With big investigative journalism projects like the Panama Papers leak and the Uber scandal making headlines across the world, people in the journalism industry are realising how essential data skills are for their newsrooms.
Finding stories in data can seem like a daunting task at first, but learning how to tap into this story-rich source is a vital skill for journalists across many subjects and specialisms.
In this two-day, online workshop, award-winning data journalist Crina Boros will shine a light on sourcing, cleaning and interpreting data, and how to turn it into relevant stories for your audience.
With a focus on easily accessible techniques and apps, this course aims to help any journalist or researcher- whether freelance, local or in a large newsroom or working for the third sector or in academia - harness the power of data analysis and storytelling to improve their investigative skills.
What you will learn
Day one:
- What data journalism is and what it isn’t
- Examples of how data journalism is applied in news and investigative reporting
- Descriptive statistics (Tip: it’s easy!)
- Understanding common data jargon
- How to use sorting and filtering questions
- How to use pivot tables and combine the skills learnt so far with research
- How to visualise information with a timeline, a map or excel.
Day two:
- How to find data online and in multiple jurisdictions
- How to extract data from PDFs and other document types
- How to clean data with openRefine and Excel
- A presentation of popular data visualisation tools
- Other practical tools to use in data-driven reporting.
This course is suitable for journalists who are new to data analysis and design, but who have a few years of experience of reporting. It's also for researchers, academics, campaigners, and reporters that have some data analysis and/or investigative journalism experience.
What you will need
- A laptop with a full version of Excel installed
- Admin rights on your machine
- Windows users: Excel 2010 or newer
- Apple users: Excel 2016 or newer
- Google Sheet users: participate only if you are very familiar with functions in Google
- An email address.
It will not work with - Excel online or tablet versions; Libre; Numbers.
Getting there
This course will take place on Monday 27 and Tuesday 28 March. Each session will take place on Zoom and run from 9am to 5pm, with lunch and comfort breaks.
About Crina Boros
Crina Boros is a freelance, award-winning investigative journalist, reporting on conflicts of interest, vulnerable groups, ill policies and use of public funds. She published with ICIJ (Swiss Leaks), Euobserver, BBC, Thomson Reuters, Greenpeace, OffshoreAlert and the BlackSea among many, producing front-page features and watchdog reporting. She trains data journalism internationally and is an alumni and mentor at Journalism Fund and Forbidden Stories.
