Data Journalism Training Courses

Looking to learn a new programming language or improve your spreadsheet skills? These online vendors offer free or low-cost online courses and video tutorials on a variety of topics and languages.

Check GIJN’s YouTube page for the free webinars.

The Social Data School, led by Cambridge Digital Humanities in association with the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, is an application only online intensive teaching program structured around the life-cycle of a digital research project, covering principles of research design, data collection, cleaning, and preparation, methods of analysis and visualization, and data management and preservation practices. In 2022, the school will take place from 15 to 28 June.

Python Dictionaries: A Comprehensive Tutorial (with 52 Code Examples) by Dataquest. Published in 2022.

Flowing Data offers a plethora of tutorials that will help you visualize your data. You’ll learn how to make cartograms, upset plots, line charts, alluvial diagrams, and a lot more.

Chartable is a Germany-based blog run by the founders of data visualization tool Datawrapper. It includes examples from publications worldwide and how-tos like Your Friendly Guide to Colors in Data Visualization by Lisa Charlotte Rost. In 2022, Rost also published this detailed guide to colors in data visualization style guides, which will also help you create an organizational color palette.

Code Academy provides free, interactive courses in Python, SQL, PHP, C++, R, Java, and more. There is also an option to purchase a pro membership for $20/month billed annually that offers access to a wider variety of courses.

Coursera offers free courses as well as paid specializations (typically $49/month) in data science, statistics, and a variety of programming languages from universities around the world. Courses are offered in English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, French, and several other languages.

Datawrapper materials for workshops.

edX hosts free online courses in programming and data analysis and statistics in a variety of languages, including English, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, French, and German. Students can also pay an optional $99 fee to receive a certificate when they complete a course.

Investigative Reporters and Editors and has online training.

Google News Initiative offers free online training materials for journalists, with a particular focus on using Google tools in data journalism.

Khan Academy provides free online video tutorials and hands-on exercises in HTML, CSS, JS, and SQL languages.

MIT OpenCourseware offers free online courses in Python, Java, and MATLAB. Each course comes with video lectures and interactive assignments.

Poynter’s News University offers online webinars and self-directed courses in a wide range of topics within journalism, including data analysis, investigative journalism, ethics, and storytelling methods. Many of the courses require a fee, but a number of free courses are available.

Propublica has published YouTube video tutorials on data-related topics: Introduction to Code, How Websites Work, HTML, Basic CSS, and CSS Classes.

The Investigative Journalism Education Consortium has a collection of syllabi from educators who teach data journalism. IJEC’s site also contains other resources, such as sample data for teaching.

Learn Data Journalism basics with THE OUTLIER, a free, six-part email series. Each part of the series will walk you through the key issues you should know about and the tools you can use. (2023)