Our weekly curation of the most popular data journalism stories on Twitter highlights non-fatal US police shootings, the rise and fall of COVID billionaires, racial disparities in internet service and road safety programs, and Minnesota’s great Halloween blizzard of 1991.
In a recent Q+A, environmental reporter Mark Olalde discussed a collaborative investigation on the impact of abandoned oil wells and other extractive industry infrastructure on nearby communities. The investigation won second place in the investigative reporting category at the awards of the Society of Environmental Journalists.
Satellite imagery provides information that can enhance the ability to write compelling narratives about the state of our planet, cutting across multiple beats. But such a tool tends to be complex and out of the reach for many journalists, so this guide offers a process that reporters interested in covering the climate crisis can use for story projects.
In a lightning round session at #GIJC21, a panel of leading reporters and editors needed just five minutes each to outline new tools and databases that any reporter can use to gather hard-to-find facts.
On the second day of GIJC21, journalists from Brazil, Indonesia, and The Netherlands offer tips and tools on how to cover what may be the most important story we ever dig into: how humanity copes with the unprecedented challenge of climate change.
Tracking some of the most popular data journalism stories on Twitter from August 23 to 29, we found a thread by Financial Times journalist John Burn-Murdoch exploring what we know so far about the long-term effects of immunizations, a look into the pandemic’s impact on the global female workforce by The Washington Post, and an investigation into teen pregnancies in Peru by OjoPúblico.
Many reporters never notice the “inspect element” option below the “copy” and save-as” functions in the right-click menu on any webpage related to their investigation. But it turns out that this little-used web inspector tool can dig up a wealth of hidden information from a site’s source code, reveal the raw data behind graphics, and download images and videos that supposedly cannot be saved.
Homeschooling has presented many challenges to parents and legal guardians of children around the world, with many dissatisfied with the online learning experience. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from April 26 to May 2 found a piece by Voxeurop highlighting that most people in Europe aren’t keen on their kids continuing to study remotely even if provided with the necessary materials and support. In this edition, we also feature an interactive project by the Guardian exploring disappearing glaciers, a look at Stephen Curry’s remarkable basketball records by The Washington Post, and an archive of publications using data sonification to tell stories.
Data analysis and visualization expert Hassel Fallas explains how the visual presentation of facts provided much-needed understanding amid the uncertainties of the COVID-19 pandemic. She also shared some of her favorite examples of pandemic data visualization from around the world in 2020.
The US presidential election dominated the Twitter chat waves last week. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from November 2 to 8 found data journalists sharing live election results trackers by Bloomberg, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, while The Atlantic and Slate weighed in on the problems of polling. Elsewhere open source platform Mapbox is organizing an election mapping contest, and Lazer Lab created a dashboard to explore 29 million tweets related to COVID-19 shared by over half a million Americans.
