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Build your own. The training is really customized for you. Our list of road-tested data files is growing every month. We may have data files already prepared to fit your news organization. Or we can develop new material to suit your needs.
Here are some modules already developed for previous NICAR training sessions, which we can mix and match for your news organization. Each uses data drawn from real-world stories and stresses reporting as much as computer skills. And each provides new tips and strategies for coaxing data from unwilling pubic officials.
Modules for Spreadsheets (Microsoft Excel only) include:
Modules for Database managers (Access, FoxPro or Paradox) include:
- Beginning, for reporters who have used personal computers or spreadsheets, but have never used them for news stories.
- Importing simple files from Internet sites. Once you've found data, how can you use it new ways?
- Importing more complex files. It's not always as easy as it seems.
- Building spreadsheet skills: Various modules using filtering and pivot tables, complex formulas, dates and times, and lookup tables.
Modules for Internet (requires live Internet access, usually in a computer lab on site or at a university) include:
- Beginning, for reporters who have never seen a relational database program. Learn how to filter out information on newsworthy people and places for your audience.
- Summarizing to find the most, the least, the best and the worst from a database.
- Joining databases for more details.
- Joining databases that no one ever meant for you to join.
- Building databases for long-running stories, like public works projects and court cases. Use database managers to help you pull together the pieces of any complex story.
- Reading databases from government agencies and importing from spreadsheets and the Internet.
- Building database skills: Various modules encompassing complex queries, calculations, cleaning dirty data, and creating data-entry and lookup forms for your newsroom.
Modules for Numbers, Statistics and SPSS include:
- A strategy for using the Internet as a reporting tool. (This can be done as a demonstration or hands-on).
- Verifying information you find on the Internet: Evaluating sources
- Finding people and facts using the Internet
- Issues in Internet reporting: PDF files, HTML tables and public records databases that limit your use.
- Beat reporting on the Internet: We're always updating our list of beat-specific Internet modules. They include business and economics, crime, and federal government sources for local reporters.
Modules for Mapping (ArcView only) include:
- Danger! Numbers in the Newsroom. A workshop away from computers to build comfort and confidence in reporting and writing with numbers.
- Modules in basic to advanced statistical analysis using SPSS.
- Reporting on school reports using statistical techniques.
- The Census as an invaluable source for reporting.
Modules for Programming (and technical skills for journalists) include:
- Visualizing data by making maps: Crime, dangerous dams and poverty.
- Advanced mapping techniques.
If you don't see the session or the software you'd like, just ask. We're happy to design new modules for your needs.
- Using basic programming skills to work with dirty data, like names and addresses.
- More advanced programming for reading government data.
