Blog Post #4 - JRN 340

When actively trying to be a journalist, whether that be print or broadcast, there are certain skills that are necessary in order to be a successful one. According to “How to Get Started with Data Journalism in your Newsroom” from the American Press Institute, there are two basic skills that the article notes that are crucial for a journalist, those being “the ability to engage in critical thinking and basic familiarity with spreadsheets.”

Most reporters in the field have critical thinking skills or they would not be a reporter, but some see challenges, such as applying data sources as well as traditional human sources. In the case of data journalism, this means the ability to treat numbers as “skeptical” as one would any other source they might obtain.

One of the problems talked about when journalists face data journalism is how to interview data and ask questions of data. Knowing how to ask for this information is highly important because if a journalist is unsure how to go about asking it, they will not obtain the information they are looking for.

Another problem mentioned that journalist struggle with is the use of basic spreadsheets when trying to organize and display their data, whatever that data may be. According to Derek Willis of ProPublica mentioned in the article, it is important for reporters to be a user and or creator of spreadsheets. This means not just reading a table of data, but having the skills to be able to “manipulate and organize it into new forms.” It is crucial to know basic math, which will give a journalist the able to calculate such as percent change, which is another rudimentary skill.

The article also mentions the basics of spreadsheets as the following:

Sorting: Arranging the rows of data in a particular order. This will help journalists to find, for example, the highest or lowest crime rates in the country.

Filtering: Narrowing down data to only show the parts of it that you are interested.

Basic Math: Simple calculations like addition and division.

The article continues on and mentions how these functions can be done, such as Microsoft Excel or the free alternative Google Sheets. If journalists are more interested and ambitions enough to go beyond Excel, they can move into something more specialized for them.

In particular, investigative reporting would lead journalists to the more analytic side, learning to use tools like SQL and relational databases. And if they are more interested in the presentation side to it, they can explore visualization tools such as Google Fusion Tables.

Overall, the article continuously preaches how data analyis cannot be escaped when wanting to be a proper journalist. Someway or another, a reporter is going to run into numbers and data where they have to display it in a way of a spreadsheet or some way or another. Data journalism is crucial, and a journalist cannot avoid it if they want to thrive and be successful in this career field.