Data for Journalists

Brant Houston is a Professor and the Knight Chair in Investigative Reporting at the University of Illinois, where he teaches journalism and oversees an online newsroom. An award-winning journalist, he was an investigative reporter at U.S. newspapers for 17 years. For more than a decade, he served as executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors, a now 5,000-member association headquartered at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, where he also taught investigative and data reporting. Houston has conducted more than 400 seminars for professional journalists and students in 30 countries, and he is a co-founder of networks of nonprofit newsrooms and educators throughout the world. He is also the author of Changes in Models for Journalism: Reinventing the Newsroom and co-author of The Investigative Reporter’s Handbook: A Guide to Documents, Databases, and Techniques.

• 1. What Data Journalism and Computer-Assisted Reporting Is and Why Journalists Use It 2. Online Resources: Researching and Finding Data on the Internet 3. Getting Data Not on the Web: How to Find and Negotiate for Data 4. Building Your Own Database: How to Develop Exclusive Sources 5. Spreadsheets, Part 1: Basic Math and Data Analysis for Journalists 6. Spreadsheets, Part 2: More Math that Matters 7. The Database Manager, Part 1: Searching and Summarizing 8. Database Managers, Part 2: Matchmaking and Advanced Queries 9. Basic Data Visualization: Charts, Maps, and Social Network Analysis 10. Dirty Data: How to Fact Check Your Data and Clean It 11. How to Report and Write with Data Appendix A: Unstructured Data: Analyzing Text and Social Media Appendix B: Coding and Artificial Intelligence