By H.G. Watson

Any freelance journalist has tools they rely on, whether it is a specific brand of pens or an addiction to Google News. But at the Ink + Beyond and Canadian Association of Journalists conference in Ottawa on May 2-4, Fred Vallance-Jones and David McKie encouraged writers to add a few new tools to their kit: those that help them understand and source data.

“Data journalism seems intimidating,” said Vallance-Jones, a professor at King’s College journalism program in Halifax. “[but you’re] taking computer skills and applying them to journalism.”

A growing number of news outlets are using data journalism to generate stories, whether it’s the research that’s behind a long form feature or the driving force behind a data visualization project. Both Vallance-Jones and McKie – a CBC reporter – pointed to stories like Global News “The Gardiner – Trouble overhead” as examples of stories that were built around large amounts of data. It was quickly made clear that journalists who have the skills and abilities to work with data will be desirable for many media outlets.

But how do you learn and practice those skills without going back to school? Vallance-Jones and McKie both pointed out a number of ways writers can start getting comfortable with data journalism.

• If you’re starting from square one, you might want a reference guide that helps you read spreadsheets. Vallance-Jones and McKie co-authored a book on computer assisted reporting that you can purchase online. There are also free, open-source data journalism books that you can use to ground yourself with the basics.
• Google offers several free programs that you can use to crunch data, such as the spreadsheet function in Google Docs. Google Fusion will take that data and allow you to create visualizations with it. For example, you could take the data from collisions at different intersections in your city and put them on a map using Fusion.
• Several municipalities, such as Waterloo, now post data resources on their websites. They serve as a great resource for stories or to simply get used to looking at large amounts of data.
• If you want to learn how to do advanced data applications such as scraping data from websites, you may want to learn how to do some basic coding. Many local colleges offer courses in simple languages like Python. Or you could use Codeacademy, a free, online education course that covers a number of computer tools.

While these tools are a great new source for writers, it’s important to remember that’s exactly what they are – a source. “It’s still about telling journalistic stories,” said Vallance-Jones. “Data is another kind of source for you.”

 

HG Watson is the Editor-in-Chief of the Cord Community Edition in Waterloo, On.