Hey all, Alex here again with another webinar recap. This week, I teamed up with the fabulous Caspar from Silk to demonstrate how easy it can be to incorporate data into your journalism stories. This ever popular trend has been sweeping the journalism community in recent years, and Caspar and I were keen to show you how you can take advantage of this trend without adding too much to your already overflowing workload.
What is Data Journalism?
Data journalism is exactly what it sounds like. It’s all about using data to enhance your stories. The great thing about data is that is can be the used as the source of story or to simply reinforce the story you’re already writing. By using data to help make your points, you automatically lend a certain amount of credibility. It also help you to explain complex topics to your audience by creating engaging infographics or graphs.
Here’s a great way to show Kickstarter success by country.
Why You Should Invest in DJ
The incredible popularity of subreddits like r/DataIsBeautiful and Nate Silver’s FiveThiryEight blog speak volumes to the growing demand for data-driven stories. In this day and age, audiences are both becoming better informed and more skeptical. No matter what you’re writing – you had better have proof.
In response to this trend, Data Journalism has become a very popular method of writing stories and articles. Some journalism schools have even started teach Data Journalism as part of the curriculum. The great news for budding Data Journalists is that there is loads of great data spread across the web. In fact, many Governments are succumbing to the Open Data movement and making their data publicly available.
How Can You Become a DJ without a Statistics Major?
Regardless of what kind of data you want to include in your story, finding it is often only half the challenge. Once you know where it is, you’ve got to get it into a spreadsheet so you can analyze it and visualize it for publication.
Luckily for you, there are loads of free tools that you can use to help you do all of these tasks. And that’s just what my webinar was all about – watch the video to see how to use import.io and silk to make a story about new companies on Kickstarter: