Posts tagged 'data'
Giving data journalism a second shot
Posted: April 24, 2018 | Tags: data
Photo by Jeff Watts, AU
David Rodriguez, who recently graduated from San Francisco State University, leaves his IRW internship and heads to a public-radio station in Los Angeles.
Flying from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., for an internship was a nerve-racking way to start my year. But that jump for a data journalism internship with The Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University was the best choice I’ve made this year.
My first data internship was at Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. I was very new to SQL and had a basic sense of Excel. I tackled ...
A journalist who sought to democratize data
Posted: March 9, 2017 | Tags: data
IRW photo
Data Editor Jennifer LaFleur designed “D-squared” buttons to honor her friend and co-trainer David Donald.
Earlier this year, some of the nation’s top data journalists flew to Washington to pay their respects to one of their own. My Investigative Reporting Workshop colleague David Donald, former data editor at the watchdog journalism nonprofit Center for Public Integrity, died in December after battling cancer. His colleagues gathered to celebrate his life and remarkable professional achievements.
Before he became ill, Donald and his colleagues had been developing a new, more democratic vision for data journalism, one that would invite the ...
Remembering David Donald
Posted: Dec. 11, 2016 | Tags: data
It is with deep sadness that we bring you the news of David Donald's death. David died Saturday at Reston Hospital after a year-long battle with cancer.
David joined SOC and the Investigative Reporting Workshop as a data editor and journalist in residence after a long professional career as an investigative journalist using data and social-science methodology on stories ranging from subprime lenders to the under-reporting of sexual assault on college campuses. One of his last projects for the Workshop involved an investigation into how federal meat and poultry inspectors sometimes fail to identify salmonella, a potentially deadly pathogen ...
Researchers collect data to reform policing
Posted: Nov. 11, 2015 | Tags: data, science, social justice
Earlier this fall, I was invited to attend an extraordinary meeting at the White House. “Open Science and Innovation: Of the People, By the People, For the People” was the coming together of an effort that has been percolating in the federal government for the past couple of years, to engage more citizens in creating and using government data through citizen science and crowdsourcing.
The forum, which drew participants from all over the United States, explored ways to enable ordinary citizens everywhere to collect, analyze and contribute data to government agencies and access it, to help spot problems and devise ...
What we're reading: award-winning journalism
Posted: July 22, 2015 | Tags: computer-assisted reporting, data, journalism, prisons, reporting
One way to constantly improve as a journalist is to observe and learn from the work of others. The May/June issue of Quill, the Society for Professional Journalists bimonthly magazine, included 85 examples of some of the best journalism from 2014. I read investigative journalism stories that debuted in print, broadcast and online formats. No matter the medium, I found the work to be incredibly detailed, insightful and informative. Stories relied on large data sets, public records and human voices to give an in-depth look at various issues from multiple vantage points.
Below are some examples that stood out ...
SRCCON Highlights
Posted: July 9, 2015 | Tags: computer-assisted reporting, data, interactive data, journalism, NICAR, SRCCON
“These are my people,” I heard many attendees at SRCCON (pronounced "source-con") say during the two-day conference in Minneapolis last week.
SRCCON, first conceived at NICAR, and now in its second year, wanted to feature the hallway conversations, skillshares and collaborations that happen naturally at bigger conferences and make them the highlight of the event. The small conference, organized by Knight-Mozilla OpenNews, drew 225 people — news developers, data journalists, designers, editors and reporters from The New York Times and Quartz to local NPR stations and freelance journalists.
I went to the conference as a volunteer, helping people register and running ...
Data editor trains Belgium journalists
Posted: Nov. 4, 2014 | Tags: data
David Donald, the Workshop’s new data editor, will be in Kortrijk, Belgium, through Sunday, representing the School of Communication and the Investigative Reporting Workshop at the annual investigative journalism conference of the Vereniging van Onderzoeksjournalisten (VVOJ).
Donald will be training reporters from the Netherlands and Belgium in data journalism skills through a hands-on session in database management and analysis. He’ll also give a talk about current trends in data journalism and what it takes to produce a data-driven project that holds up to increasing media scrutiny.
This is Donald’s fourth time training for the VVOJ, a nonprofit ...
