Paul Bradshaw from Birmingham City University says:
Data can be the source of data journalism, or it can be the tool with which the story is told — or it can be both.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism says:
Data journalism is simply journalism.
The former is a new and trendy term but ultimately, it is just a way of describing journalism in the modern world.
The New Zealand Herald, Stuff, and RNZ all have specialist data journalists.
Nobody is trained as a data journalist - data journalists are either journalists who have taught themselves more data analysis and visualisation or they have come from a data analysis background into journalism
COVID-19 has changed the role of data journalism in many news organisations. Data is becoming more prominent in live or daily news.
The most important aspect of a chart is the
Tip: Think about the
alt-text
The best way to get a sense for bad charts is to peruse vis.wtf or /r/dataisugly. There is also a good writeup here
The most common bad things are:
There is
Figure.NZ’s mission is to get the people of New Zealand using data to thrive.
This includes being very happy to help journalists if you reach out with questions about New Zealand data
If you can only remember two things - remember add /data.csv
to Figure.NZ urls
Sometimes the data used to create the chart you see is only part of a data set. So
don’t use data from /data.csv
calculate percentages.