Data journalism, the process of gathering and filtering the information tucked away in spreadsheets and facts and figures, is a growing field.
Khalid Khattak, reporter at The News International in Pakistan, notes that the wide range of free, easy-to-use online tools that allow journalists to unlock data sets and tell stories in different ways has opened up new opportunities for journalists and enabled smaller newsrooms to break bigger stories.
In an article on IJNet, Khattak explains that journalists looking for data sets would do well to begin with the statistical office of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and to take note of the free tools such as Online OCR to help them extract text from PDFs and convert the data into an Excel or Word file.
He also lays out some of the data visualisation and storytelling tools available to journalists looking to present engaging and interesting stories, such as Canva and Pixel Map.
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