The IRE office will be closed from December 25th to January 5th.
Posts by hdcoadmin
Beyond charts, making interactives fun
Fun does not equal fluff. Spice up data viz and you can “take a wonky topic and personalize it,” said Tasneem Raja of Mother Jones in the “Making interactives fun” session. Also, fun interactives build your credibility for the hard-nosed investigations down the line. When readers see how you deftly handle dog license data they…
Read MoreInside baseball: What data journalism can learn from sports
Photos by Travis Hartman What if you could predict a hospital’s quality of care the same way baseball statisticians can predict a pitcher’s season or a team’s record? The sports world has long been using statistics in creative ways — and Ryan Pitts, Jeremy Bowers and Matt Waite say journalists can and should tap into…
Read MoreDashboards for reporting
Think of a data dashboard as a bird’s-eye view of data that gets automatically updated in real-time. It’s like a news app meant only for internal use, and the ultimate goal is to make repeat reporting processes more efficient. Aaron Bycoffe of The Huffington Post and Derek Williams and Jacob Harris of The New York…
Read MoreThe one-query story: quick hits for your newsroom
Not all data reporting needs to be a long-term project. Quick-hit queries are helpful for feeding the beast with substance, and they’re a great way for reporters new to computer-assisted reporting get used to the process. The best advice, regardless of beat, is to develop what IRE Training Director Megan Luther calls an “arsenal.” This…
Read MoreFrom CAR to news apps and back again
Reporting and app development don’t have to be separate processes. In fact, the earlier these workflows are integrated, the more efficient both processes can be. This makes for better reporting and presentation, which amplifies your value for your audiences. This was the main take-away from a power-panel of Lena Groeger, Ted Mellnik, Charles Ornstein, Serdar…
Read MorePhotos from Lightning Talks
Lightning Talks moderator Derek Willis of the New York Times kicks off the event filled with fast paced, pithy presentations. Organized by Willis and New York Times colleague Aron Pilhofer, lightning talks debuted at the 2010 CAR Conference in Phoenix and have grown in popularity — this year’s lightning talks had an overflow crowd. Ben…
Read MoreInspect This: The many uses of inspection data
Take a ride to understand inspection data. Megan Luther of IRE said. Buckle up next to an inspector and get to know their world: how often they inspect, how do they do it? How often? Do they inspect everyone on a set timeline, or just the new kids on the block? What is the inspection…
Read MoreBeware of data – cautionary tips and tales of statistics
A nine year-old girl was beaten to death by her foster brother in Kentucky, but the tragedy did not become a statistic. The state agency in charge of counting abused children didn’t categorize it as a death, attorney Jon Fleischaker said in the “Legal issues, access and big data” session. Local and state government goes…
Read MoreData viz on a shoestring
The plethora of data visualization tools available these days creates a high-quality problem: a lack of resources to create visualizations becomes a hard task of choosing which of the many to use. Sharon Machlis of Computerworld offers a rapid-fire, well organized and nearly comprehensive inventory of data visualization tools that can be deployed for little…
Read MoreSmarter interactive web projects with Google spreadsheets and Tabletop.js
Using tabletop.js, one editor and two researcher, presenter Tasneem Raja of Mother Jones got the remarkable 47% graphic online for Mother Jones in under five hours. If that’s not reason enough for you to try tabletop.js, consider this: Raja says Tabletop has been an absolute “game changer” for the Mother Jones newsroom. Think of tabletop.js…
Read More