Mindy McAdams has created a Storify featuring lots of examples of data journalism to inspire budding data journalists, as well as background reading and other resources, which she has posted on her blog.
Examples include projects by the New York Times and ProPublica.
Tipster: Rachel McAthy
If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link– we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.
Poynter has a helpful lesson in Excel and other spreadsheet software for journalists dealing with data.
The post explains how to split names in a single column to two columns, for example.
Poynter’s post on how journalists can use Excel to organise data for stories is at this link.
There will be a workshop on data journalism – led by Simon Rogers, editor of the Guardian’s Datastore and Datablog – at Journalism.co.uk’s news:rewired – media in motion conference for journalists. The news:rewired agenda is at this link.
Tipster: Sarah Marshall
If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link– we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.
Tool of the week: Codeacademy
What is it? Free tutorials in basic JavaScript
How is it of use to journalists? The rise in data journalism, an interest in Hacks/Hackers meetups and collaboration between journalists and developers has led to many journalists to express a wish to start coding. But where to start?
Codeacademy is a learning tool that offers tutorials to get you started. So far there are only a couple of courses on the site but they are free and superbly designed.
The homepage gets you to begin entering a bit of JavaScript and you soon find yourself progressing though the tutorial. There is a progress bar to show you how much of the course you have completed and reward badges to give you the equivalent of the teacher’s gold star.
You might well find you quickly learn simple JavaScript that has a useful application for you as a journalist. For example, within the first five minutes you learn that writing “.length” at the end of a word or phrase gives you the character count. You can then open an editor (using Chrome from a Mac the command is ALT+CMD+J), paste the headline of a news story, add “.length” and you will have the character count of the headline.
The 10,000 Words blog has posted five top tricks for filing blog posts from the field using WordPress.com. The tips include WordPress’ mobile apps, adding hyperlinks, call-in audio posts and adding geolocation to posts.
Read them all here.
Tipster: Rachel McAthy
If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.
Over on the HelpMeInvestigate blog Paul Bradshaw has compiled an incredibly useful list of five ways to simplify investigations. The tips include writing a hypothesis, breaking down the process into more manageable tasks and keeping a record. He also offers plenty of tools and resources to help put these tips into action.
Tipster: Rachel McAthy
If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.
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