J298 Intro to Data-Driven Journalism

It’s 2026. Most government information is stored on computers. If journalists want to cover issues in their communities and across the country, they need to be able to use data. In addition, most investigative stories rely on findings from data analyses. If you’re ready to add these skills to your journalist’s toolkit (whether investigative or not), then this is the course for you. The course is foundational instruction in data journalism. Students will learn to find, download, manage and clean data for stories. They will learn to evaluate and analyze data for stories – the heart of this course. They will learn to communicate data-driven findings for print, online and video publication. Finally, students will create a data project that puts all these skills together and could lead to publication. This course should prepare you to do basic data stories in a newsroom and give you the basis to continue to more advanced classes.

Learning outcomes:

+ An understanding of the many roles for data journalists in newsrooms
+ The ability to critically review data and bulletproof data
+ An understanding of how to approach a database and develop a methodology for your analysis
+ The ability to request and negotiate for public data
+ An understanding of how to communicate and present data findings