Getting Started in Data Journalism

This document is designed to be a guide to help students and professional journalists get into data journalism. Please add resources and examples of stories (with Github links if applicable) below.

This is designed to be accessible for all. If a resource comes at a cost, please note it if it is not free, and please refrain from putting resources that come at exorbitant costs.

Another list of resources by Gurman Bhatia can be found here as well

Resources

• News Nerdery Slack: This is basically a series of channels where data journalists from around the world communicate. There are channels for different coding languages, a helpme channel, a channel for students, a channel for career advice, job postings, etc. It's a great place to find out what people are talking about and everyone is super open and helpful. I asked a lot of dumb questions on there when I was starting out and frankly still ask a lot of dumb questions. The website is here http://newsnerdery.org and you can email newsnerdery@gmail.com to get added to it.
• Udemy's course "Automate the Boring Stuff" is always discounted so whatever you do don't pay more than $20. Mine is quoted in British pounds but it's £12 which means it's probably $12 or $13 for you.
  https://www.udemy.com/course/automate/
• Using R for data journalism https://learn.r-journalism.com/en/introduction/

• The O'Reilly data science books: "R for Data Science" is great. https://r4ds.had.co.nz/ "Hands-On Programming with R" is the other one of theirs I would recommend https://rstudio-education.github.io/hopr/
• There's also a really nerdy newsletter called "Data is Plural" that you can sign up for here but it's basically submissions of weird data sets and they're all listed here. It's good for if you're hunting for stories or need a test data set to try an analysis https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wZhPLMCHKJvwOkP4juclhjFgqIY8fQFMemwKL2c64vk/edit#gid=0
• There are a bunch of resources about getting started in data journalism from a National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting conference in the States. There are a bunch of resources linked in there.
  PowerPoint: http://bit.ly/learn-coding-ppt
  Tipsheet: bit.ly/nicar-learn-coding, Bootcamps: https://www.ire.org/events-and-training/boot-camps
• Doing Journalism with Data: First Steps, Skills and Tools: https://datajournalism.com/watch/doing-journalism-with-data-first-steps-skills-and-tools
• The Chronicle of Higher Education - Data Journalism and Open Records Workshop For Students: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1a9COCNzqfUCFttA4FkFTyRIEV02Am1Z1rZjfXqN2mEE/edit?usp=sharing 
• MaryJo Webster’s Data Journalism Academy: https://sites.google.com/view/mj-basic-data-academy/home Great resource for learning Excel and R.
• Chrys Wu’s roundup of training materials and presentations from NICAR conferences http://blog.chryswu.com/
• How to Interview a Big Pile of Data: https://training.npr.org/2015/10/15/what-to-do-with-a-big-pile-of-data/ Simple hands-on tutorial about analyzing data using Google Sheets.
• QGIS, which is a free mapping and spatial analysis software: https://www.qgis.org/en/site/

Examples of Published Works

News Apps (creating online tools to explore data)

• Politwoops: https://projects.propublica.org/politwoops/ 
• Represent: https://www.propublica.org/nerds/more-machine-learning-about-congresss-priorities 

Data Reporting (using data analysts and computer coding to feed into traditional reporting)

• STUDENT JOURNALISM EXAMPLES: https://stack.dailybruin.com/
• https://projects.propublica.org/miseducation/
• https://www.wsj.com/articles/saudi-arabia-pumps-up-stock-market-after-bad-news-including-khashoggi-murder-11544727772
• https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2018/investigations/heartbroken/data-methodology/

• https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-wall-street-journal-analyzed-trading-and-profit-in-the-municipal-bond-market-11568302246
• https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article224957145.html
• https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/reader-center/taxi-medallion-investigation.html
• https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2018/11/investigates/police-destroyed-rapekits/about.html
• https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-usa-taser-methodology/how-reuters-tracked-fatalities-and-taser-incidents-idUKKCN1B21AM

Graphics

• https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/dea-pain-pill-database/
• https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/corona-simulator/
• https://graphics.latimes.com/
• https://blog.apps.npr.org
• https://graphics.reuters.com/
• https://observablehq.com/collection/@chicagoreporter/illinois-coronavirus-data (local data-driven embeds with source code)
• https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/learning/over-60-new-york-times-graphs-for-students-to-analyze.html

Newsroom Tooling/Engineering (these are tools journalists build to help journalists report)

• This is a really great news app from ProPublica that uses machine learning to identify lawmakers' top issues and track their political activity https://projects.propublica.org/represent/.
• https://github.com/The-Politico/django-slackchat-serializer
• https://github.com/mcclatchy/gun-deaths
• https://www.propublica.org/article/help-us-monitor-political-ads-online
• https://open.nytimes.com/how-the-new-york-times-uses-software-to-recognize-members-of-congress-29b46dd426c7?gi=72838dc1cb
• https://github.com/GateHouseMedia/hurricane-tools
• A link on this page opens a spreadsheet of examples of journalists and journalism orgs using artificial intelligence — https://www.lse.ac.uk/media-and-communications/polis/JournalismAI/Case-studies 
• Tabula: Helps pull data from PDF’s into a useable format (i.e. CSV’s)

• https://tabula.technology/