Data journalism is thriving worldwide, but is American journalism education keeping up? Funded by the Knight Foundation, our research team set out to survey and analyze the state of data journalism education in the U.S. today. The results are being published and available online as a free report, Teaching Data and Computational Journalism, that provides model curricula for a range of computational and data journalism courses.
There are things that happen with such regularity and predictability that journalists have simply ceased to recognize their news value – not least if those things are least likely to happen to the people most likely to be journalists. That much of what we have come to accept as commonplace has dulled our curiosity to why so much of what is commonplace is unacceptable; that given the prevailing and escalating inequalities and inequities, we simply do not occupy the same worlds we portend to cover – even when those worlds are right on our door step.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top links for Mar. 3-8: designing lists (@edwardtufte); Zurich streets (@NZZ); Lesbos journey (@washingtonpost); Google Maps storytelling (@GoogleNewsLab); German bridges (@SPIEGELONLINE); data science guides (@KirkDBorne); and more.
In part one of this blog I discussed the need for journalists to save evidence they find online and some of the techniques for recording that information. In part two, I’ll focus on some of the issues journalists face when it comes to saving information from social media and mobile devices.
As journalists we are used to saving information. We securely store documents, keep meticulous notes, save and back up important emails on our computers. But what about the information we find online during the course of our investigations?
This is not just about getting the money; it is about creating a faithful community of readers. In a way, they are searching for the lost group of loyal subscribers to traditional newspapers who would call the newsroom in times of crisis as if journalists were family.
GIJN lent a hand to the Thai Broadcast Journalists Association last month, helping train 60 journalists in the fine art of muckraking in Thailand. “The ending workshop was quite amazing,” Hanson says. “They worked with an intensity that was really impressive, developing story ideas they had generated the first day… “I believe some of these stories will be published!”
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top links for Feb. 23-Mar. 1: earthdata search (@ddjournalism); Hyblab #ddj projects (@hyblab); Is data journalism for everybody?; a city transformation in 3D (@LeTelegramme); Spanish data presentation (@cabralens); & more.
The movie Spotlight, based on the Boston Globe’s investigative reporting into pedophilia inside the Catholic Church, won best picture and best screenplay at the 2016 Academy Awards late Sunday. “We would not be here today without the heroic efforts of our reporters,” declared producer Blye Pagon Faust as she accepted the award. “Not only do they effect global change, but they absolutely show us the necessity of investigative journalism.”
