want to do data-driven journalism, go ahead and start. Good ways to start learning include online courses, books and tutorials.

If you live in Latin America, you can take advantage of projects like Chicas Poderosas (“Powerful Girls”), which promotes the development of data-driven journalism skills through workshops that connect journalists, developers, designers, animators and storytellers and get them to work together on storytelling projects.

I also recommend global initiatives like Hacks & Hackers, which hosts meetups in many countries in and outside Latin America.

You must also commit to never stop learning. Even after you have developed advanced skills and a deep understanding of the techniques, tools and methodologies of analysis and visualization, there will always be a bigger challenge ahead – bigger datasets, new software to test, new techniques to try and different approaches to generate participation from people for whom your story is important.

Why Data-Driven Journalism Matters
You may ask, “why does data-driven journalism matter to me?” A good summary comes from Sisi Wei, a data journalist at ProPublica, who I talked to while I was on a two-week assignment in that newsroom.

“It allows me to scrutinize and examine information better than ever before. For example, when I was in college, I thought that you interview experts, believe in what they say, then quote them in your articles. But why not take the data results of their research and analyze it yourself? I can check what they are saying. If I analyze the data before I do an interview, I can ask questions about the anomalies that I found or questions on procedures that I understand better than before.”

I know just what she means – it’s very useful and satisfying to be able to scrutinize and examine the information in a better and new way.

Every good story starts with an idea, a question or an observation, said Sarah Cohen, who has been editor of computer-assisted reporting at The New York Times for about a year.
“And then, we look for data or documents that help us to extend the impact of these observations,” she added. We spoke in the Times’s employee cafeteria earlier this week.

That’s how one particular Pulitzer-Prize-winning series of stories, that was reported by Sarah and her colleagues at The Washington Post was born....MORE

HT: O'Reilly Strata: