Data Journalism

Chris Knox

Data Editor at the New Zealand Herald (in August 2019)

chris@functionalvis.com

20 September, 2019

Recap

  • What is a chart?
    • Bad charts
    • Chart choice
  • Workbench
  • Maps

Breakout

In pairs discuss these:

  • What do you think of these approaches?
    • Do you like them?
    • Are there other ways you would prefer to learn about this data?
  • Are they journalism?
  • Are they news?

NZH Improvements

I probably should have included a median income version as well as an average income version.

Digressions — Why?

All summary statistics hide things

The mean and standard deviation are the same for each of these graphs

Back to
Labour vs National

What would inflation adjusted median household income look like?

How would you do that?

  • First look on Figure.NZ
  • Follow back to Stats NZ
  • Stats NZ has two primary data sources
  • (At this point you can call StatsNZ)
  • Look in the income sections and look for household income

Data tables have overly complicated names like:

Household income by region, household type, and source of household income

This is useful if you want to do something about regions - but often we just want to look for totals.