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 6,000-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.

Chapter 1. What Data Journalism and Computer-Assisted Reporting Is and Why Journalists Use It Part I. Learning Computer-Assisted Reporting Skills Chapter 2. Online Resources: Researching and Finding Data on the Internet Chapter 3: Gathering and Analyzing Text and Social Media Chapter 4. Spreadsheets, Part 1: Basic Math for Journalists Chapter 5. Spreadsheets, Part 2: More Math that Matters Chapter 6. Database Managers, Part 1: Searching and Summarizing Chapter 7. Database Managers, Part 2: Matchmaking Part II. Using Computer-Assisted Reporting in News Stories Chapter 8. Getting Data Not on the Web: How to Find and Negotiate for Data Chapter 9. Building Your Own Database: How to Develop Exclusive Sources Chapter 10. Dirty Data: How to Fact Check Your Data and Clean It Chapter 11. Doing the Data Journalism and Computer-Assisted Reporting Story: How to Report and Write with Data Appendix A: A Short Introduction to Mapping Data Appendix B: A Short Introduction to Social Network Analysis