1. What is data journalism?
Cody Winchester, IRE/NICAR
@cody_winchester

2. Data journalism, CAR, “quantitative journalism”
Using computers to help you solve reporting problems
CAR = Computer-Assisted Reporting
Focusing on numerical evidence, not just anecdote, to tell stories
Common pattern: Analyze data to find trend/test hypotheses, use anecdotes to help tell story
Using data to investigate leads almost always results in a better story than “I wonder if there’s a story in this data”

3. Buzzfeed/BBC: Tennis match-fixing
BuzzFeed News began its investigation after devising an algorithm to analyse gambling on professional tennis matches over the past seven years. It identified 15 players who regularly lost matches in which heavily lopsided betting appeared to substantially shift the odds – a red flag for possible match-fixing.
Analysis methodology and code

4. ProPublica/Consumer Reports: Insurance
Our analysis of premiums and payouts in California, Illinois, Texas and Missouri shows that some major insurers charge minority neighborhoods as much as 30 percent more than other areas with similar accident costs.

5. Bristol Herald Courier: Mineral lease payments
Of about 750 active individual accounts in escrow, between 22 percent and 55 percent received no royalty payments during months when the corresponding wells produced gas over an 18-month period, a Bristol Herald Courier investigation has found.
(2010 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Public Service)

6. Omaha World-Herald: Prison sentences
A World-Herald investigation showed that Nebraska prison officials — using a flawed formula to calculate sentences — had wrongly released or were set to release dozens of prisoners years before their sentences were supposed to end.

7. What do data look like?
XLS / XLSX
CSV / TSV / TXT
JSON
DBF
XML

8. What do data look like?

9. What do data look like?

10. What do data look like?

11. What do data look like?

12. The process
Obtain data → clean/verify/prep data (80% of the work) → analyze data → report/visualize

13. A set of data is like a human source
You ask it questions
You follow up
You understand how it knows the answers

14. What tools can you use to ask data questions?
Spreadsheets (Excel, Google Sheets, OpenOffice, etc.)
Database managers (Access, SQLite, MySQL, Postgres, etc.)
Programming languages (R, Python, etc.)

15. Data journalism: What it can do for you
Helps you ask better questions, report more efficiently
Quantifying information means you can visualize it for your audience
Gives your journalism more authority
Working with structured data makes watchdog reporting easier
Context for breaking news coverage

16. Data journalism: What it can’t do for you
Doesn’t replace shoe-leather reporting
Data = always messy
Great for the what, not the why
Treat data like any other source: with care, skepticism and curiosity
Understand how it’s collected and kept
Get the methodology
Data are created by humans
Humans make mistakes
Humans have agendas