Resources for data journalists

Resources for data journalists
by Ed Cox

At a glance...

Alist of useful videos, blogs, website, books, research papers and tweeters to help data journalists find and work with data.

Data journalism is growing in popularity and the internet provides a wealth of resources for the budding data journalist.

How to do data journalism

Read Paul Bradshaw's excellent article "The Inverted Pyramid of Data Journalism" for an overview of the process.

The Inverted Pyramid of Data Journalism

Where to find data

Central government

Local government

Local government is beginning to make an effort to publish open data as part of their commitment to transparency. You can download information regarding public services and facilities (such as information about libraries, leisure facilities, bus timetables) as well as their spending.

An emerging standard seems to be making this information available at www.councilname.gov.uk/opendata, but if that doesn't work, try using their search engine to search "open data".

Here are a few examples:

Find other information about local authorities at OpenlyLocal, which attempts to gather publicly-available open data into a single database. You can also use it to search for local news websites & blogs.

Other public bodies

Freedom of Information (FoI)

Make a request for information from a public body or browse previous requests at WhatDoTheyKnow.com

Keep up with daily FoI-related news at Hold the Front Page or journalism.co.uk.

Media

The Guardian collects and interprets a vast amount of publicly-available data and even blogs about the process, so is a great source of inspiration as well as education.

Guardian Data
Guardian Data Blog
COINS data explorer - public spending data

Search engines

Google has some powerful tools to search websites which may not be immediately obvious. For example, you can restrict your searches to specific websites and to filetypes using a couple of simple parameters:

the query "filetype:xls" searches the Internet for all Excel spreadsheets
the query "filetype:xls site:gov.uk" searches all UK government websites for spreadsheets
the query "filetype:pdf site:manchester.gov.uk report" searches the Manchester City Council website for all PDFs containing the word "report"

Live data

Social networks such as Twitter area great source of news stories and particularly of sentiments regarding a current topic or event. Much of the 2011 England riots unfolded on social media, as the public warned others of hotspots to avoid while many rioters posted videos of the looting and photographed themselves with their pickings.

Use tools such as Tweetmeme to find the hottest stories right now, or visual tools such as TrendsMap to find what's trending in a particular part of the world.

Your own research

Set up surveys, questionnaires or post questions onto your social networks to collect information and gather intelligence.

Find other sources and ideas at the Online Journalism Blog.

Crowdsourcing tools

Videos

“Journalism in the Age of Data” a one-hour video report about using data visualisations to tell stories produced by Stanford University in 2010.
BBC College of Journalism’s Frontline Cub event about making sense of data