Simon Rogers

Alberto Cairo and I have been working together for a while now and we spend really way too much time discussing the state of data journalism. Well, now you get to see what we talk about with our new Data Journalism Podcast. It’s available on Spotify, Google Podcasts and other platforms and we will have … Continue reading →

Recreating live news events online is hard – but bringing them to life so you canfeel them is harder. Just published by the Washington Post and designed by The Pudding (and supported by my team at the Google News Initiative), this visual joins together Google Earth studio animations and places YouTube live videos on location … Continue reading →

Just launched: a new free online course produced with the Knight Center for Journalism for anyone wanting to learn how to do data journalism with free tools. I get to teach the introduction and welcome you to the course, along with the great Alberto Cairo and a fabulous set of teachers, including: Debra Anderson, Duncan … Continue reading →

When I decided I wanted to be a journalist, somewhere between the first and second years of primary school, it never occurred to me that would involve data. Now, working with data every day, I realise how lucky I was. It certainly was not the result of carefully-calibrated career plans. I was just in the … Continue reading →

TwoTone What does data sound like? There are two reasons why this can matter. Firstly, all these visuals are excluding anyone with any kind of visual disability from accessing them. Secondly we are always looking for new ways to visualise data. Sound opens up a whole new world of possibilities. To make this process easier … Continue reading →

Twin Peaks is one of the best places to view the whole San Francisco Bay area — the two adjacent peaks visible from all over the city. It doesn’t need a single adornment, but head up there today and you should be able to find a new addition: a sculpture. And it’s only visible with our new augmented reality … Continue reading →

There’s no shortage of advice on teaching journalism students. If you believe what you read, young reporters need to learn to code; not to learn to code; learn history of the internet (the flowchart above is from there), or the ‘technologies of the web‘. The fact that there’s so much discussion is easy to understand: it’s the traditional curse of … Continue reading →

Journalism hasn’t been ‘just’ words for some time — and there’s a phrase for one strand: ‘Visual Journalism’. I’ve written one of the pieces in a new book from Gestalten which provides a detailed (and beautiful) look at the field, combining images and text. But the real stars are the visuals. Here’s a selection. Visual Journalism on Amazon

The latest in our series of data visualisation projects sees Shirley Wu and Nadieh Bremer apply their unique take on life to Google data. The pair together make up Datasketch.es. Shirley is based in San Francisco, Nadieh in Amsterdam, and the two regularly produce complementary work that tells beautiful stories. This month, in the latest … Continue reading →

Facts are Sacred has just been published in China. This is the new introduction written for this edition. When Western data journalists think about China, it’s often as the subject of data journalism, rather than a source of it. And you don’t have to search hard for smart examples of interesting work: just take Propublica’s … Continue reading →

In 2013, as I was about to start at Twitter, Alex Howard wrote a piece pondering on just what a data journalist would do at a tech company. Now, as I’m about to begin a new adventure, I thought I should collect together a selection of the projects worked on with some amazing developers and others … Continue reading →

Where do journalists post their data? It’s a pretty core tenet of open journalism that you share your sources; i.e. , you write a story about data then you make numbers available to download. It matters because: Your audience is more likely to trust your story if they can test the sources Someone out there probably … Continue reading →

This has been the first week of the free data journalism MOOC, with more of the course still to come over the next few weeks. This is the text of the first part of my module. It’s not too late to sign up for the rest of the course when the real detail of learning … Continue reading →

  When it comes to data journalism, everyone’s a critic. The launch of three major data journalism operations in only a few weeks—the revamped538, Vox, and the New York Times‘ The Upshot—have produced a slew of opinion pieces. They are summarized quite nicely in this piece by Guardian journalist James Ball, but the one critique that sticks with me the most is … Continue reading →

If you were in downtown San Francisco recently, you may have seen a blue box in the middle of the street (yes, it was Tardis blue), next to the Embarcadero centre. Inside was a data visualisation conceived and created by Roundhouse in collaboration with Universal Everything. “Data visualisation” is underselling it. I got to work on the data part of … Continue reading →

If you want to make an animated map (and you’re not a coder), there are not  a lot of options out there. CartoDB is the best. You can use it to make rather gorgeous choropleths but it excels at mapping large numbers of points. That makes it perfect for mapping Tweets — and I used … Continue reading →

When my daughter was three and out for a walk on an autumn day, she pointed at a spider’s web and explained what it was. “Daddy, it’s a website,” she said. It was a visual way to describe a word she had heard but didn’t yet understand. And information graphics and visualisations give us a … Continue reading →

It’s hard enough to leave The Guardian without your friends doing stuff like this for you. This is the handiwork of the rather lovely Guardian graphics team – especially Paul Scruton, Mark McCormick and Christine Oliver.

After nearly 15 inspiring years at the Guardian, I will be leaving at the end of May to join the Twitter media team in San Francisco as its first Data Editor. A lot has changed since 1998 when I joined as editor of NewsUnlimited, the then-titled GuardianUnlimited’s news section.The front page of the site looked like this: … Continue reading →

First published on the Guardian Datablog How often does a map change the world? In 1854, one produced by Doctor John Snow, altered it forever. In the world of the 1850s, cholera was believed to be spread by miasma in the air, germs were not yet understood and the sudden and serious outbreak of cholera … Continue reading →

The Census is one of those data exercises that brings out the best and worst in day-to-day data journalism. The best is the access to lovely very granular data which can allow you to interrogate an area in detail. The worst is the amount of mucking around you have to do with the data just … Continue reading →

Just seen the proofs for Facts are Sacred, out in April – these are some of Kari Pedersen’s amazing designs

I’ve been building up a collection of border files for us to use in Google Fusion table maps – and these are the key ones. You can download these as KML files or as CSVs. Or merge them with your data. If you have a shp file you what to convert to Google Fusion tables … Continue reading →

The workshop below was written by Kathryn Hurley at Google and is a brilliant guide to how to get started with Fusion tables.  Fusion Tables is a modern data management web application making it easy to host, manage, collaborate on, visualize, and publish data tables online. Follow the steps below to upload your own data … Continue reading →

I have been teaching basic data journalism for a while now – and these links are so useful I keep them with me every time. I will add and update these in the future too Free and simple viz tools Datawrapper: http://datawrapper.de/ CartoDB: good alternative to Fusion Tables Google charts via spreadsheets Mapping: Google Fusion … Continue reading →

First published on Guardian Data Before a dataset results in a data journalism story, there’s a whole process of sifting and finessing and generally sorting the data out. The split is roughly 70% tidying up the data, 30% doing the fun stuff of visualising and presenting it. So, how do we get through that 70%? … Continue reading →

This is a chord… this is another… this is a third. NOW FORM A BAND So went the first issue of British punk fanzine Sideburns in 1977 in the “first and last part in a series”. It might be 35 years old, but this will do nicely as a theory of data journalism in 2012. … Continue reading →

Data is everywhere: from governments publishing billions of bytes of the stuff, to visual artists creating new concepts of the world through to companies building businesses on the back of it. And everyone wants to be a data journalist too – the barriers for entry have never been lower as free tools change the rules … Continue reading →