Dec 2-3, 2019 Data Journalism Training

David McKie
1-613-290-7380 (cell)
Email: davidmckiec@gmail.com

David and Fred are co-authors of
“The Data Journalist: Getting the Story“

David McKie and Jim Bronskill are co-authors of
Your Right To Know: How to Use the Law to
Get Government Secrets

Introduction: What is this course

Generally speaking, data journalism describes three disciplines. First, the use of data analysis and mapping software to spot newsworthy trends; second, the ability to make people see your trend with the help of cloud-based visualization programs such as ArcGIS Online and Tableau Public; third, using coding skills to create interactive web pages and news applications.

This two-day course will focus on the first set of skills, allowing reporters and producers to conduct more in-depth research to get original ideas for daily stories and longer-term projects. The tool of choice will be a spreadsheet, the “Swiss Army knife of data journalism.”

Why is a course like this necessary for journalists?

Because we are awash in data, everything from federal, provincial and municipal open-data portals, to the largest dataset of all, the internet, of which social media is a huge part. In an era where original journalism will help us distinguish us from our competitors and hold policy makers and politicians to account, we can’t afford to ignore this data. Think of it this way, how good would our journalism be if we ignored court documents or company financial reports, arguing that they were too complicated? The answer is obvious. So, then, why would we ignore data just because gaining access to it involves a bit of a learning curve?

The good news is that getting started is far easier than you think.

By the end of the two days, you’ll be ready to return to your newsroom and begin employing your new skills to help tell stories.

Day One

What you will learn on day one

Downloading tables from Statistics Canada
Downloading data from an open-data portal
Light data cleaning
Distinguishing between record level and aggregate data
Sorting filtering
Creating a pivot table
Summing totals
Formatting numbers
How to go beyond the headlines to make pitches

Day Two

What you will learn day two

Continuation of pivot tables
Working with federal political contribution data
Using an If statement to substitute political party names with ID numbers in a new column in federal political contribution dataset
Using Google Sheets to dig into federal political donation data
Continued use of special functions to analyse data
How to find data online
Building data into your workflow

Links

Download deleted dataset by clicking here.

Pipelines

Canada Energy Regulator

Access to information

Access to Information:search through summaries

Access to Information: Proactive Disclosure – Briefing Note Titles and Numbers

British Columbia Completed Freedom of Information Requests

Tutorials

Tutorial: A quick video how-to session on using the agency’s data tables.
https://www.statcan.gc.ca/eng/sc/video/howto

For the tutorial explaining how to download the federal donation data please click here.

To obtain the pivot table tutorial, please click here.

Follow this tutorial which explains how to download, save and open the donations table. Upload the Conservative Party leadership contribution file to Google Sheet. Determine which candidate raised the most money and attracted the highest number of donors.

Google Sheets guide

Google Sheets guide in Excel worksheets

SpiceUpYourSheetLife_ExcelGoogleSheetTips_BenCollins.pdf

Create a pivot table in Google Sheets with the help of this tutorial.

To obtain the tutorial on calculating per cents, please click here.

To obtain the specialized functions tutorial, please click here.

IntroArcGISOnline_media.pdf

To download the ArcGIS Online tutorial for Story Map Journal templates ( beginning at Exercise: 7 on page 28 ), please click here.

To download the QGIS geocoding tutorial, please click here.