
News & Analysis
Journalists Need to Start Taking the Climate Crisis Seriously
In this open letter, Berlin-based journalist Sara Schurmann implores her colleagues worldwide to consider the implications of climate change and how to cover it.
In this open letter, Berlin-based journalist Sara Schurmann implores her colleagues worldwide to consider the implications of climate change and how to cover it.
How fast is the coronavirus spreading in countries around the world? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from September 14 to 20 finds data visualization designer Jan Willem Tulp simulating the speed of COVID-19 infections and German television news program ZDF heute mapping how the pandemic traversed the globe. Meanwhile, Thibi Recipes explores tutoring data journalism as if you’re following a cooking recipe, the Financial Times reports on climate extremes, and ICIJ and Buzzfeed bare suspect financial data.
One of the biggest issues that comes with visualizing election forecasts is how to incorporate uncertainty in a way that is understandable to readers. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from August 10 to 16 finds FiveThirtyEight explaining their election forecast design process and considerations. Elsewhere, The New York Times Magazine has been digging into the collapse of the fashion industry, and the Hong Kong Free Press is teaming up with the Journalism and Media Studies Centre of The University of Hong Kong to expand its protest research archive.
In the midst of the pandemic, some newsrooms haven’t forgotten about the issue of climate change. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from July 20 to 26 found ProPublica partnering with The New York Times Magazine to examine climate migration and where climate refugees are moving to. On the COVID-19 front, FiveThirtyEight revealed the disparities in the availability of testing sites between Black and Hispanic neighborhoods and white areas, broadcaster RBB highlighted that the risk of coronavirus was more keenly felt by low-income earners, and the Google News Initiative and Agência Lupa communicated the impact of the coronavirus by visually putting readers at the epicenter of an outbreak.
The devastating consequences of the coronavirus pandemic can get lost in the mass of numbers presented. Journalists are working hard to humanize the data. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from May 18 to 24 finds The New York Times with a moving tribute to lives lost to COVID-19; Schema Design, the Google News Initiative, and Axios visualizing coronavirus-related Google searches; and The Atlantic revealing the US CDC conflated results of two types of coronavirus tests.
GIJN asked investigative journalists around the world to look ahead at what’s in store for 2020. Here are the trends, key forces, and challenges they expect will affect investigative and data journalism in the coming year, as well as the new skills and approaches we should be thinking about.
Throughout this year, we’ve brought you weekly “snapshots” of the Twitter conversation surrounding data journalism. But this week, we look at what the global data journalism community tweeted about the most during all of 2019. Below you’ll find links to stories from Brazil, Germany, Switzerland, the UK, the US, and elsewhere.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from August 19 to 25 finds Bloomberg mapping the alarming degradation of the Amazon rainforest, Alyssa Fowers discussing variations in visualizing mass shootings and their corresponding impact on readers, Data Carpentry sharing tips for organizing data in spreadsheets, and Atlatszo visualizing the succession of Hungarian kings.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from July 29 to August 4 finds a number of articles related to the climate crisis, including the BBC’s piece on tree planting and its interactive tool on temperatures across the world, as well as Alberto Cairo’s blog post on misleading charts created by climate deniers. We also found useful tips and tools: a data GIF maker by Google News Initiative, Datajournalism.com’s strategies for teaching data journalism, and Paul Bradshaw’s tutorial on how to extract numeric data from phrases.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from July 22 to 28 finds The New York Times analyzing the catalyst behind Hong Kong’s recent protests, National Geographic visualizing human migration in the past 50 years, Ellery Studio’s fun and informative renewable energy coloring book, and The Economist’s findings that Hillary Clinton could have won the 2016 US election if all Americans had turned up to vote.