This week our top ten in data journalism features stories digging into the link between Ebola outbreaks and deforestation, on the stark impact of global warming on everything from crop yields to species loss, and the undeniable increase in the number of hot nights in Singapore.
Data journalism has evolved from simple spreadsheet analysis of local government data to the spectacular tracking of the hidden wealth of oligarchs, autocrats, and corporate leaders from gigantic datasets. In a session at GIJC21, leading data journalists looked at this transition but also, at what is next.
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.
More than ever, investigative journalists need to understand electronic data to do their jobs. To find, extract, analyze and tell stories, increasingly they need to deal with spreadsheets, databases, and visualizations. Nils Mulvad (https://x.com/nmulvad) is an Investigative journalist based in Denmark, who has worked with data journalism for more than 20 years. Visit GIJN’s resource […]
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from Sept 4 to 10 has @FastCoDesign bringing the #EndtheRainbow argument to the fore, @puddingviz analyzing driving times to abortion clinics in the US and @nsuwatch dissecting a trial involving a German terrorist organization by the numbers.
Whether it’s tables of data embedded in reports or spreadsheets saved as PDFs, journalists get lots of data in PDF format. But until you get that data into a spreadsheet, there’s not much you can do with it. Luckily, there are a few great tools that can liberate your data quickly and with relative ease.
Here are the hottest data journalism tweets for Jan 23-29, per our NodeXL mapping: 100 Years of infographics (@NatGeoMag); Trump’s wall size (@thetruesize); Women’s March (@womensmarch); journocoding (@journocode); dataset viz 25 ways (@flowingdata); dataviz stocktake (@eagereyes); & more.
What a year… We’ve been Trumped and Brexited, blitzed by bogus news, and fighting to protect good journalism pretty much everywhere. But there were flashes of hope and better days. The Spotlight movie and Panama Papers showed the world what great reporting can do. As the year draws to a close, we’d like to share the 10 most popular stories on our site that have grabbed the attention of our dear readers.
