With just a spreadsheet, a journalist can let the software do the counting and calculating, allowing them to concentrate on the purpose and result of their inquiry. It also opens the door to understanding more advanced statistics, and the use or misuse of statistics by governments and businesses.
Being struck by lightning is often used as an example of heavenly retribution because it is so unlikely. Fatalities due to lightning are statistical outliers, since most people struck by lightning survive. So what is the best way to avoid becoming one of these outliers? The following is a step-by-step set of instructions for unpacking a dataset – and being careful about the conclusions we draw.
The Global Investigative Journalism Conference is the world’s premier international gathering of investigative journalists held every two years. The next conference in 2021 will be an especially significant event as GIJC will be celebrating its 20th anniversary. GIJN, which oversees the conferences, is now accepting proposals from GIJN member organizations for the 12th Global Investigative Journalism Conference.
The figures for Canada’s Jewish population dropped by half in five years. But nothing happened to this Jewish population. Rather, this is a perfect example of how careful we must be about data collection methods.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from March 11 to March 17 finds @davduf’s award-winning exposé of Yellow Vest injuries in France, @theboysmithy making music out of the yield curve, and @alisonkilling on mapping two fictional migrants’ journeys to Europe.
GIJN invited data scientists and experts who have been focusing on data journalism in China for years to select the most noteworthy data news of 2018. Here’s what they told us.
There are two ways to use machine learning in journalism: as part of investigative reporting, or as a day-to-day tool to make journalists’ lives easier. But the journalism industry is still scratching the surface when it comes to machine learning and deep learning.
In Hungary, nonprofit news site Átlátszó has hired a full-time data team to create a wide range of data visualizations and data-driven stories, notably on corruption. Amanda Loviza spoke to the team’s leader Attila Bátorfy about his plans to raise the bar for data journalism in Hungary.
For the 50th anniversary of the riots that rocked Washington, DC after Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, the Washington Post mapped the extent of the rioting throughout the city thanks to data compiled from declassified Secret Service reports and archival city planning documents.
After a landmark New Jersey supreme court ruling made police use-of-force reports fully available to the public, NJ Advance Media decided to dig in. They fought tooth and nail to get their hands on the reports and create the United States’ most comprehensive statewide database on this issue.
