Data on the gap between rich and poor, privileged and marginalized, tends to be nuanced or hard to find. But amid warnings that the COVID-19 pandemic will accelerate the gap between rich and poor, investigative reporters need new tools to show the scale and implications of these gaps. From audiographs to drone imagery, and featuring tips from South Africa and Brazil, we share some of these methods here.
For our “My Favorite Tools” series, we spoke with Brazilian journalist Gustavo Faleiros, editor of environmental investigations at the Pulitzer Center where he leads the Rainforest Investigations Network (RIN), about mapping deforestation and using data to chart what is happening in global forests.
For our series on journalists’ favorite tools, we spoke to Alberto Cairo, head of visualization at the University of Miami’s Institute for Data Science and Computing. Cairo shared several user-friendly tools and core principles to help investigative reporters shape their data visually to create new insights for audiences.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from October 9 to 15 has @RTSinfo looking into flight sharing platform @Wingly_UK, while @srfdata finds millions of fake @instagram followers, @jwyg charts the growth of all Internet sites, and @nytimes collaborates with @AmstatNews to promote critical thinking and data literacy.
Here are the hottest data journalism tweets for Jan 16-22, per our NodeXL mapping: dataviz catalog (@flowingdata); Inaugurations compared (@pewresearch); big data & polls (@ddjournalism); Hispanics in America (@UniNoticias); Le Monde data (@decodeurs); Obama’s record (@nytimes); & more.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top links for May 3-12: #ddj awards (@GENinnovate); China’s EU stereotypes (@foreignpolicy); Atlantic slave trade (@slate); French employment (@Data_Match); Germany’s green cities (@morgenpost); bubble maps (@datawrapper); & more.
People regularly ask what tools to use or what programming language to learn for data-driven journalism (ddj). There is no right answer for it, especially considering that technology and tools available are evolving quickly in the field.
