Data journalists: the rock stars of news

Leading data journalists Helena Bengtsson of STV (Sweden), John Burn-Murdoch of The Financial Times (UK), and Pamela Duncan of The Guardian (UK) join our Covid-19: a Data Story panel.

If the financial crisis of 2008 made finance and economic correspondents the stars of news, the Coronavirus pandemic made data journalists, science and health correspondents into household names.

We’ve never watched the numbers and graphs with such intensity. But what data can you trust and how to interpret what you see? Learn the best practices of data-driven stories at the times when data drives policy decisions like never before. Mon 6 June at 14:00 BST. Register to attend for free.

And here is a taster. One of this panel’s speakers, John Burn-Murdoch appeared on the BBC Radio 4 The Media Show, alongside Caelainn Barr of The Guardian, talking about data journalism at the time of the Coronavirus pandemic.

Helena Bengtsson

Helena Bengtsson is the data journalism editor at Gota Media, a regional publishing company in the south of Sweden with 13 local titles. She previously worked as the data journalism editor at Sveriges Television, Sweden’s national television broadcaster, for 27 years and has also served as Editor, Data Projects of the Guardian UK between 2014-2017.

John Burn-Murdoch

John Burn-Murdoch is a senior data-visualisation journalist at the Financial Times.

Pamela Duncan

Pamela Duncan is the editor of the Guardian’s Data Project team, an occasional award-winning journalist (#humblebrag) and a self-confessed data nerd. She can usually be found at her desk poring over spreadsheets and using her coding skills - usually a combination of scraping, regex and pandas/Python - to build and analyse datasets to produce high quality and exclusive data stories.

Published: 28 May 2020

6 July 2020

Covid-19: A Data Story. UK and Sweden.

Leading data journalists Helena Bengtsson of STV (Sweden), John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times (UK), and Pamela Duncan of the Guardian (UK), explain how data analysis plays a crucial part in the coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic.