The Data Journalism Handbook: How Journalists Can Use Data to Improve the News

by Jonathan Gray, Lucy Chambers, Liliana Bounegru

Overview

When you combine the sheer scale and range of digital information now available with a journalist’s "nose for news" and her ability to tell a compelling story, a new world of possibility opens up. With The Data Journalism Handbook, you’ll explore the potential, limits, and applied uses of this new and fascinating field.

This valuable handbook has attracted scores of contributors since the European Journalism Centre and the Open Knowledge Foundation launched the project at MozFest 2011. Through a collection of tips and techniques from leading journalists, professors, software developers, and data analysts, you’ll learn how data can be either the source of data journalism or a tool with which the story is told—or both.

• Examine the use of data journalism at the BBC, the Chicago Tribune, the Guardian, and other news organizations
• Explore in-depth case studies on elections, riots, school performance, and corruption
• Learn how to find data from the Web, through freedom of information laws, and by "crowd sourcing"
• Extract information from raw data with tips for working with numbers and statistics and using data visualization
• Deliver data through infographics, news apps, open data platforms, and download links

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781449330064
Publisher:	O'Reilly Media, Incorporated
Publication date:	08/02/2012
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	238
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Jonathan Gray is Head of Community and Culture at the Open Knowledge Foundation (okfn.org), an award winning not-for-profit organization dedicated to promoting open data, open content and the public domain in a wide variety of different fields. He founded several data journalism projects at the OKFN, including OpenSpending.org, which maps public spending around the world, and Europe's Energy, which puts EU energy targets into context. He is doing research in philosophy and the history of ideas at Royal Holloway, University of London. More about him can be found at jonathangray.org.

Lucy Chambers is a Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge
Foundation. She works on the OKFN's OpenSpending.org project and
Spending Stories, a Knight News Challenge Winner 2011 - helping journalists build context around and fact check spending data. She also coordinates the data-driven-journalism activities of the
Foundation, running training sessions for journalists on how to find,
work with and present data.

Liliana Bounegru is project manager on Data Journalism at the European Journalism Centre (in Maastricht) and editor of DataDrivenJournalism.net, a collection of useful resources for those who want to get started with data journalism. She is a Research MA candidate in Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: In The Newsroom
• Chapter 3: Case Studies
• Chapter 4: Getting Data
• Chapter 5: Understanding Data
• Chapter 6: Delivering Data
• Colophon