Finding Stories with Data – Online, Intensive (Google Sheets)

You’ve heard people talking about data journalism, but don’t know where to start? Then this course is for you.

Group size: max 8 people.
Class duration: 2hrs x 4 days
Level of participation: very high. Hands-on, screenshares, regular Q&As and participants contributions.

In four workshops you will learn what data is available and how to find it, how to interrogate it and find facts or patterns in it which will lead, inform and enhance the stories you tell.

Guided by one of our data trainers, with decades of experience pushing the frontiers of data-driven investigations, you’ll come away with the skills to start gathering, interviewing and presenting data for your own reporting projects.

There are lots of courses which teach data journalism skills, but no others have the specific focus on using these tools and techniques for investigations and holding power to account that is the Centre for Investigative Journalism’s speciality.

The course is composed of four sessions of around two hours each, scheduled daily across a week, with exercises and recommended reading to augment your learning between sessions. Signed-up participants must attend all four sessions.

Groups for this course are capped to keep them small and ensure practicality and interactivity.

Technical Requirements

This course will need you to have the following software/apps/tools on your computer:

Google Sheets (If you’d prefer to use MS Excel, please consider booking another iteration of this course).
Zoom app
Camera and audio
This course will be hosted on Zoom. To find out more about how we use Zoom, please check out our Zoom InfoSec page.

4 August 2020 – Interview your data

10:00–11:30

This first session teaches you the primary functions of spreadsheet software for journalistic analysis. These functions will allow you to quickly and easily 'interview' your data, asking questions about what it knows and interpreting the answers. These techniques form the core of data journalism skills.

5 August 2020 – Finding data

10:00–11:30

Having sharpened your analysis skills on some sample data, you'll be keen to find datasets relevant to your own projects. This session will give you the best tips and tricks to find data that can inform your research and provide leads for new untold stories.

6 August 2020 – Importing, cleaning and tidying your data

10:00–11:30

Even when you know where to find data and how to analyse it, there are often barriers in your way. From the difficulties of working with incomplete and inconsistent data to the problem of 'data' being released in PDF format, this session will give you the tools and techniques to unlock datasets and clean them up, getting them into a form which you can analyse and draw meaningful conclusions from in as short a time as possible.

7 August 2020 – Telling your story

10:00–11:30

This final session will focus on how to take the findings from your data research and pull them together into a coherent story. Data-driven stories often need some kind of visualisation and we will look at how to do these. But visualisation is not the only way to present your findings, so we will discuss when visualisations are necessary and when they’re not.

Jonathan Stoneman

Jonathan Stoneman is a freelance trainer specialising in data journalism. He has been working with data since 2010. Before that he worked at the BBC – as a reporter, producer, editor of output in Macedonian and Croatian, and finally as head of training at BBC World Service.

4 August 2020 10.00–11.30
5 August 2020 10.00–11.30
6 August 2020 10.00–11.30
7 August 2020 10.00–11.30

Location: Zoom Meeting

Fully booked:

14–17 July 2020

Finding Stories with Data – Online, Intensive (Excel)

You’ve heard people talking about data journalism, but don’t know where to start? Then this course is for you.